It doesn’t matter where. Lillian Mottern’s MOONSHINER, directed by Danica Selem, plays out on a roof, but the actors have to walk down a flight of stairs into the basement of a “private location” in the “Ridgewood area,”1 per notes from production company Adult Film. Up there, down here, there’s no TV on the roof, so the fires all around LA in 2019 will have to do, and people will have to do, too, though they won’t.
College-aged friends Riv (Annalisa Noel) and Joan (Raina Soman) pass time on the roof of their apartment building as distant fires burn (an opening salvo for climate death) offstage. They’re later joined by Joan’s cousin Im (AJ Molder, like a funhouse Hillary Duff casting spells in the night), and what unfolds proves the worst in us is like gasoline, and everyone’s on fire and unkind and hardened like dead bug carapaces.
Work is not a topic, for no job is worthy of our loyalty. Joan is leaving to head east, for no lofty hive is worthy of being home. They are lonely people but for each other’s company. Community is mediated via subscription, despite our efforts, which aren’t much, since we seem to love depressive realness for its palliative self-centering. MOONSHINER, with intention, shows a way of turning our early 20s into entire lifetimes.
Mike Davis writes in City of Quartz that to live in LA is to “sever connection with national reality, to lose historical and experiential footing… and to submerge oneself in spectacle and fraud,” though this is only an LA problem insofar as the city’s capacity to reflect the sandblasted American condition: no family, no community, no hope but shadowplays of joy. MOONSHINER distills the worst parts of our collective vapidity into their universals. It doesn’t rely on cheap satire (selfie poses, incessant internet-poisoned lingo), but illustrates, in timeless form, how some of us sometimes or all of us all the time are totally clueless to our lack of anything redeemable.
We lie, as Joan does, about where we’re from and what we’ve done. We are bodies of lies and it doesn’t matter because there’s no truth anyway, only non-events (far away fires, big winds only heard, cool parties that probably never happened thrown by cool friends who probably don’t exist) heard secondhand, happening offstage. In our discrete lives, nothing really happens; the only situations are the ones we’re monitoring.
Meanwhile, in staged reality, the characters struggle to care about their own wellbeing. Joan’s car might have been towed through the fires, but she only feels briefly anxious before forgetting. The trap Joan and the rest are in is arbitrary. They choose to linger.
Riv dances near the rooftop edge. They tell stories of deadbeat cowboy dads and pervert dogs killed by neighborhood packs. The American condition hurts so much because there is often nothing nearby—family, pets—that’s deserving of love. The shallowness of their interactions present childhood and young adulthood not as eras that we outgrow, but as permanent states to endure.
But thankfully, when you’re nothing, what you are is totally sufficient. Understanding isn’t valuable, so listening is what you pretend to do when waiting for your turn to talk. No one is understood, and we can hardly blame them with the noise of highway traffic and helicopters in the background (designed by Liam Bellman-Sharpe in a way that replicates infrasonic unease). It’s hard to shout over each other in the urban hells we chose: “We all don’t know each other,” the Woman (veteran actor Megan Metrikin) says, so the younger characters can’t tell who’s nice or what nice even is. There are no common definitions, no point to language (“No yeah,” Riv says).
It’s a visceral, frightening play: the interactions atop the red-painted floor are stilted, the characters strange and unlikable. I could smell the gum being chewed, along with the Diet Coke and cigarettes and peeled orange. I watched what my neighbors must do on the regular, just like me, and I know none of us will grow out of it, because Metrikin, as representative of an older womanhood that the other characters must become, didn’t outgrow it: totally placeless beyond where she’s sitting, a New Mexico backstory invalidated by an accent that fluctuates between southwestern, Boer, and British.
Language and the stories it conveys are unstable. Riv says she left her phone in the sink, and Joan later claims the same. Our origins being the same, the past is just a thought experiment, and we live in a 4k res present where all our pores and creases are too visible, where, as Paolo Virno writes in Déjà Vu and the End of History, “Perception fixes the present as real, complete, resolved in unambiguous facts; whereas memory limits it within the terms of pure potential.” Our pasts in the city are contingent on a present that does not matter.
The grinding sameness and alienation of urban life is blamed on anything from roads to work to whatever today’s definition of a third space is. As Teresa Caldeira says of São Paulo in City of Walls, “We have to consider the everyday functioning of the institutions of order.” A true universal, though Caldeira doesn’t consider that the people within said order are rotten to the root, and that any systemic problems obfuscate that fact. People today are content to fit into “the image of the secluded,” as Caldeira says of life in Brazil’s middle-class condos.
But that couldn’t be me (after all, I’ve held a book), couldn’t be any of us (we’re so real that we graduated whole colleges; we have opinions because of it) because we’re only watching everyone-but-us in a basement-roof try to “organize a common life inside the walls,”2 despite their fundamental incapability to build, and therefore unworthiness to obtain, any sense of community, any sense of place.
In the places we undefine, we can’t even say fraud and deceit and lives of lies run rampant, because that’d presuppose a common understanding of truth in the social sphere. What Mottern has written in MOONSHINER, as Selem directs it, are plainly asocial and inhuman interactions. Pity for those who want something good to come of their time alive. Pity them while they reach out for touch with no fingernails, for talk with lungs full of asphalt as they stumble around the sprawl for a payphone (in 2019, in 2026).
We live between the old structures—the family unit, church, unionized work—afforded to some, and whatever comes next. In that meantime, what’s probably now, we’ll keep on not doing anything. Maybe it’s not a permanent state, though Mottern doesn’t exactly bake any hope into this. Either way, the future waits for us. Look at it, or call yourself a coward. Your call to make.
MOONSHINER is why theater reviews exist: to provide a record of deserving stories so that they can escape their production runs, like after the applause, when I asked my neighbor how they liked the play—a softball interaction, I thought, since we’d sat beside each other for ninety minutes, watching the same play. Before they could answer, one of the actors started corralling everyone to Phil’s. My seatmate never answered me. I can’t really blame them.
Riv strikes crescent moon poses. She cartwheels with Im. Endless, stationary cycles, childhood forever, even when knowing our knees will give out in due time. I shouldn’t have expected anything more from that other attendee. I shouldn’t have expected anything at all. It doesn’t matter where.
Lillian Mottern’s MOONSHINER is showing through March. Buy tickets here. Follow Adult Film for more updates.
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.
Photography by Geve Penn
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