“It’s because I’m a pig isn’t it? … I did not get the nomination for best actress … can you  honestly say I am not Oscar material? … In this male chauvinist, non pig world, did you ever  think I even stood a chance?”  

Miss Piggy to Johnny Carson at the 52nd Annual Academy Awards.¹ 

I should begin with honesty. A very good place to start. I am not a Muppet fanatic. I have not  always adored Miss Piggy as much as I adore her now. I was, for a long time, much more of an  establishment Disney villain queer. A devoted worshipper at the shrines of Cruella De Vil or  Ursula the Sea Witch. That said, I can happily watch a Muppet film with a glass of wine and enjoy a  pleasant giggle. 

Something about Miss Piggy struck me more deeply than the usual queer coded Disney villains. It  could be the wig. It could be the dress. It is probably the karate chops. As a queer man, I am  constitutionally inclined to admire a confident female character who can karate chop a villain with  one hand and cradle her amphibian lover in the other. 

There is something irresistibly special about Miss Piggy. 

Her position in the public eye fascinates me. How could it not. 

Miss Piggy has been a still performing celebrity since her debut in 1974 as Piggy Lee, a parody of  the singer Peggy Lee, in a Jim Henson television special. ² Since then she has done everything. She has starred in multiple feature films including The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The  Fantastic Miss Piggy Show and The Muppets Take Manhattan. She has hosted, guest starred, sung  duets, delivered monologues and stolen scenes with alarming ease. 

Through all of this, Piggy has developed a distinct comedic persona, one that draws heavily from  the work of earlier comedic and dramatic female stars. She is a vessel for those classic feminine  sensibilities, preserving them, exaggerating them and carrying them forward into the present day. In  a strange way, she functions as both archive and performance. 

Miss Piggy does not age. She is, much unlike myself, unvarnished by time. 

Because she does not age, she is spared the usual indignities that accompany celebrity longevity.  There is no physical decline to be commented on, no descent into public cognitive fragility, no late  career unraveling that forces audiences to renegotiate how they feel about her. Unlike so many real  celebrities of the past, she does not become an awful person, nor is she reframed through hindsight  as someone whose opinions now make us wince. 

Stars of her era tend to fall into familiar categories. Some become venerated icons, endlessly  rehabilitated and re-contextualised, like Jane Fonda. Others quietly disappear into the fog of  nostalgia, remembered fondly but vaguely, like your Tallulah Bankhead or Lauren Bacall. Miss  Piggy exists in both spaces at once. 

She is a figure of nostalgia and an active character in the contemporary media landscape. 

She is a kind of immortal Carol Burnett, who fittingly appeared as a guest on The Muppet Show in  1980. 

Because of this, Miss Piggy acts as a bridge to the previous century and to older, conventional ideas  about femininity. She embodies them so fully that she is able to subvert them, twisting tradition into  something that still resonates with modern audiences. Her exaggerated glamour becomes  commentary rather than costume. 

Modern pop stars even echo her influence. Chappell Roan, for example, has been rumoured to  draw inspiration from Miss Piggy’s theatrical silhouettes and unapologetic excess. ³ This makes a strange kind of sense. Piggy understood the power of costume long before the internet turned  fashion into a language of identity. 

I am always interested in who Miss Piggy appears alongside. 

On the original Muppet Show, she sang duets with John Denver, Elton John and Raquel Welch.  Piggy is endlessly adaptable. She bends just enough to fit the guest star of the week without ever  losing herself. Her personality is strong but elastic, capable of surviving any context. 

In the most recent iteration of The Muppet Show, she appears beside Sabrina Carpenter. What is  striking here is that Carpenter subtly adjusts herself to fit Miss Piggy, rather than the other way  around. That alone says a great deal about Piggy’s accumulated cultural weight. By embodying  stereotypes and gleefully undermining them, she has somehow become a modern trendsetter. 

This is not something all boundary breaking celebrities manage. 

Plenty of stars who once seemed radical now feel awkward, dated or outright troubling. Scarlett  Johansson and Diane Keaton (until her death) continue to defend Woody Allen. Nicki Minaj has called herself Trump’s number one fan . Patti Lupone being Patti Lupone . ^{5 6} 

Divas age. They change. Often the media reacts badly to those changes, often unfairly. But Miss  Piggy avoids this entire cycle. At the end of the day, she is literally put back in a box and stored  until she is needed again, perfectly preserved. 

Sabrina Carpenter is an interesting choice, but not an inspired one. The new Muppet Show is  intriguing, yet it ultimately feels like a retreat into familiar territory. If you love The Muppet Show,  you might as well just watch the original. It remains sharper, stranger and more alive than its  successors. 

Miss Piggy’s greatest appeal is her ability to function as a bridge. On the surface, she is just a pig  puppet in a wig and a dress. Beneath that surface is a personality capable of making people feel  seen, affirmed and entertained all at once. 

As an entity, Miss Piggy also works as a quiet teaching tool. For audiences still learning about  pronouns, identity and gender norms, she offers an accessible example. You can point to her and  say, notice how this character refuses to be defined by what society expects of her. That is a deeply  uplifting thing, even when it arrives wrapped in satin gloves and dramatic eyelashes. 

Diva worship is basically my religion, and Miss Piggy absolutely deserves a niche, if not a full altar. 

My favourite historical nugget is Miss Piggy’s 1979 campaign for the leading actress Oscar for her  role in The Muppet Movie. It is what I love most about her. It felt like a genuine expression of  character rather than a corporate publicity stunt. That campaign even produced a wonderfully  absurd exchange between ABC’s Hughes Rudd and Academy President Fay Kanin. 

“To see Miss Piggy is to think of Olivia De Haviland, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid  Bergman, Oscar winners all. So why shouldn’t Piggy have an Oscar?” 

“You know we all do love Miss Piggy,” Kanin replied, “but the rules of the Academy say that  we give awards and nominations to actors and actresses, not to characters, and since Miss  Piggy is a character, we just can’t, we can’t do that.” 

Miss Piggy, of course, would disagree. And she would be right in doing so.

The post The Glamorous, Immortal Nostalgia of Miss Piggy  appeared first on The New Absurdist.

On the 11^th May 2024 a temporary forest sprouted in a theatre in Tartu, Estonia. The trees  were a gathering of around 50 tattooed Estonians, and the ink on their skin spoke of personal  stories of triumph and heartache, pride and resilience, celebration and change. We instructed  them to show as many of their tattoos as possible while dwelling silently in the darkened  performance space. 

I was positioned in the centre. I’d written a sequence of eight stories inspired by the same  tattoos that now surrounded me. I’d also spent time reading Estonian folktales and  mythology, I’d explored the edgelands of Tartu, and I’d visited the ancient mires and forests  of the nearby countryside. The stories attempted to respond to these various nodes while  staying rooted in the narrative traditions of folklore. The tattoos offered an obvious theme of  ‘permanence & change’ which I soon found reflected in the Estonian landscapes and their  accompanying mythologies. The resulting story sequence told new folktales of forests and  their people who contend with nebulous technologies, eternal conflicts, and fragile  interpersonal relationships. One of the stories, ‘The Artist’, is interwoven throughout this  essay, like ivy embracing a tree trunk. 

Back in the theatre, I’d fanned out the stories around me in an eight-pointed mandala.  This is a pattern often found in Estonian folk cultures and was also to be discovered inked  across the shoulders of one of our trees, somewhere in the shadows. At fifteen-minute  intervals, small groups of audience entered the space with torches. They were told to roam the forest, shining their lights on the tattoos while I read out one of the tales. At the end of the  story, that audience group would exit, and the next would enter soon after for the next  reading. 

Beneath it all looped a soundscape composed by UK electronica artist Rickerly that featured birdsong, the swish of the wind in the canopy, long-held drone tones, and sonic hints  of distant machinery. A chasing sequence of lights pulsated overhead, and a thin haze of  smoke filled the air. The tattooed trees would sway and shift, a few fell gently to the ground,  others crouched like stumps, one did a handstand as if uprooted, her roots turned upwards to  the sky. Sometimes I would roam towards particular tattoos, other times I would stay seated  in the centre and let the audience make their own connections.

We cycled this for four hours so that each story would be read twice. Two full turns of the  mandala.  

This was The Forest of Ink & Skin. 

The Artist: Part 1 

On the edge of a mighty forest lived a woman who was all alone in all the world.  No-one knew why she lived alone. Some from the town say that she was left in the forest as  a baby and raised by bears. Some say she had a husband once, but he was so cruel to her that  she killed him and burned his body in the fire she uses to heat her sauna. Some say she’s not a  woman at all, but a witch who is also a werewolf. But she kept herself to herself and was no  trouble, so the townsfolk let her be. 

But the world turned, as it does, and the times changed, as they do, and the town swelled  and became a city, bursting at the seams.  

And from that city came a man.  

He had silver hair, a golden suit, and bronze shoes, and he ate dry food from boxes instead  of the plentiful food offered by the forest. He walked with great confidence, his head high and  his arms swinging, as if pretending he were a giant taller than all the trees. He thumped a fist  on the door of the woman’s house. Against her better judgement, she let him in. 

“Why do you live here all on your own?” he asked. “No husband, no lover, no children, not  even a dog or a cat. Aren’t you lonely?” 

It took some persuasion to make the woman speak, but the man had a silver tongue and lots  of patience. Soon enough, the woman was telling the tragic tale of her life. She had not been  abandoned as a baby, she had never married nor killed a man, she was no werewolf or witch.  Her tale was much more complex, much more difficult to understand, and contained just as  much love as it did pain. Later, when the silver-haired man was questioned he could not  remember her story, for he had not really been listening. His mind was typical of the men from  the city: always busy thinking of other things. 

“There must be something that you want?” he said. “Something you desire most in all the  world?” 

She said that she had everything she needed right here in her house with her sauna, and the  forest. 

“That can’t be true,” he said. “You need a husband?” 

No.

“You need children?” 

No. 

“Then surely you must feel the need to travel beyond the forest and see the rest of the world?” 

She paused. She said no, but he heard her hesitation.  

“Aha,” he said. “You have wanderlust!” 

She had never heard this word.  

“No,” she said, more firmly. “True, I am curious about the world, but I have no desire to leave this place.” 

“Well, that’s easy,” he said, smiling a smile with no real smile inside it. From his pocket he produced a strange, glowing device and gave it to her. He showed her how to use it, and it  showed her the world.  

She was soon entranced. 

“You can keep this one,” he said. “But I want something in exchange. We’re building a harbour. Boats, ships, and docklands that look out over the sea. Our city needs to keep growing  and the ocean cannot stop us. Naturally, we need lots of wood. I will be taking the forest.” 

The woman nodded because she was not really listening. She was looking at pictures of  harbours and docklands and boats and ships, and she was looking at the sea and wondering  how far it stretched. 

“I will return for it in one year,” said the man, and strode out with his head high, his chest  up, and his arms swinging like axes. 

How it came to be: 

The core concept of The Forest of Ink & Skin had sprung from the head of my collaborator,  the Tallinn-based performance artist Henri Hütt. We had wandered Tartu together seeking  inspiration, and he’d struck upon the idea of an audience doing the same. He envisioned a  ‘rhizomatic story experience’ where an element of ‘soft participation’ might be created through  an audience actively rambling through tattoos. Perhaps, he suggested, my story might mention  an owl, and in that same moment the various torchbearers could be looking at a feather, or the mandala, or a mouse, or a skull, or the word ‘survive’, or, indeed, an owl. In this way, each  audience member makes their own symbolic associations between what is seen and what is  heard, perhaps enjoying thematic resonance or instead experiencing the disturbance of  dissonance, or something more nebulous in the hinterland between the two.

And while the tattoos had directly inspired the stories, that unity was eroded by the roaming  audience who encountered these alternative montages. A skull tattoo might portent a character  death that never happens, or a devil sparks a fear that proves misguided, or a heart suggests a  romance that is unfulfilled. In a sense we’d created a strange edgeland of narrative where  steadfast symbolic connections are put under strain and new uncanny linkages spring up in  their place. 

Of course, the audience had other alternatives. They were also free to switch off their torches  and turn away from the tattoos to focus entirely on me – and, indeed, some did exactly this. In  contrast, there were many others who roamed with determination from one inked body to  another as if this were an art exhibition (which, in a sense, it was), and seemed to completely  ignore the story being told. This too was a legitimate experience, especially for those few who  may have struggled with the language barrier (my stories were told in English). Whatever they  decided, our main intention had been to liberate the audience from their anonymous,  homogenous block of relative safety and instead let them loose to embrace a degree of chaos. 

To be rhizomatic, according to Deleuze & Guattari, is to resist the ‘arborescent’ and  hierarchical way of thinking, with branches sprouting from branches all derived from a central  trunk. Instead, we are to adopt a planar, horizontal network with no overall coherence or order,  where starting points and ending points are not so easily defined. In this sense, while our  tattooed participants became trees for the afternoon, the rhizomatic experience better evoked  the imagined mycorrhizal network beneath our feet; the ‘wood wide web’ of fungi fibres that  spread from tree roots to tree roots carrying messages and information. There was a visual  sense of this during the performance. We kept the experience on a horizontal plane, no one  person any higher or lower than anyone else, myself included. We had no riser stage to step  onto, and the audience were not in their raked seating. The traditional theatrical spatial hierarchy was eroded.  

This was partly how I was able to brush off those audience members who seemed not to be  listening to my stories. We had created a space of wandering freedoms rather than a constricted  focus, an almost neurodivergent theatrical expansion that accommodated the differing needs,  attitudes, and intentions of the non-homogenous visitors. I also came to realise that I did in fact  have a dedicated second audience in the form of the tattooed trees, many of whom reported  entering a heightened mindful state as they embodied the forests I repeatedly invoked in my  tales (especially the carved one included here in ‘The Artist’). By the second half of the four  hours, they were making links between the stories and showing me relevant tattoos that I had  not previously seen. I was most delighted to discover a hedgehog on someone’s arm given that the final story in the sequence ends with a hedgehog with ink in its spines. The rhizomatic  network was feeding messages back to me.  

I’ve deliberately invoked neurodiversity here as a rhizomatic offshoot from my previous project, where I studied the relationships between autism and fantastical narratives for a  Creative Writing PhD. I’d come across the work of radical French educator Fernand Deligny  who had, across the 1960s and 70s, fiercely resisted the institutionalisation of autistic children.  Instead, he’d developed a form of cartographic observation where young autistics are given  time and space to roam as they pleased while Deligny mapped their ‘wander lines’. These maps  were subsequently used as navigation aids during the therapeutic and socialisation activities of  his clinic. 

Deligny’s idea was to allow the world to bend around the autistic people, rather than forcing  the autistics to fight their instincts for the sake of fitting into a world constructed around  neurotypicality. Such thinking is a core tenet of the neurodiversity movement in the present  day, and this ‘neuroqueering’ of the world offers a fresh approach to the deconstruction of the  stubborn hierarchical structures of narrative and performance. I like to think we all left our  ‘wander lines’ on the floor of that theatre. Overlapping loops and circles of audience, trees, and  performer, each telling their own idiomatic tale of the desire to see and be seen. 

It would not be a wholly rhizomatic picture. Seen from above, it would be me at the core with the audience circling, and the trees drifting slowly around in the same orbit, like satellites. But I think also of the pattern of the torch beams, the ‘castlines’ perhaps, that tell a more  rhizomatic tale as they dart from tattoo to tattoo in a divergent quest for coincidence and  discordance. 

Something had been freed, I like to think, to run wild inside our forest. 

The Artist: Part 2  

Later, the woman was alone in her sauna.  

There was a great storm shaking the forest, and the branches of the nearest tree were tapping  furiously at her window. Soon enough, the strange device stopped working, so the woman had  to come back to her own mind. She remembered what the man had said, and it upset her  immensely. 

She ran from the sauna and sought out the wisest trees of the forest.  

First, she visited the eldest birch, the kindest and most understanding, and begged for its  forgiveness. A birch does not hold grudges, for it offers patches of its silver skin to write love songs and memories. The birch, in all its wisdom, could see she had been tricked by the silver haired man and his hypnotic device. 

The birch said: “You must take the device to the eldest oak and place it inside the hollow.  The oak will examine the device and it will soon know what to do.” And the birch gave her a  coat of its silver skin to protect her from the rain. 

She hurried to the oak and kneeled at the roots, begging again for forgiveness. While the  oak was grumpier than the birch, it was also the sturdiest and wisest of all the trees in the forest.  It took the device in its hollow and swallowed it. The oak began to understand new and  wonderous things. It learned about the strange age of glowing devices that had arrived so  suddenly in the last few rings of growth. It saw how they connected, and how the humans were  dragged along in an agonising cycle of high joys and deep pains. Most of all, it saw possibility.  Endless possibility. And soon it had a plan. 

The oak placed a crown of its leaves upon the woman’s head to grant her its wisdom. “I will keep hold of this device,” it said, “it is not for likes of you. Now go, to the eldest  pine, who will give you the items you will need.” 

With her cloak of silver skin, and her crown of leaves, she hurried on to meet the pine.  Again, she fell to her knees and begged for forgiveness. The pine was the most artful and  cheeriest of trees. It had long forgiven the woman even before she transgressed, knowing full  well that she would never harm a living soul. The pine knew of the oak’s plan, and happily  agreed. It bled out a barrel of its inky sap and gave her a sack full of its sharpest needles. 

“Well, well,” said the pine. “You’re going to create art, my dear. A picture, if you please,  upon every tree in the whole forest, but a different picture each time, of course. And then go  into the city and tell all the people to come see your work. It will be fabulous.” 

She was very scared, as she had never attempted to create art before, and she had not visited  the city for a long time. The pine laughed and gave her a cone to place beside her heart, because  a pinecone is a work of patience and pattern beloved by young and old.  

She spent a moment practicing on the trunk of the pine, drawing two stick figures fighting  with swords. It was crude but it was delightful, and for the first time since leaving the sauna,  the woman felt a glimmer of hope. 

What it meant: 

During my trip to Tartu in February 2024, just as the writing of the stories was starting in  earnest, I escaped the hard Estonian winter for a couple of hours and took to the cosy warmth of the Elektriteater cinema. The auditorium was packed, not a spare seat in the house, and the  Estonians were uncharacteristically fidgety and vocal. The film was Vara Küps (‘Vertical  Money’), a documentary by Martti Helde concerning the current management (most would say  mismanagement) of Estonian forests. Slick businessmen would appear on screen to justify the  excessive logging and the unhealthy cutting methods, raising incredulous laughter and barbed  comments from the auditorium. The tension in the room was palpable.  

Estonians have been known as ‘forest-people’. Around 60% of the Estonian landscape is  forest (compared to around 12% of the UK), and their histories, religions and mythologies are  deeply intertwined with woodland. For philosopher and semiotician Valdur Mikita forest covered landscapes are ‘an essential part of the sense of home for Estonians’, and he suggests  that forests have been ‘an accelerator of consciousness’ for the nation. He argues that forests  are where ‘periphery accumulates’ and spending quiet, meditative time within them ‘supply a culture with the unusual and keep it alive’ (Forestonia, Estonian Literature Centre, 2020).  

He also tells of the importance of the ‘home forest’; the area of woodland closest to your  home which is adopted as a sacred and treasured place. You’ll go there to forage for berries  and firewood, you may build your smoke sauna within those trees, you may even find yourself  a warden of an ancient and sacred pagan site. Historically, Estonia was one of the last holdouts  on Christianity, abiding for hundreds of years as a stubborn pagan pocket, and there are signs  throughout the country that these earth-beliefs never fully went away. This may have been in  large part due to these forests, where sacred spaces could stay more easily hidden and  preserved. And while Estonia is today considered one of the most atheist countries in the world,  there is a clear spiritual intensity for nature within Estonian hearts, with forests as a central  pillar of the pantheon. 

Estonian trees have persisted as protectors and providers of sanctuary. During World War  II, when Estonia and the other Baltic states were tossed between Soviet and Nazi control, the  forests became the fertile arena of resistance. The ‘Forest Brothers’ freedom fighters took  advantage of the generational knowledge of the woodlands and became a persistent thorn in  the side of the oppressors. While the Stalinist regime eventually quashed these efforts, the  legacy of this woodland brotherhood echoes down and can be felt today in the proud and  unwavering Estonian support for Ukraine. 

Today, many of the urbanised Estonians will retain a modest ‘country house’ at the edge of  a forest to decamp to during summer – locations that proved vital during the COVID pandemic.  Wood is everywhere in Tartu; most of the houses are made of wood, their tourist nick-nacks  are wooden kitchen utensils, and in the colder evenings the streets fill with the heady scent of woodsmoke. It was no small thing to choose the forest as our creative setting; the trees  intertwine with Estonian existence as if their blood were sap and their skin, bark.

And yet, despite all this, Vara Küps reveals a governmental distain for the preservation of  woodland heritage. Forest felling has accelerated in recent years, and large swathes of ancient  woodland are being aggressively cut in pursuit of profits. Wood, of course, is one of Estonia’s  key exports, and the forestry commission argue that harder winters and growing populations,  both within and outside Estonia, require more wood as a source of fuel. But activists contend  that protected forests are being shadily re-categorised and felling stats are being fudged to  accommodate aggressive expansion. Environmental concerns are also being ignored as  monoculture pseudo-forests are cultivated for the purposes of logging, resulting in unhealthy,  lifeless woodlands with little other flora or fauna. The pointed use of drone shots throughout  Vara Küps show the devastation wrought on the landscape. Bare and boggy arenas scratched  with the black track lines of the harvesting machines, the scarring wander lines of ecocide.

The story sequence of ‘The Forest of Ink & Skin’ makes regular contact with these fragilities. In one tale, a future city has carefully constructed sanitised ‘zones’ of nature,  including the most extreme version of a monoculture forest, and has embedded folkloric fears  among the people to stop them straying beyond the boundaries and into the wilds. The girl who  disobeys is reunited with animal life and transformed into a witchy figure more radical than  the city folk have been allowed to imagine. In another, a family collectively loses their memory  after one member, the youngest, is cursed for neglecting the home forest. Returning to the trees  restores a fragile form of harmony, but the ancient forces of the woodland fade into an unheard  distance, doomed to be forever out of sync with human modernities. I hope ‘The Artist’,  included here, speaks for itself. 

Like our audience, the stories meander and drift and make unexpected turns. They are  pointedly self-aware, asking questions of the narratives we construct for ourselves when we  use them to justify inharmonious actions. Obvious conclusions are resisted, questions are posed  and left unanswered, and throughout the sequence the forest abides as a ‘bewitching landscape’  (Mikita, Forestonia). It persists as often as it falls, it outlasts and outlives, sometimes shunning  our fairytale foibles, sometimes embracing them wholeheartedly. Much like our tattooed trees,  the forests in the stories are temporary, private, mysterious, and lead their own lives away from  the glare and the torch beams of visitors. 

Vara Küps unveiled to me a febrile debate that I was wholly unaware of, reminding me of  the similar debates we’re having in the UK concerning the poisoning of our bodies of water. It  also helped to reveal the cultural importance of asking a group of Estonians to embody a living forest of temporary trees and inviting another group to explore it. The rhizomatic experience  within the theatre space extended far beyond those darkened walls, reaching into the depths of  the home forests, ancient forests, and sickly forests just beyond the city limits.  

The central presence of the tattoos, I hope, emphasised a theme of defiant permanence that  helped strengthen these mycorrhizal narrative lines. Here, carved on the skin-bark of our sturdy  oak-humans were hieroglyphics of hope, icons of inspiration, and runes of resilience, the exact  details and reasons for their origins deliberately obscured. Instead, the mere existence of the  tattoos urged us forward by showing that change will happen, but our destinies are shaped by  what we choose to do. 

The Artist: Part 3 

Every day of that year from dawn to dusk, she went from tree to tree sketching and etching,  wearing her cloak of birch and her crown of oak, with the cone of pine snug beside her heart.  On the tree closest to the city, she drew an eight-pointed mandala with a butterfly at the  centre. It would tell the townsfolk that there was a transformation underway.  On the tree furthest from the city, she drew herself, her arms crossed over her chest, and her  head replaced with blooming flowers and stretching leaves, so that she could always remind  herself that there are ways out of every difficult situation. 

And on the tree at the very centre of the forest, not far from the eldest birch, she drew a great  dragon, borrowing all the colours of the forest, from the berries to the beetles, and the tree  responded by growing twice as tall so that the dragon could look out across the canopy, ready  to spring to life should any felling begin. 

It took her almost the whole year but with one day to spare, and only one needle from the  pine remaining, and just one single drop of its sap, she had etched pictures on every trunk of  every tree throughout the whole of the mighty forest.  

There was but one task remaining, and she barely had the energy to do it. But the dragon  roared from above the canopy, roses bloomed from her cheeks, and the mandala swirled  through her mind and drew her to the edge of the city. 

With the final needle and the last drop of sap, she fell upon the door of the house closest to  the forest and wrote the words: ‘Come and See’. Then she turned and walked back towards the  forest, knowing full well that this journey would be her last. 

When she reached the mandala, she just had enough energy to look behind. There was a vast  crowd of people following her and they all had the same strange device as the man who had  visited her almost a year ago. 

And the great tragedy of this tale is that our artist died on that spot thinking that she had  failed. Her final thoughts were these: that all those people had been hypnotised by the silver haired man just as she had been, and they were going to use those devices to destroy the trees  and build the wooden city to choke the distant sea. 

But the trees knew differently. She had not failed. The oak’s plan had worked perfectly. The people came with their devices, but they did not cut down the trees. They explored the  forest to every corner and every inch, and they marvelled at the work our artist had done. And  with their strange devices, they showed her work to the rest of the world and within the space  of just a few brief hours, the plans of the silver-haired man were stopped.  As for that man, he was driven out of the city and told to go elsewhere. As for her house, it  became a shrine for her mighty work.  

As for the forest, it lived on, the trees aching in the pain of bearing her art, but they stayed  standing for as long as they could manage, which was many, many years.  And by the time the last painted tree had fallen, there were already many new trees in place.

The post The Forest of Ink & Skin appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Back then, some quarter century ago, the nuns knew little about anatomy. Modest by nature and training, they either didn’t look or never noticed that my testicles didn’t drop. They had nothing to drop into, I was born without a scrotum. Many were too timid to even look at my penis. It’s just an organ, Sister Elfriede said. Without it none of us would be here. 

It’s dirty, some said. 

Dirty but necessary, Sister Elfriede rejoined. The two or three nuns who were least squeamish – they had brothers, they’d been around – were assigned to care for me. The others were excused. 

This was in a remote part of East Tyrol. Visitors, wealthy, middling, or impoverished, were, despite the abbess’ hopes, rare. 

My caretakers were musical. They hummed and sang religious music, hymns mostly but sometimes plainchant, as they washed, fed, or comforted me. I heard more song than conversation until I began my secondary education. 

Once I passed my toddler years, they let me walk the grounds unaccompanied. My voice, closer to a countertenor than anything else, was influenced by the chittering of the creatures I heard in the woods and clearings during the day, the distant sound of yodelers, and the screeches of the beasts culling their ranks in the night. 

I received my earliest formal education in the convent. The sisters had no way to send me to the nearest school, kilometers away. They suspected public education anyway. 

Progress came to our corner of the Alps. When I was twelve or thirteen, the road in front of our convent was paved. We started receiving visitors but no benefactors. One of our new guests mentioned there was a school bus stop a kilometer away. The nuns conferred. The following September they enrolled me in an all-boys prep school. I was a scholarship student. 

My first class was gym. We all had to strip. The teacher wasn’t gay. We’re in a gymnasium that believes in first principles, he said. Back to the Greeks! We stood in a line while he inspected us. He pulled me aside. 

Where are your balls? he asked. 

Balls?

Your testicles. 

Testicles? 

He marched me, still unclad, to the principal’s office. A woman’s group was in the waiting room waiting to speak to the headmaster about who knows what. Since the gym teacher had seniority, besides he had a class to teach, the receptionist waved us in ahead of the committee. They seemed more incensed about being bypassed than by my nakedness. 

The principal allowed the headmaster to return to class then called the convent. Sister Elfriede was indisposed. The second in command said she never noticed anything irregular about my anatomy but then she’d never seen me naked. The principal wrote out a slip, told me to report to the nurse’s office. I couldn’t find it till midway through second period. The nurse palpated me, said she couldn’t feel anything irregular besides my missing equipment. She gave me my clothes, which my gym teacher had a boy deliver, then sent me to the nearest hospital a village or two away. 

There I was X-rayed, MRI-ed, massaged again, made to cough and perform calisthenics. It was the first time I’d ever exercised. They had me lay on an examining table. Someone took pictures, others took notes. They planned to write an article about me for some Munich medical journal. 

A specialist came in. He explained that the procedure to create an external scrotum for my gonads to drop into was risky and very expensive. He doubted Sister Elfriede, given her poverty and beliefs, would pay for it. He’d seen the videos of the round nurse rubbing me, saw my erection. Your desires are normal, he said. You don’t need the operation. He wrote a lengthy note. Give this to your gym teacher tomorrow, he said. We saw you exercise. We know his type. He’ll go easy on you. 

The gym teacher read the note next morning. You must be a sissy, he said. Drop and give me ten. 

Ten? 

Ten pushups! 

Pushups? 

He dropped and demonstrated. He must have done fifty. 

I lowered myself then came halfway up. 

You may dress, he said. I need to get the boys ready for competition. 

I sat in a corner and leafed through a book about Salzburg’s heyday while the gym teacher forced some students to run laps around the gym and others to perform soccer drills. Those who weren’t on a team could do as they pleased. Most of those played basketball or used the gymnastics equipment. 

Next morning I had music first class.

I bet you didn’t expect to see me, the gym teacher said once we were all seated. I didn’t know what to expect. 

There’ve been a few budget cuts, the teacher explained. It’s all for the better. Franz, the old music teacher, retired. I hear he’s composing and conducting now. I don’t have the musical talent that old Franz has but I do know some things. He then yodeled for five minutes. As he ranged from low to high and back again, we sat in our seats dumbstruck. After our applause died down, he asked each of us to sing a short passage. He took notes on our voices. We’ll meet again next Wednesday, the gym teacher said at the end of class. During the peak of sports seasons, we’ll have music once a week. Later, towards Christmas, we’ll have music two or three times a week, depending on how much time I need to prepare you to sing in the concert. 

The following Wednesday, he arranged us in a semicircle then stood facing us. I was on his far left. The next closest person was a few yards away. Not all of you will be choristers, he said, just as not all of you will perform on a sports team. Since this may be your first formal exposure to music performance, I’ll give you all a chance to make the squad. 

He handed out sheets of music. The first song was a Christmas carol, “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht”, of course. I’d heard it, we all heard it, many times. 

As we filed out of the classroom, the gym teacher asked me to stay behind. 

You have a wonderful voice, he told me. You haven’t just made the choir; I want you to be a soloist. He gave me a book of songs. I want you to practice as much as you can, during gym class of course, but also at home. 

The nuns of course were pleased that I succeeded at something. 

I was the featured soloist at every performance my first three and a half years there. Bored with the repertory, I added melismatic effects and other trills and tremolos to my parts. Audiences looked forward to my eccentric interpretations, never knowing what to expect. I changed them from evening to evening not so much for them as for me. 

In the spring of my last year there we performed an operetta, von Suppé’s Galatea. The female roles were sung by students of a nearby girl’s school similar to ours. That was the first time I saw Lotte, who played the lead. I was cast as Ganymede. 

I played the role straight, as straight as I could. Like all my schoolmates I was smitten with Lotte, a medium height fraulein with black curls, freckles, dimples, hips, and what we imagined was a stupendous bust. The production was a great success. The last performance was a matinee, the Sunday before school let out. Backstage we heard that Pelagio, the famous impresario, was in the audience. Lotte, usually composed before we went on, was jittery. I held her hand. How can you be so calm? she asked me. I didn’t tell her I’d never heard of Pelagio, had only a vague idea of what an impresario does. You’ll be fine, I said.

Lotte sang and acted better than she ever had, better than anyone who’d ever appeared on our schools’ boards. The audience applauded a full fifteen minutes, demanded she perform an encore. She sang a Lied by Schubert a cappella since the musicians had already left. 

As the star, Lotte had the only private dressing room. The rest of us shared a long dingy green room. Many of my classmates were going to fancy dinners to celebrate the capstone of their scholastic musical careers. I had to take the last bus to the nunnery where I’d eat cold leftovers from the communal dinner. The abbey’s finances hadn’t improved much. I’d be lucky if any meat was left for me. 

Worried that I’d miss my bus, I was on the threshold of the doorway out when I felt a familiar hand upon my shoulder. 

Thank you so much for encouraging me, Lotte said, then turning to Pelagio, who was with her, this is the man who inspired me to my greatest performance yet. Lotte turned me around, kissed me chastely on the lips. It was the first time I was ever kissed. 

Have you completed your farewells? Pelagio asked. 

Till then, it hadn’t occurred to me that I wouldn’t see Lotte after my final performance or, for that matter, most of my classmates after the coming week. I wasn’t accepted to any universities, had no job offers. 

Come fall, I’ll be studying at the Mozarteum University, Lotte said. 

Ah, Salzburg, I thought. 

In Innsbruck. Pelagio will visit me at least monthly and arrange that I get extra instruction. After I graduate I may sing in one of his opera troupes. 

That’s fantastic, I said. 

I told Lotte I didn’t know what I’d be doing when she asked. Lotte batted her eyelashes at Pelagio. You’re a major benefactor to the Mozarteum, she told Pelagio. Surely you can find something for our Ganymede there. 

His voice is more than adequate for someone with his training, Pelagio said, but it’s not up to university standards. The school always needs janitors. He turned to me. Can you push a broom. 

I can learn, I said. 

After much back and forth, though only after Lotte threatened to give up music or go to another school, Pelagio agreed to hire me. I’d get room and board plus a miniscule stipend. 

Lotte’s parents emerged from the shadows. Her father gripped my hands hard, her mother smiled at me. They both thanked me for my pep talk. Let’s celebrate our deal! Pelagio said. He then took Lotte and her parents out to dinner.

I missed my bus. I didn’t get home till just before the front door was locked. They’d never given me a key. The sister who let me in told me that the leftovers for dinner were already added to the compost heap. We’re becoming a green nunnery, she said. 

The next morning I told Sister Elfriede of my plans. She agreed that I could stay at the convent till the new school year. She’d even let me wash walls and floors. I didn’t realize that they planned to banish me once my education was complete. 

I worked mostly with Turks and Arabs. My voice deepened though it was still higher than most. There wasn’t any demand for a singer with my range. My deepest note was at the high end of a light tenor’s range. 

At the beginning of my second year there, Bruck, a wealthy Englishman or an Anglophile, I couldn’t tell the difference, sponsored a performance of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. Tryouts were winding down when Pelagio appeared at my locker at the end of my shift. He spent most of his time in Vienna and Milan, sometimes in Salzburg, rarely in Innsbruck. He asked me why I didn’t try out for a role. 

They only ever want baritones and tenors, I said. I was told to stick with my brooms. 

Not for this piece, Pelagio said. He showed me the part for the Chinese Man. Bruck is a very wealthy man, much wealthier than anyone your nuns will ever know. This is the first piece he’s sponsoring. We need to wow him. 

Next day I won the part. My partner was a Korean woman, not Lotte. My supervisor gave me time off to rehearse and perform though I wasn’t compensated for the hours I missed. 

Bruck was detained by some lucrative business in Cambridge. He was only able to attend the final performance, another Sunday matinee. Lotte, who played not Titania but Juno, approached me before we went on. She asked me if I was nervous. 

No, I said. It’s a small role. 

I’m worried, Lotte said. Bruck isn’t like the other burghers who sponsor our productions. I hear he’s very knowledgeable and demanding. The stakes for our institute are high. 

I held Lotte’s hand. She calmed. Pelagio appeared. What’s this? he said. 

Nothing, Lotte answered. 

He left, most likely because he didn’t want to disturb Lotte before her finale. 

We all performed splendidly till the last line of “Yes, Daphne” my final song. The rest of the cast carried on as if I didn’t flub my part. 

Pelagio was already in the green room when I entered. We could still hear the audience’s applause. It may have been the loudest ever heard at the Mozarteum.

What do those yahoos know? Pelagio said. I sat next to Bruck, saw him wince as you concluded your part. I told him you weren’t part of our academy, just an outsider we decided to bring in, we didn’t want to make it a breeches role. 

I’m an aesthete with a cultivated ear, Bruck said. Even so, I understand that singers don’t always hit their notes just as athletes and actors sometimes miss their marks. Besides, this is a music school not the Royal Opera. That was the last he said to me. He left as soon as the final curtain fell. I’m ruined and it’s all your fault. 

Lotte approached as Pelagio finished his tirade. He left the green room apparently without seeing her. 

Pelagio wasn’t ruined. We didn’t stick around to find out. Instead, we flew – where else? – to New York. 

I’m fed up with Pelagio, Lotte said on the plane. I didn’t know if she was angered by his attention or lack of attention to her. 

We had to share a room our first night in Manhattan. Lotte sent me out for pizza while she showered and changed into her nightclothes. After we ate she told me to shower and to come to her naked. 

I approached her side of the bed more excited than I’d ever been. She touched the tip of my quivering penis, examined the fair hairs around its base, gazed at the spot where my scrotum should be. You may dress, she said. 

That’s it? 

I just wanted to see if you’d passed puberty, she said. I should have known from the peach fuzz on your cheeks. Who castrated you? 

I wasn’t castrated. My testicles didn’t drop. 

That’s gross, she said, but we’ll still be friends. 

Lotte, her parents, or someone that they knew has connections in New York. We soon found work. Lotte was accepted at Julliard. 

I went a-whoring with all the spare money I scrounged. The whores didn’t notice or didn’t say anything about my missing equipment. This went on till the director of the troupe pulled me aside. Lay off the hookers, he said. Satiety is bad for your acting. Remember the part calls for you to long for your beloved. 

He didn’t prohibit sex, I just had to seduce or be seduced by my partners. The few cis women I slept with were queasy about my equipment. I had better luck with trans women. Our company had an about equal supply of both. Lotte sang with us summers and during winter breaks, her duties at Julliard were that demanding. Wholesome as a milkmaid, she stood out from the rest of the troupe.

Lotte graduated from Julliard with honors. She wasn’t able to find many roles. Casting directors for conventional media – TV, mainstream theater, even film – looked at her history with the various groups she played in, considered her healthy appearance, and scratched their heads. My troupe evolved. We didn’t have any major roles for singers with Lotte’s talents and appearance. She didn’t want to play mere foils to major characters. One day the director fired her. Lotte came to me straight after. I don’t know what to do, she said. My father is sick, maybe dying, my parents have to cut my allowance. 

The following Sunday – we no longer performed matinees – I took Lotte to a pier in the West Village to help her forget her troubles. We brought mountain bread, a hunk of gray cheese, and Grüner Veltliner in a wineskin, my treat. It was the first fine day of spring. For some reason we had the pier to ourselves. After we had a little bit to eat and drink, we sat on a blanket at the end of the dock, our legs dangling over the Hudson. I held Lotte close, was about to kiss her when we heard someone shout, What’s this? 

We turned. It was Pelagio. He put the cheese and knife in his bag, slung the wineskin over his shoulder. Do you have any idea how far I had to walk to find you? he said to Lotte. Come, I’ll get a taxi, we can still catch a 6 pm flight to Vienna. He tore Lotte from my arms and dragged her to the street where a cab was waiting. I reached for the wine, found only the bread, a sort of flattened boule, tore a chunk off, and chewed it. I, who ever since my rescue by bony Sister Elfriede sought solace only in buxomness, had a long empty afternoon and Monday ahead of me.

The post The Horny Castrato appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Quinn (they/he):

To start, can we just go around and Introduce ourselves, our names, pronouns and artistic and creative practices and projects?

Jason (they/he):

Sure. I use they/he pronouns. I am a senior, at Tisch Drama at NYU and I am a playwright, I’m an actor, voice actor and creative leader of interactive, immersive and experimental projects, video games too.

Anisha (she/her):

I figured. Awesome.

Sally (they/she/he):

My name’s Sally. I use they/she/he pronouns in that order of preference. I mainly illustrate and write poetry, but I also dabble in sculpture work and animation. I mostly make work about identity, home nostalgia, intimacy, and fantasy. And I’m a senior at Parsons School of Design, majoring in illustration and minoring in psychology.

Anisha (she/her):

Oh my God. I was a psych major. Awesome. Thank you guys so much. To kick it off, well, we just kicked it off, but to kick it off again, we just want to know, how did you guys meet, how did you guys start collaborating and what were your various roles in making untitled gamer play? We can break that up since I know it’s a loaded question and I always forget part twos!

Jason (they/he):

Sally how did we meet?

Sally (they/she/he):

We met in our high school Japanese class and in junior year when we got assigned to be partners, we also became best friends and started dating. We started collaborating because we had to at first, because of Japanese projects and stuff like that…but you put two artists together and you constantly want to keep working on things together or be each other’s partner in crime or whatever. And I always joke that they’ve been my muse for like five years now. My role in untitled gamer play or UGP (however you want to say it) was at first just as a cover artist/event artist, but then after I finished my thesis, Jason reached out to me again and was like, “I heard you have free time. Do you want to be my codesigner?” That’s what I helped do co-set designer and co-set paint.

Anisha (she/her):

Nice. Nice. The sets were beautiful. Just throw that out there. I saw a clip of the video. It was really good.

Jason (they/he):

I wouldn’t call Japanese exercises collaboration, but I think we started … Wait. It is. we started collaborating in a real collaborator sense, I guess a little bit later when I decided to pursue art going into my second year of college diving right in there. And it’s just like whenever a project would pop up, for example, like rank choice dating popped up last September and it would be like an opportune time to bring Sally on. I brought Sally on about it and of course the muse part is definitely true for both of us of a lot of the art we make, I guess, is inspired by each other’s lives and the lives in our community and can’t wait to chat more on that. I am the writer of untitled gamer play and I’ve been, I guess I started writing this in my first year at NYU, which is like two and a half years ago. I wrote like a 10 page version of this as well as several other like 10 page plays that eventually …

The first version of this was just about “Oh, Gamer’s toxic.” And it was just a bunch of gamers in a room bantering and the one eager in their group that they were trying to woo, which did not end well. And then it eventually turned into this after many, many, many, many different drafts and iterations of this. And that’s where it went up.

Anisha (she/her):

That’s amazing. That is major props. Quinn, sorry. Did you have anything to say?

Quinn (they/he):

No, same. Just the script was a really amazing read. I had a great time and I had a great time watching what I could of the video that was sent too. And I also wanted to say that the set design was so beautiful and so good job both of you. I guess for the next questions, like for those who are listening and aren’t familiar with the play, can we just get a quick synopsis and also a little bit about Albert and what his character is indicative of?

Jason (they/he):

Untitled gamer play. It’s this play that revolves around Albert. He’s this 17 year old Chinese American kid who’s closeted and he’s sad and lonely. He plays video games all day to the extent that he’s paying this kid with the same first and last name as him to go to school for him and get good grades for him so he can impress his mom while also just playing video games. And he does that alongside his best friend Kevin who’s this like two or three years older, just big brother figure to him who hypes him up, cheers him along. And they go along this big adventure where Albert overcomes his fear of risks and tries to become a professional video gamer. And he does make this choice where he can’t go back by cutting ties with the guy that’s been going like ransom … Now at this point, like blackmailing him. If you don’t pay me, I won’t go to school for you and I’ll tell on you.

And he gives that up fully commits and then don’t want to spoil anything, but that choice changes how he views himself, how he views his mom and Kevin and at its core, this play is about saviors and what we do when people go out of their way to help us and we have no choice in the matter as so many of our parents do, immigrant parents do. And I wouldn’t say Albert’s character is indicative of anything. When I write, I normally just like to think of these people as real people and how would they want to their stories to be serviced and told, and reach as many people as possible.

But I think the best way I can answer this question is Albert is this amalgamation of gamers that I have met online and in-person and grown up with much, much more on that later. The naturalistic dialogue to him came really, really easy to me when he was just this huge conglomerate of just these voices that I’ve grown up with. And I hope that I’m able to service those stories and those memories of what was once just this massive part still is of my childhood.

Anisha (she/her):

Well, honestly I loved everything you said, it was very inspirational because I think I’m very big on storytelling as we all are especially at The New Absurdist and as creatives. I really just appreciate the thought and effort that you put into building out this character and really just not being like, this person symbolizes this one thing, but if it just comes to that, then that’s kind of what happens, but just letting the person be authentically.

And you touched on this a little bit so feel free to elaborate more or if you feel you answered it already. But you touched a little bit on this. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of writing this character? I know you said you pulled from some of your experience and the play in general. How did that look for you?

Jason (they/he):

Yeah. I think the process of writing this character is definitely tied in with the writing the play. This play revolves around Albert and well, it does revolve around Albert although every single character I hope has a really emotionally fulfilling arc. And I would say Albert started off as this idea of when I was in my first year playwriting class, I went like, “I have this massive part of my life that I’ve shut down in order to be here.” And whenever I look back on that gaming life, it’s like these people said slurs, these people hacked and bullied others, was there any good to these 10 years of my life that I spent online or was there anything good I could pull from that? And of course there’s a lot of bad and I had to really, really search for the humanity.

And I’m so glad that I found it because it made me be a little bit more compassionate to myself. These gamers are just really lonely kids for a lot of … And one place where this play did come out of is all the media especially in plays right now or historically is rarely about people of color with some exceptions chat out to black feminist video game. But it’s like the gaming and like D&D like table tabletop RPG setting in playwriting is dominated by white men. And no one’s really talking about how Asian games are. There are so many Asian gamers, there’s so many Asian kids and friend groups that live in these little channels on discord. And that’s how they grow up because they all want some kind of escape from their really, really tough lives.

And that escape is much, much different for them. Because they’re escaping a lot of expectations and a lot of rigorous classwork, stuff like that. And sometimes it feels like their entire family’s dreams are on their shoulders. And so when they escape that to play video games, they feel guilty. And there’s just so many parts of this that I was so grateful to find. And so the process of writing this was started out as this little exploration and then I explored many, many things about what this play could be. I think there was like a 120 page version at the beginning of last year. 1.5 years ago of where it was like this play was structured around money and enterprise of this professional league of legends esports system, where it was so much more focused on that.

Because if you think about it, esports is a cult. esports is like professional video gaming and it’s biggest in league of legends, which is where my background. League of legends is like the world’s most popular game, I guess. Don’t fact check me. It’s the most popular esport and the cults following. And there’s a lot of those professional gamers happen to be Asian. And no one really talks about that. I think where that draft started from is, oh, these gamers are Asian. Where do they come from? How do they end up here? Are they just heroes of their hometown? Do they have like these dreams? A lot of these gamers are coming from low income backgrounds and using these games that they love to support their families as opposed to all the other players who are just doing it for fun and they had their luxury for doing it for fun. And that was a whole exploration of that because in the end everyone’s competing for the white man’s dollar.

But then I circled back, found out, really explored the emotional lives of each character and ended up here much more to come many, many more edits to come. But I’m really glad that I took a step back rooted this in the people that I cared about because it was getting a really hectic and hard to control. And I think I made something really great.

Anisha (she/her):

You did. You did. I will attest to that…I second that.

Quinn (they/he):

I agree. And I also really liked finding the humanity in the gaming world. From what I understand, when you’re gaming, other people are just little voices and characters. And so extrapolating the human out of that is just so cool. For the next question, we’re wondering how..And you already touched on this too, but how Albert is relating to and exemplifying changes or lack of changes within the gaming community?

Jason (they/he):

There’s this really, really great article by my friends that I want to plug. They wrote a paper about Albert as a character. And in relation to being a gamer and the multiple identities he holds as an assignment for class. Her name is AJ, we have a playwriting class together. I think at its core, the gaming community in [untitled gamer play] is incredibly homophobic. And I think the sentence in this paper that hits me the most is…let me find it.

“Albert’s fundamental existence as a gay gamer is that his passion lives in an environment that is inherently unwelcoming to him.” This article beautifully explains that this community is degenerated and I often say gamers are the worst of people. They throw these slurs around, they have no fear of consequences because they’re often very self indulged in the fact that they’re trying to escape. For that reason, they get away with a lot. Albert is just this little kid trying to exist in this hard world that is unwelcoming to him. This play in particular, I think does capture a lot of humanity and goodness in video gaming community and it does definitely give a little bit of light, a tiny little bit of light to the bad I would say.

I think what I explored in terms of like Albert being a character and homophobia in this play was that like the bro-gamer and bro culture is often like, “Yeah, yeah bro.” How is this not gay? How has no one ever talked about this? Like being remotely suggestive of these gamers being gay. So Kevin will go off and do these really obscene things and bait Albert and lead Albert on in these sexual crude acts of humor as well as their online connection, they’ve never seen each other and yet they have this brotherhood and the way that both of their masculinities benefit from this relationship and just those two things I think are very, very key parts of this gaming community. Men will get really, really close and they will be very strangely straight. Let’s talk about that. Very long tangent feel free to cut.

Anisha (she/her):

No, no, I loved it. I loved it. I don’t know if you saw because Zoom’s a little hard, but I was getting a little emotional as you were talking about humanizing people. I think that’s so important. And honestly I’m going to be completely transparent. Prior to reading your play, I’ve had friends growing up who are very much in the gaming world and they would tell me so much about the toxicity. It was honestly really refreshing to read your play.

I was like, whoa, this is a whole other side to this world that I’m not in, but I can almost empathize with. It was just really a little jarring, but in the best way possible. And also I love the threads of homophobia that you touched on throughout the play, I think was very seamless. Thank you for that. It was very refreshing on my part, very enlightening for me as a person. And also along the lines of integrating homophobia, you also spoke about immigration and really touched on the life of immigrants. I was wondering, was there any particular reason why you chose to incorporate this? How does it relate to gaming and how does it relate to the gaming world in general? I know that’s a loaded question-

Jason (they/he):

Definitely.

Anisha (she/her):

-so take it in parts if you have to.

Jason (they/he):

I have many answers. Don’t worry.

Anisha (she/her):

Excited.

Jason (they/he):

This definitely came, like I said, came from like the fact that so many of these professional gamers are Asian gamers and children of immigrants. For part of my visual research I took these pictures of pro gamers when they entered the scene, like in 2013-2014. They have bull cuts, they have glasses, they’re fucking ugly. But then give them five or six, seven years as they come into massive amounts of wealth and they support their families and they completely change.

There’s this story of one of one very controversial gaming in figure. But I do look up to him. His name is Doublelift in the League of Legends Community. He entered this scene really early, in 2012, he was really, really poor and he was playing this game to support his family to which he had a very strange relationship with. His mother gave him up because he was playing video games and he had to live in this journalist friend’s apartment for many, many years because his parents kicked him out, but he still had this dream.

He still plays this game. He’s very controversial because he is toxic, but he still plays this game a lot. And in, I believe that around 2017, 2018, his mom died. His mom was murdered by his brother. That was heartbreaking because we followed his life and he’s talked about his family. Around that time he reconnected with his mom and was starting to heal their relationship, but she died before they were able to fully do that. And the thing is, he went through that. Two weeks after that happened were the regional finals in North America and he played through it. And like, God, I was watching this stream choking up. Right before that game, right after that game, you can just hear the entire crowd in that stadium, just shout, “Doublelift. Doublelift.” And it was just like, wow. That’s that.

I think there’s this huge part of…all the Asian video gamers have this relationship with their mom. I’ll say that. Like I will be on call, I will hear my friend’s mom literally say something like, “Don’t call me bro.” You could ask east Asian men if they’ve played league of legends and most of them will say yes. I think every single one of them who has this relationship with gaming and their mom play this game to fit in and find community. They actually find a lot of other Asian kids who are doing the same thing. Playing this game is an escape like I said before, from like the strict expectations of their parents.

And their parents desperately want to stop. And there’s this constant tug of war of, “Stop, stop, stop, stop.” And they go like, “I’m doing fine. I’m doing fine. I’m doing fine.” There’s also these more intricate interactions. One friend, Yusuf, talked about me about how lots immigrant kids to try to confuse their moms with technology and say something like, “Oh our grades are on the student portal, go check it,” That’s the only thing that they can leverage against their very smart, very cunning parents. They have this knowledge of the online world and they can use it to confuse. There are just so many parts of this, but I think I foiund a synthesizing thought.

Anisha (she/her):

Go off if you have to.

Jason (they/he):

I guess at its core, when it comes to gaming and immigration, you play this game to escape your parents because they want the world out of you. Sometimes you just want to go into something where you can feel like you’re progressing, you can feel like you’re powerful, you can feel like you have friends, because you definitely don’t in school if all you’re doing is doing tests. There’s just so many things that help this online world, both in terms of a social world and in terms of immersion and escape, make you powerful in a sense. There’s so many things that make the online and gaming world attractive to children of immigrants. And there are so many children of immigrants that play. And I will say immigrants too. It’s just alluring, it’s new, and it makes you feel like a person when the world doesn’t.

Anisha (she/her):

Well said. Well said. And also thank you for making me cry at nine o’clock in the morning-

Jason (they/he):

This is normal for me.

Anisha (she/her):

That was very touching. Thank you so much for sharing.

Quinn (they/he):

I can totally understand why your friend wrote an essay tracking Albert’s experience as a gay gamer. You could write so many essays about what you just said and about the play as a whole. I really appreciate everything you just said and also for the very emotional gaming background too. I guess the next question is for both of you. I was just interested, what was it like to see your play move into a physical space. What was that process as a writer and then also as a set designer?

Sally (they/she/he):

Well, for me, Jason sent me like… 50 different versions of this play  in the past two years that they’ve been writing it. Reading through all the different versions, I think the one thing that I kept thinking about was projections, really fun lighting, and this idea of solitude. I kept thinking about that. When I saw that they were thinking about a modular set design, especially with cardboard and stuff like that, I had this idea that the cardboard boxes were a bit like pixels. They would move and shift with every iteration. For me, even though I thought of it as such a high budget play being portrayed with such low tech, it was still really endearing when you think about the meeting of cardboard boxes and play. In both the digital and real worlds, we play into ideas of what our parents want and also play into ideas of how we should behave in school and to our friends and stuff like that. It made a lot of sense. Seeing this play move from just words that…I still cry when I think about it. The visuals…and everyone coming together I thought was really heartwarming.

Jason (they/he):

It was very, very heartwarming. I think the main thing tying together this experience for me is the amount of respect other people have shown in bringing this work to life. Not to discredit the many, many, people that have feedback for my play and who have given me such amazing affirmations throughout these years, but I’ve always felt that my work has not been respected, especially at NYU. I will be in a playwriting class and when I present my work, the white people in the room will turn their cameras off on Zoom because they don’t know how to interact with it. Or  people will not know how to approach this work because it just like belongs to a culture other than theirs. For the longest time, I’ve just felt so undervalued and that no one would pay attention to me.

I started to have this bitterness, I had to fight for everything…I have to make people turn their heads. So I was getting really bitter and, in a really unhealthy way, just feeling that I have to fight for my voice to be heard in every single kind of space. I have this baseline expectation that no one will listen to me because of how this curriculum is structured and because all the playwriting teachers are white, but then to have my work…

I was so pessimistic going into this that the Asian people would not be there, that noone would want to work on this. But then to be met with an amazingly large and diverse team and for my work to be handled like that, with an insane amount of respect, it’s just like, wow, that was … Throughout those years, I guess I was getting something done. I was heading in a right direction. I was doing something right. It’s very, very affirming. Shout out to all those collaborators and to the level of communication on this project because people were so invested, facilitated by our amazing stage manager Tatiana. We had so many amazing artistic conversations that really just showed how much people cared to me. I think like one really, really big thing coming out of this project is a newfound confidence in myself. Also shout out to director Jonathan.

Sally (they/she/he).:

Literally the entire cast and crew felt like family and it was so … I just felt like even if I worked on it in-person for maybe a week or two, I felt so connected to everyone, they were so sweet. Everyone was so dedicated.

Anisha (she/her).:

Oh my God. That’s so heartwarming. I feel like when I hear stories about spaces where there isn’t a strong sense of like community, it’s usually the opposite where it’s like, “I felt very left out. I was running and putting things together, but I didn’t really talk to anyone.”  So I am relieved. You guys actually built a little community so, shout out to you two.

Honestly, shout out to you guys for like really carving out spaces for others…because especially as people of color, just navigating the space as belonging to a marginalized community, it can be so, so difficult. I’m also getting emotional again, so don’t mind me if I start crying. But that’s something that hits home to me, but it’s just so inspiring to see you guys. Really just carry on as a force to be reckoned with in this space. You guys are really making movements and it’s just really amazing to see. Applause to you guys. I think that’s amazing.

Jason (they/he):

In many ways, this thing went so fluently. I have had many bad collaboration scares and that just made this one so good. In many ways, I feel like we proved a lot of people wrong and we subverted a lot of expectations going into this. Now people know what we can do. People are treating us differently and it’s a big culture shock. I’m really, really proud of this. My ego is not normally this high, but we really subverted every narrative about us.

People are coming into this process with really similar stories to mine, about never feeling seen or appreciated for their talents in their cohorts throughout their arts education. Then this happens and they get to see just how wonderful their community (and themselves) can be when they are supported. And they have the support that has been denied to them for so many years.

Anisha (she/her):

Obviously I wasn’t there when you guys were doing this, but just hearing about it, you can see the love and appreciation you have for the project and the rest of the team as well. It’s really a shining through. I think that’s really important to build a community within a community sometimes because it can be so isolating. It can be very much  like… you think you might have to diverge past a little bit. You’re like, “Maybe this isn’t the right field for me.” I don’t know if you guys ever thought that, but I did at some point.

And so when you see that community come together, you’re like, “Oh wait, no. I got this, we got this.” It’s very inspiring. Thank you both for being very vulnerable and sharing those parts. I definitely really appreciate it and we really appreciate it in general. We touched on the art and all this stuff. Sally, you also touched on this. We both really enjoyed your art and I really love the idea of the whole like pixels moving.

It’s so crazy because like, I don’t know, Quinn if you also have this thought, but I had the thought. I was like, “Oh this reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put the puzzle pieces together,” and then you said “ it’s like how pixels movie.” And, that’s exactly what I was thinking I just literally could not find the words to describe it. It’s really cool. We both really enjoyed your art and we would love to hear about what it is like for you in terms of intersecting, like that storytelling aspect with the visual, narratives and how that all comes together. Also I think you mentioned, if I’m not mistaken, you worked in different mediums of art as well, but how does that also relate to the whole experience? And once again, loads of questions so we can take that in parts.

Sally (they/she/he):

I’ve always been drawn to visual art and storytelling because growing up, I was the youngest child, and youngest daughter of a family of immigrants. My brothers are 4-5 years older than me, and they’d be gaming together, going to school together, doing big things and I’d be stuck in this gender role of, “Oh, you’re not allowed to do those things. You can’t get addicted to games like they are, and you can just read books and watch cartoons.” For the limited amount of time that I was able to game with them or watch cartoons with them, especially with things like in the more sort of like Asian, especially east Asian sense of anime and manga, I was able to see more stories like mine with people that looked like me like Crayon Shin-chan and Chibi Maruko-chan. 

Growing up with those was really important especially because I wasn’t allowed much screen time. Reading a lot, getting immersed into those worlds through children’s books especially because it was the first time that I really encountered stories that were meant to uplift me even if the characters didn’t look like me yet. Shout out to Eyes that Kiss in the Corners Oh my gosh…

Coming from that perspective of being really inspired by children’s books and wanting to get into them since I was literally five and since I figured out how to draw, because I only thought writing was an option, I guess it was always my preferred medium and storytelling and adding words to that really came naturally. So sorry, what was the rest of the question?

Anisha (she/her).:

Totally good. The intersection between storytelling and visual narratives and different mediums and stuff like that.

Sally (they/she/he):

I guess I always stuck to almost the cheapest materials I could find because growing up in an immigrant family, there wasn’t really much, and art materials were so expensive. At the time, I didn’t feel like my art was worth investing so much into especially as I was still a kid and I was still practicing and we couldn’t afford any art classes. I treated it as a hobby and I just practiced and poured my soul into it, even if it was just pencil and paper.

And then when I was 14, my brothers chipped to buy me a Wacum tablet that I’ve been using ever since. I asked for that specifically because digital art is so much more accessible than other mediums in a way that you don’t have to keep paying for paints and brushes and things that break down, like a canvas, you could just keep using the same tablet as you were seven years ago.

All the colors are there, really everything is there. That’s all you really need. That’s what I’ve been using since really. And as for other mediums, I do ceramics, I do soft sculpture, I do animation stuff like that. All that has been as I’ve grown more confident in storytelling and my skills, technical skills as an artist where I’m more willing to invest in it especially as I…Well that confidence only really came to be as I started applying to art schools and college. I really hadn’t invested a whole lot before then, but I do think that everything comes down to storytelling. It doesn’t really matter if it’s visual or just writing, I think that stories are just really important.

Quinn (they/he):

I wanted to just say, both Anisha and I looking forward to what’s next and definitely looking forward the eventual Broadway production. But I also just wanted to say, I feel like I’m a big believer in art as a space where power and hierarchy can be subverted and where community and lifting each other up is really important. So I just wanted to echo what Anisha said earlier, thank you for being so vulnerable about talking about this process and everything. But anyways, I have another two- part question for you, Sally. I know that you talked about your thesis earlier, I’d love to hear some about that and just that process of working on a long term project and how that has been for you?

Sally (they/she/he).:

My thesis is titled One Day the Sun Won’t Be Wounded and it’s a growing collection of originally written and illustrated poems of about Chinese mythologies, dieties, spiritualism, family history, queerness, transness, and myself. Showing up for thesis, we started like five years in, no, my gosh, five weeks into our first semester, at the time I was incredibly burnt out. I had this whole grand plan of last year thinking about like, “Oh, I’m going to make this super cool, illustrated chapbook” and also I was thinking of an accordion book and that it would be huge and at least 30 pages or something like that. I thought I planned out all the subject matter that I was going to tackle. But when it came down to it, that first semester I was so burnt out that I couldn’t get anything out of me really other than one piece, the first one.

And I guess it was mostly a process of trying to find compassion for yourself, especially in a world that’s so capitalistic and it’s so driven by productivity. I was punishing myself every single time. I couldn’t start every week where it was like, “Come on, just write some things,” or like, “Just like dress sketch. It’s not that hard. You could do it if you like.” You felt the pressure too and yet nothing was coming out. And because of that cycle of like, “Oh, you have to do something.” And yet, I’m not allowing myself to do anything enjoyable until I start and being paralyzed. And that was difficult to get out of, but then when winter break came and January came, I was able to let go of that a little bit and also be more motivated by seeing what other people were creating in class and being able to let go and play Stardew Valley for a while was exactly what I needed and so I just started thinking of like, “Who cares, it’s thesis, not like it’s the last project that I’m ever going to do.”

And that was what my professor said too. Like, don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s not your last thing. Sure, it’s bigger than any other project that you’ve done, but that’s not the end all of your career. I just took it step by step and drew out. I saw it as a work in progress and something that I’m proud of rather than something that is more of a punishment in trying to prove myself to people that aren’t particularly my audience.

Quinn (they/he):

I’ve been working on my thesis too for the past year and so I get the struggle. I guess that’s something that has to come out of me at some point. For the last question, we’d like to open it up to both of you again, and we were wondering, what advice would you give to aspiring artists and playwrights and what would you have liked to hear when you started working on untitled gamer play? I’m sure it’s a lot.

Jason (they/he):

Do you have an answer Sally?

Sally (they/she/he):

You can start.

Jason (they/he):

I got it. I would say at the beginning of this process, I wish I knew that my problems were big. For example, we Asian artists have executive dysfunction as evidenced by everything I just said. We have a very poor relationship with our work, especially creative work because of the anxieties passed down to us. And I think I belittled myself a lot for not being able to write. I wish I had more compassion for myself and knowledge that the artists that are able to work through this create even stronger art stronger, what does that mean? 

Our executive dysfunction problems are big, treat them like big problems and when you get to overcome them, give yourself a bigger reward. What I like to say to people is: you’re up against a final boss, not just another slime. And a word of advice would be on that related note, you need a hype squad if you are a writer from a marginalized background, and people will be like, “Ah, you don’t need validation.” But you need validation, it’s human, it’s one of your needs. Belittling that need is belittling yourself. Yes. Many people will make you feel like you’re nothing. Especially for Asian artists, they will reduce you to being proficient or uncommunicative or rude. And a lot of things will eat away at you and you deserve having a community that will vocally support you often to just keep you afloat and keep you writing.

Sally (they/she/he).:

I totally agree with that. I would say trust in yourself and also trust in your community and rely on community, support your community because they’re the ones who are always going to be there for you too. Especially with illustration and writing, of course, these are usually really solitary acts and you usually do them alone. It’s like, oftentimes you really don’t feel that support unless it’s right in front of you and you’re going after it to talk to people and hear each other’s voices, sometimes you really don’t feel like that support is real. It’s just like, again, like pixels on a screen doesn’t really mean anything to you, does it have any value? But working on things like untitled gamer play and being in a team environment, you really can see how the emotions that you put into the play reflect through how everyone else is experiencing it and the care that they have for you and your work is also the same care that you offer to other people.

And that’s what really keeps everyone creating things and building things and trying to make a better future for everyone I think. That’s the big goal, I guess. We’ve all started writing stories based and we wanted to hear ourselves and see ourselves in our communities represented. And so I feel like supporting each other is just one other aspect of being an artist.

Anisha (she/her):

Oh my God. I love. Sorry. I think you were going to say something. I just …

Quinn (they/he):

No, I was just going to say the same exact thing. Thank you so much you guys. This has been so wonderful and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us and-

Jason (they/he):

I found out a future project.

Quinn (they/he):

Yes, please.

Anisha (she/her):

Oh my God.

Jason (they/he):

On June 11th, 2022, I will be performing and Sally will be costume designing for untitled waifu play. It is directed by Jonathan and the playwright is Char Nakashima-Conway, who I love with my entire heart and who inspired this playwriting journey in me of writing for small groups of people that have never been seen before. Come see it, it’s about incels who materialize their anime wife into real life and try to go on dates with them and we’ll see how that goes. 

Anisha (she/her):

That’s so interesting. Oh my God. Well, thank you for that. If I can make it, I probably will. Try to start my schedule out. But no, that sounds amazing. I see the gaming thread there, which is also really just enlightening, like I’ve said a million times, but that’s honestly how I’ve been feeling. But thank you guys so much. It has been such a pleasure, like Quinn said, just to have this conversation. Thank you for being so open and vulnerable with the entire process and also being very transparent because I think that a lot of times people, especially when they come on platforms, they’re like, “Yeah, it was a wonderful ride.” And you’re like, “Okay, it was, but let’s be real. It was a struggle to get to this point.”

Really appreciate your transparency and your honesty throughout the entire thing. You guys did a phenomenal job with the play and bringing it to life. It was really, really eye opening. And I think that these stories, like you said, they need to be materialized a lot more and just brought to a lot of different audiences. Really appreciate you guys bringing it to the New Absurdist audience as well. Really look forward to sharing your stories. We’ll be in contact about the whole process of things like that and once it gets posted and all that stuff, but honestly, thank you guys so, so much. I know it’s bright and early on this gloomy morning, so really appreciate you guys plowing through and being the resilient people that you guys are. Really appreciate more power to you and honestly look forward to seeing the amazing work that you guys continue to put out.

Jason (they/he):

Thank you both.

Sally (they/she):

Thank you so much for your time.

Anisha (she/her):

No, of course. Thank you guys.

The post A Look at “Untitled Gamer Play” appeared first on The New Absurdist.