At my first and hopefully only GWAR show, a Joe Biden dummy got decapitated and his neck pulsed blood straight into my eyes as the moshpit churned like a pot of soup and I had to lay my body on the line to defend a friend who’d blown out both knees in various soccer incidents. IT’S ALIVE!, a musical playing at East Williamsburg’s the Vino Theater (274 Morgan Avenue, Suite 201) could have used more blood, if only for hyping the gore in its marketing, but seemingly rationing it on stage. The phrase “the perpetual sense of austerity we live in today” comes to mind. 

Past the camp and musical numbers and rationed blood, IT’S ALIVE! depicts the anxiety of living under the neoliberal state, as illustrated through its referential story, depictions of the body under assault and nostalgia laundered through the speculative. To assume anything less—a “fun romp” and nothing else, or even a “bloody good time”—would be disrespectful to the players and technical staff.

It begins with a typical Breakfast Club setup: jock (Edward Escamilla), dork (co-writer Jack Doyle), cheerleader (co-writer Nina Groll), another dork (Rhea Issac) and an outcast (Hannah Duncan): adults as recovering children. We never get over the powerlessness that we never realized then. It’s the October the 13th Halloween Blood Moon, so the teacher is a mad scientist (Lexie Schultz), the coach a werewolf (Noah Walther), the principal a vampire (Peyton S Dupree). As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes in his 1996 book Monster Theory: Reading Culture, “The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.” This audience isn’t high schoolers, but adults: school staff-as-monsters are indicative of our adult conditions: manager as sasquatch, coworker as living and hostile shadow create, landlord as limber and chasing mummy.

The musicals’ numbers bring to mind 50s cabaret, 80s movies, and the kind of tinny post-Ministry industrial in the background of 1995’s Johnny Mnemonic. The music illustrates hauntological nostalgia: this is a retreat not to the audience’s or writers’ childhoods, but the childhoods of our parents. It moves us so far back because it’s so appalling outside right now¹. Life during wartime seems more straightforward than our encroaching and suffocating uniparty government. There were three or four chairs marked by white sheets as being within spraying range of the blood. The audience—myself included—avoided those chairs. We didn’t want to  be touched by death, only reminded of it, from a distance.

The conflict’s power structure (victimized students, staff exercising a monopoly on violence) is indicative of neoliberal governmental management: the students’ freedom is under assault by their absence of security. As Isabell Lorey says in State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious: “Freedom and insecurity now form the new couple in neoliberal governmentality” in a world where “both labour and social life become highly precarious.” The crowd was probably full of the people Lorey describes as virtuoso workers—tech, comms, whatever a “creative” is—who monetize the communicative capacity once only reserved for artisans and political actors in a world that devalues the former and is actively hostile toward the latter. What’s on stage is not our pasts, but the punishment of our present 9-to-5s played out via showtunes.

SIDENOTES; BLURBS GIVEN INTENTION:

• Edward Escamilla stole the show throughout, playing fastest and loosest with his material, and was in peak homoerotic form during his duet, “You’re Alright Man,” with Jack Doyle (as written by Josh Moore).
• IT’S ALIVE! is entertainment that makes you think if you think really hard because all plays deserve someone to think about them really really hard. Everything is worthy of serious treatment. Good/bad is a binary for people who consider subletting dumpsters.
• The only thing I really found objectionable was the seemingly developmentally disabled janitor-puppet handled by a white guy in cornrow-tight French braids, but even then there’s already a whole country of honkeys who think it’s acceptable to dreadlock their hair. Anyway, I thought the puppet (designed by Jenna Doyle) was cute, and I was sad to see its head eventually get yanked off.

Death matters so little in this world that every murdered student comes back to attack one another and die again. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen also says in Monster Theory that the “undead return[] in slightly different clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social movements or a specific, determining event.” They wear ears, have tentacle arms and are marked with squib blood. In their new, monstrous forms, they show they were always so much alike (this is a Breakfast Club parody, after all).

Cohen continues, “Behead the corpse, so that, acephalic, it will not know itself as subject, only as pure body.” The afterlife is another subjugation, but one the characters no longer suffer in. Only the body is in chains: the soul is free, or somewhere else, if anywhere at all. So much pain is abstracted via squibs and buckets of blood. Life is cheap, the afterlife even cheaper. The story strives to depict hell, but we end up in a sort of heaven: so many die and it doesn’t even matter, since death is a relief from the horror of internalized precarity of school-torture, of adulting-torture.

We end with one survivor, per usual. IT’S ALIVE! is a parody, after all. They say they’ve lived through this story before; therefore, they’ll live it again. We all got work to do.

High school, but monsters. Free bottomless mimosas, with baptism. Haunted pillows sold on Etsy, feathers plucked from still-living geese. Pillows that quack, multipitched and demonic, “Let us out! No, no, not forever!” And they’re sold at farmers markets. No situation can discount the holy or the profane.

Northern Town Parodies’ It’s Alive! will continue showings at the Vino Theater from February 26th to the 28th. Follow along here and buy tickets here ($32.25).

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 provided by Northern Town Parodies.

1. I could link to a bunch of specific and horrifying articles about the U.S. today, but you’ve either read those or already have them bookmarked anyway! ↩︎