I used to fantasize about moving to Gowanus from Bushwick. Things weren’t going well so long ago (four months ago). But after killing my inner demons with Lexapro (I’m a 10mg/day kind of guy myself), I learned to accept bright futures, and now I see that Bushwick has its own canals. I’ve been in my own Gowanus this entire time. Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure at the Bushwick Starr takes us on a journey between Gowanus and Newtown Creek. All of Brooklyn might go the way of the Waterfront.

Bushwick native La Daniella—with direction by Sammy Zeisel and music and arrangements by Ben Langhorst—wrote the story of Gooey (also played by La Daniella), a smelly half-mermaid who grew up in Bushwick after a TMNT birth in the Gowanus Canal. She grows up orphaned, the daughter of a deadbeat dad and a mother dead in the Canal.

Raised on radio advertisements for the corporate arms of Fred Boss, an Oz-esque property developer, she spends her days living in Newtown slime and and with imaginary friends—pizza box and dead pigeon puppets designed by Gaby Febland and brought to life by supporting actors Amanda Centeno, Sushma Saha, and León Ramos Tak.

She leaves her home to become the official Princess of G’Wond’rLand (Gowanus redeveloped into a theme park). She meets a rat who becomes her closest friend, and encounters so much conflict that’s thankfully resolved. Add Gooey to the growing list of whacky adventures in Gowanus.

The music numbers are simple, with comic choreography and artful pitchiness from La Daniella, all backed by Jon Schneidman’s live piano accompaniment. Another attendee said it best: the play doesn’t get lost in its songs. The music serves as a vehicle, not hijacker, to move the story forward.

It’s a musical about found family and conquering loneliness. The power of friendship might be challenged, but it’s always affirmed and never disintegrates. Long lost brothers are reunited, animal communities revitalized, and runaway corporations are eaten alive. Its cast is incredibly diverse in a story that indirectly signals toward that fact. It tells a universal, proudly New York story.

(INTERMISSION BATHROOM REVIEW: I needed to go #1 during the intermission, but I ended up in an excruciating line. I looked at the communal sink, like an open floor office equivalent to the standard washroom, and made me dream of what I could’ve already been done with if not for the all-gender bathrooms that democratized suffering.

7.8/10: Principled, difficult, but would be grateful to pee there again.)

But Gooey is a millennial child’s idea of a dystopian future: a misfit mermaid, talking animal friends and a sentient pile of sludge in binary combat against cartoon junk food and an evil property developer. All of its violence—behandings, child abandonment, drowning, patricide—are couched by the puppetry. It’s a children’s show for adults, and it does it very well.

Puppetry is having its moment in national and local theater. The Drama Desk resumed giving out its Outstanding Puppet Design award less than ten years ago. It’s a step up in spectacle to attract audiences back to struggling theaters. In addition, it expresses a hipster appreciation of craft, an analog equivalent to CGI saturation.

The audience on a recent Friday was in full attendance and loving it. We’re seeking our simpler narratives, more understandable battles (my operating theory as to why everyone loved One Battle After Another over Eddington in the 2025 Barbieheimer-esque standoff between schizoid movies marketed to all the white boys on Halloween who I thought were dressing as the Dude).

In “The Slow Cancellation of the Future,” Mark Fisher writes that “the feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed” after “a time of massive, traumatic change.” Gooey, even its foul-mouthed rats and occasional gore, represents a retreat into fairy tales. Its happy ending, from the beginning, feels  inevitable, as if by showing up, I had already earned it. I sympathized so much with Gooey’s sense of loneliness. I rejoiced in her victories. I also don’t want reminders of how fucked the world feels right now. It’s painful to bear witness. Gooey made me forget it all for a bit.

But even in the neon maximalism and LLM-generated advertisements for pizza/cannoli hybrids—using a present technology to signal toward past advertising languages—Gooey isn’t all immaturity. At times, it exercises restraint. A post-industrial neighborhood (Gowanus) becomes a theme park, while the new purity of its waters run the local fish out of the canal. It’s a clear allegory for gentrification, and has been promoted as such, but the play doesn’t use Every Transplant’s Favorite Word once. Instead, it focuses on reframing sludge and pollution as a backdrop for a new community.

It—this musical, Gowanus, or Bushwick—is an overbuilt future where some waters are still filthy. From those cesspools come beautiful friendships to justify them. Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure is eventually kind to Gooey. It’s kind to us all along.

Gooey’s Toxic Aquatic Adventure is running at the Bushwick Starr(419 Eldert St, Brooklyn, NY) until February 21st. Tickets run for $27.85. Get them here.

Aaron Tomey is from Georgia, lived in St. Louis, and now lives in Brooklyn. His essays have previously appeared in Hobart, Bushwick Burner Phone, and Apocalypse Confidential. He can also be found on Twitter: @ecstatic_donut.

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Photos taken by Maria Baranova.