“The Thing”: 26 things

1. I shouldn’t write about The Thing. I’m friends with its creators. That’s a conflict of interest, so you have no reason to trust me. Also, the whole run is sold out so if I tell you it’s really awesome that might just make you feel bad.


2. This isn’t technically a review. It’s a blog entry.


3. I’m sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, and it’s hard to concentrate because my dad is in his study listening to Bon Jovi.


4. I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept much over the past few days. This weekend I saw a concert and a dance performance and six plays and then I was on a TV show.


5. I saw The Thing at 11 p.m. on Saturday night. Then I sat on a couch in a cold room with some of the people who were in the show and I drank a can of mineral water while they drank beer and wine. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to drink wine or beer, I just happened to have that can of mineral water because it was sitting on my chair when I arrived for the show, and I wasn’t thirsty until afterward.


6. Everyone who goes to The Thing gets a can of mineral water and a pancake and a pancake-marshmallow sandwich. Maybe more, if you raise your hand.


7. While I was waiting to enter the room where The Thing happens I was talking with John Bueche. I asked if he had a ticket. He said, “I make pancakes. I don’t need a ticket.”


8. Imagine if you went up to someone in a bar and said, “May I join you? Just so you know, I have a condom.”


9. Or if you went up to someone in a bar and asked, “Do you think it’ll be good for you?”


10. Those things don’t concern The Thing except for the fact that on the couches afterwards it’s what people were laughing about, bad pick-up lines.


11. Now my dad’s listening to Neil Young.


12. I really liked The Thing.


13. Everyone who went to The Thing loved the scene with the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.


14. The Thing is very intimate, but also very impersonal. It’s close, but very far. There’s a really thick Fourth Wall, kind of a Fourth Bubble, surrounding your chair and if you break it you might get a tongue stuck out at you. But pancakes can pass through it.


15. I want the soundtrack. The music is really loud and makes everything seem profound, like in a Wes Anderson movie and like in life.


16. I don’t really know how The Thing was made. There are no programs, and I’ll bet if there were they’d say “created by the ensemble.” But Samantha Johns and George McConnell, I think, are especially, particularly responsible.


17. The Thing does a lot of the things that Whatever does, but instead of breaking the rules to show you that the rules can be broken and so there’s no point in even playing the game, The Thing breaks the rules to show you that the rules can be broken and so the game is even more fun than you thought it was. If you want to lick someone’s head to show your ambiguous feelings for him, you can go right the hell ahead and do so.


18. The Thing taught me that plot is optional, like cufflinks. Not everyone would agree that cufflinks are optional, and those same people probably don’t think plot is optional either. Jeremey Catterton and Carl Atiya Swanson are the only two guys I can think of offhand who might value cufflinks significantly more than plot.


19. One of my friends who saw The Thing had a crappy day the next day and said she wanted to go back and live in the basement with The Thing. I don’t think I’d want to live with The Thing, but you would save a lot of money on groceries that way.


20. The Thing makes most site-specific theater feel very non-specific.


21. I’m not writing a proper review because, yes, I’m pretty tired; but also, some things you don’t want to analyze because they seem fragile and different and exciting and you’re afraid that if you try to take them apart and see how they work, they might break. It’s like that feeling you have driving home in your car after you’ve just met someone who you’re really excited to see again and you think you might want to, and get to, see again and again and again and again and again. The Thing is about that feeling.


22. It’s also about that feeling you have when your gut is telling you this isn’t going to work, but damn it! Why not?! About how fate can be a real cocksucker.


23. (Did I write that out loud?)


24. The Thing is very physical. But aren’t they all? Some more than others.


25. I called Sam at about 1 a.m. on Sunday morning, even though she was standing just four feet in front of me, because you have to call to make reservations for The Thing and I had decided I wanted to see it again. She looked at me and answered the phone. “Jay,” she said, “I’ve already got you down.”


26. My dad just went out to have a smoke on the back porch. When he came in, I asked him whether I should publish this stream-of-consciousness review I just wrote. He shrugged. “I dunno,” he said. “Why not?”

Photo courtesy George McConnell. l-r: Lauren Anderson, Billy Mullaney, Tom Lloyd, Tera Kilbride, Alisa Mattson.