Best Little Whorehouse in Crunchtown
It’s been five months since Crunchtown’s performance of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and the first moment I’ve been able to process it. We raised $5330 in ticket and bar sales, which was given to LOUD: New Orleans Queer Youth Theater and Trans Queer Youth Nola, as well as established the Chicken Ranch Mutual Aid Fund. We have often built Crunchtown in places experiencing a seismic shift in New Orleans—this time around, we performed in the defunct Family Dollar in the Lower Ninth Ward on its way to becoming a harm reduction space. If only all predatory dollar stores could become community spaces. May this one be an inspiration! May these stories be a blueprint for a better world!
Crunchtown delicately sways on the support of the blustery, steep mountains of Belief and Trust. We must wholeheartedly Believe and Trust that we can do something this absurd because otherwise it becomes impossible. If one mountain crumbles, it takes a lot to maintain such an endeavor. Crunchtown is the most stunning example I know of for what a group of individuals can do in a few days, with no pay, fueled simply by Love, Belief and Trust. The more of these 3 magical qualities you possess, the bigger the reward. It’s a psychedelic trust-fall for sure.
These are the words spoken in fairytales, Belief/Love/Hope, told to children so they can survive tragedy. How ridiculous to incorporate these into our real world, adult lives–can’t we do something easier, more logical, than pull off the amazing? Crunchtown is nothing short of miraculous, always tapping into some divine luck– like pouring rain beating down until the curtain call for our Saturday show, then resuming the moment the action went indoors and abating for intermission. The weather only stirred up the drama onstage, as that was hands down our best performance.
A lot has changed in the 4 years since we last put on a public production of Crunchtown. The world is different. We are different. We are older, more introverted, tired. We’ve changed the pacing of our lives dramatically since the start of the pandemic and have reassessed our boundaries. I joked, eyelids drooping, back hurting, that Crunchtown is a young person’s game. A friend quickly retorted that no, it is an insane person’s game. Yes we are those unhinged people, pushing ourselves to the brink with painted cardboard and lights zip-tied to dollies (genius James), our own Burden of Dreams. But the feeling buzzing in us that one weekend of performance is an elation that can be felt from few other things. We partied til 2am Saturday night after our first show and when I returned to the space nine hours later on Sunday morning, the whole warehouse was filled with cheerful faces rehearsing lines, offering morning coffee, practicing dance routines. After our final show that day, we all dragged our feet out of there, unable to stop singing and laughing and leaning on each other. We weren’t even striking that day, we just didn’t want to leave! We had built a home in a few days’ time. Magnet said it felt like the last day of camp, and it was strange that an audience was witnessing it, and everyone who heard that concurred and chimed in. That last performance was a bit hungover and PG, but it really felt like we were reciting a love letter to each other, the whacky citizens of Crunchtown.
Narratives matter. The stories we tell to keep us alive, to keep us engaged, to keep us informed, to make a roadmap for the future, to create codes to live by, are as crucial as marching in the streets. For so many of us who live outside the confines of expectation within capitalism, and those constantly fighting a binary of straightness and cisness that denies personhood, embodiment, autonomy and nuanced femininity, struggling under the tyranny of white supremacy, there are few narratives that offer possibility. We are all denied hope for a better future when we are stuck in one paradigm of expectation–even straight white men, who are assumed to enact a violent disposability. Participating in these re-written cult classics for over a decade has been so deeply empowering–we get to rewrite our futures and perform this possibility alongside our old friends and brand new ones, acting out the world we want to live in like a radical adult re-imagining of playing house–all the while making a huge audience laugh and cry and cheer alongside us.
Eight years ago I met this powerhouse Columbian Indigenous activist and after we spoke for a few minutes–I in broken Spanish, she in broken English– and she asked me what I did with my life. I felt so embarrassed to say I was an artist, focusing on performance. But her eyes lit up, and she was visibly itching to know more. She told me that theater is what inspires her to keep pushing forward, and told me about the important role radical performance holds in Columbian movements. It’s a whole other ramble to explore why beauty and story fail to be regarded as important within so many radical movements in this country– but the movements that are successful, such as Act Up’s groundbreaking design and theatricality which turned perception of and mobilization around the AIDS crisis in a new direction, incorporate creativity.
The script this year was beautifully, hilariously, lovingly and deftly overhauled by an amazing team of sxwrkrs, artists, and queers actively fighting the terrifying legislative shifts happening in Louisiana that threaten everyones’ safety, but especially the lives of trans people, queer youth, sxwrkrs, compounded as we know for people of color. The script was written by Crunchtown veterans and brand new participants. Every aspect is created by old timers and newbies alike. Misha holding down set + space for years + years, new actors jumping on stage at the last minute, midnight gifts of the perfect prop from a friend of a friend. You might meet someone new in the last few days who got whipped up in the whirlwind and decided to camp out +paint the whole town, literally (Zsa zsa!!). The energy of the folks this year who had never participated prior truly made this play happen. The friends I’ve made in that madness are some of the most beautiful connections I’ve made in my life. It is a treasure to do this eccentric, ecstatic trust thing with a perfect stranger, slathered in face paint, dashing from one place to another, inventing characters and scenarios along the way. There is little I can say that would do justice besides Thank You, wholeheartedly.
Time bends in Crunchtown. Our first time reading the script was Monday. We were performing in front of an audience by Friday. Each day is a month. There is no time yet somehow what we can do is limitless. Quantum physics is happening but you can only feel it if you’re there. A warped tunnel of creation, stretching to the limits of our needs and desires, pushed by the collection of our working hands.
Other than booze for the bar and the utilities bill for the space, our expenses for this massive project were a whopping $50. While that sounds like we are the thrifty geniuses you think we are, it also means that nearly everyone in the cast and crew spent their own money on things to sustain this project, on top of devoting extraordinary time and energy to it. Handmade food and drinks on set each night (omg Lynn!), whole parts of the building re-wired and plumbed (Libby!), dramatic tech solutions (Ethan + James, invisible angels) and a revolving selection of perfect costumes. When I say this is a labor of love, it is nearly insufficient to describe what people put into this work of creating a space and a play.
Crunchtown isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s gloriously imperfect: wigs fall off, people forget their lines, actors break character. Nothing we ever make as humans will be perfect–and what a tremendous blessing that is. It’s important to take creative risks even if we fail (especially if we fail!) because that is, in fact, the real roadmap that can lead us where we want to go. It is so deeply important to stumble into dangerous territory with intention, humility and consistent communication. Safety and comfort don’t often get us to new places. No budget, limited time and conflicting schedules means we can never make our ideal conceptual or creative decisions–but there is never enough time or money for perfection, and all we have is Right Now. Doing the damn thing with what we’ve got is our best chance in this world, again and again. In the words of the narrator CJ, written by the enormously multi-talented Dietz, “We don’t have it all figured out just yet Ms. Mona, but we came out here to tell y’all that we’re fixin’ to try!”
Addendum:: It’s hard to thank everyone individually in a cast of sixty, but I still lay in bed at night two months later thinking about Goldie’s exquisitely designed cranky/projector/booth; Gray writing lines of the script while on a canoe trip; Jesy Rae lugging around a massive camera to document our production while Caitlin carried around a cardboard camera that still managed to live-stream the play (that Mere was editing backstage in real time to be sliced into a video Aaron Havel made on the other side of the country!); Alison Gaye being thrown into fifty roles and (unsurprisingly) excelling at each one; Eren Wilson getting down to business immediately and truly carrying the show with their performance and boundless energy; Clove bringing more dimensions to the secretary role than any of us could have anticipated; Dan handing over the keys to the most amazing space after one conversation with so much trust and mutual appreciation; Misha, as always, arriving first and staying last every day, assuring us that everything we needed was covered while holding down the fort; Peter Bowling’s unhinged interpretation of the original score; Megan Mullally performing with aplomb after getting a concussion in a terrible car accident (and not allowing anyone to tell me until after the show because she didn’t want to stress me out! WTF) days before she moved to another country; Chris Acker assembling a band overnight–no small feat considering it was jazz fest and every musician in town had a gig) including roping in Hunter who had just moved to town that week and was ready to quit on the first day but finished the run with stars in his eyes; Dietz, oh Dietz, the way you picked up so much slack with tremendous grace in the midst of your own chaotic, emotional and stressful work time, and supported me immensely all the while; Hannah Pepper popping in as guest critic to give incredible feedback after our first full run through; Magnet happily receiving my quixotic texts at all hours of the day and night with a can-do attitude… the list goes on forever. From the bottom of my heart, thank you Crunchtown. You make my heart pound.
Photos from Annie Flanagan:
