Theater of the absurd

Who needs to go out for dinner and the theater? (Or for dinner-theater, if those joints still exist.)

You can get Grub Hub to bring in dinner from just about anywhere. Drizly can schlepp the booze in. And if you live in New York City, you don’t have to rely on Charades – or the improv ad hoc-ery of your liquored-up friends and family – to supply the drama. You can hire Philip Santos Schaffer.

Which, a short while ago, a woman on the Lower East Side did. Michelle Stern and her friend Thomas ushered themselves into her bathroom and plunked down on a couple of chairs wedged in by her toilet. No need to dim the house lights. The play was on.

Santos Schaffer was putting on an original play for them, “The End of the World Bar and Bathtub,” an interactive piece that takes place in your bathroom, providing you have a tub. (Tickets are a hundred dollars for two, which is the most and least you can purchase.) He débuted his play in March, 2018, and is approaching his fiftieth performance; if records of this sort of thing were kept, Santos Schaffer might qualify as the longest-running Chicken Little Off Off Off Broadway. (Source: The New Yorker)

I hope Santos Schaffer has a day job – because $100 x 50 over a year plus doesn’t translate into much of a living, especially it that living’s going on in Manhattan. But I’m actually amazed that there are that many people who’ve wanted to have an actor come into their home and perform.

But Stern was, so there Philip Santos Schaffer was, sitting:

…cross-legged in a dry bathtub, looking like the Buddha’s brother from Brooklyn. He was wearing shorts in a blue Hawaiian print and a matching shirt, under a Michael Kors women’s blazer from a thrift shop; his black hair was in a bun. “The world is about to end, and this is the only place to survive,” he explained, in an agitated but not crazy way.

I suspect if I were there, I might have interpreted ‘agitation’ as ‘cra’, but, hey, I don’t even have a bathtub, so there’d be no place for a guy looking like Buddha’s Brooklyn bro to be sitting cross-legged.

Not to mention that I’d be completely mortified for a) myself for watching; and b) for the actor/playwright/Buddha bro.

Turning on the tub’s faucet, Santos Schaffer held up a mug and offered his companions coffee, tea, or ramen “made with N.Y.C.’s finest tap.”

Maybe you had to be there, but IMHO, the Rogers’ children put on better plays in our cellar.

Sorry, offering to make someone tap water tea hardly compares with the well-plotted (not to mention well-acted) high drama of our best known work, “Oh, Martina.”

“Oh, Martina, will you marry me?”

“No, Pedro, I must marry Juan.”

“If you marry Juan, I must stab you to death.”

See you you can do with a bit of imagination and a 10-cent rubber dagger from Woolworth’s?

Of course, our play was a bit on the brief side. One act (three lines, plus the stabbing action).

The script for the bathtub play is nineteen pages, but Santos Schaffer uses it as scaffolding on which to improvise. “I try to listen to what type of experience the audience wants to have,” he said. “Some nights, people really want to talk. Some people want to laugh. Some people want to be scared.”

And then there are some people who just want to cringe. And that would be me.

All of the plays are built around pushing audiences to experience empathy in a new way,” Santos Schaffer said. “And all of them are solo performances in which audience interaction is slowly scaled up until, by the end, the audience is asked to make a big action or choice, such as whether or not to survive the end of the world.”

Audience interaction? Include me out!

One of the worst experiences of my life was a circus clown approaching my row at Madison Square Garden looking for someone to engage with.

Friends, I tell you that was a near death event.

Fortunately, circus clowns are pretty good at figuring out just who they can drag into their act, and this guy definitely knew that the 17 year old girl with her face in her hands and her her long dirty-blonde hair being shaken into place to cover the scene, was not going to help move his act along.

Look, as someone who knows plenty of poets and writers, I have plenty of sympathy and empathy for those who want to forge a life in the arts. But I don’t think I’d be able to survive the end of the bathtub play, let alone make the choice to survive the end of the world.

I don’t imagine I’d like Santos Schaffer’s forthcoming play about Baby Jessica, either.

You remember Baby Jessica. Back in the late 1980’s, when there was less going on in the world and cable TV was just getting to be a thing, we were enthralled by the existential question of the day. Would “they” be able to rescue Baby Jessica alive from the backyard well she’d fallen into deep in the heart of Texas?

Fortunately, Baby Jessica survived. I don’t know if I’d survive the audience experience in this one:

In the first act, one audience member privately listens to an audio track. In the second act, that same person sits in a closet while an actor talks to her over a baby monitor. There are two more acts, but let’s keep a few plot twists untold.

For over a decade now, I’ve written a weekday blog post for a small audience of stalwart friends, family members, and the handful of strangers Pink Slip has pick up over the years. But mostly I’ve stuck with it for my own entertainment. Just because I enjoy writing.

And if Philip Santos Schaffer wants to write plays and act in them, and this is how he’s doing it, more power to him. He doesn’t seem to lack for energy. In addition to the entity that puts on the bathtub play, he also runs a non-profit theater company. Not to mention that he’s ballsy enough to have gotten a piece written about him in The New Yorker.

For all I know, he’s the next Samuel Beckett, the next Harold Pinter.

But I’m not the experimental type, so I’m just as happy that I’m a couple of hundred miles away, and bathtub-less in Boston.