Artistic Statement
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Max Mondi
Artistic Statement
I really do not like the word “crazy.” It is dismissive, broad, and meaningless. In other words, it contains no empathy. When we say someone is “crazy,” I think we’re only seeing their choices and not their circumstances. This is why theatre is awesome: It gives you both! Theatre is the interaction of people and their circumstances; characters enter a context, make choices to change the context, which further creates more choices. No one is “crazy” in a play. This is the impulse behind my first play, MAYBE TOMORROW, which is inspired by a news story of a woman who lived on her boyfriend’s toilet for two years. At the time of this story, everyone kept calling her “crazy.” I wanted to explore why someone would choose to live in the bathroom and how a marriage could work in that context. When we debuted the play at the New York Fringe Festival in 2015, one of my favorite responses was, “This totally makes me want to live in my bathroom.”
A few years later, I learned that among its many indignities, one of the most prevalent symptoms of homelessness is the constant felling of being invisible in the world. Around that time, I was waiting for the subway in Queens. On the crowded platform was a homeless man, nearly naked, wildly and passionately dancing and singing. As you might expect, everyone else on the platform had moved away from his vicinity and was ignoring him. I imagine everyone thought he was just “crazy.” But I don’t know. If I felt I was truly invisible, why wouldn’t I be dancing and singing, especially if no one sees me doing it? If anything, would I not be dancing and singing as a desperate way to get people’s attention, to, in other words, become visible? This is the impulse behind PERSONHOOD, in which we watch a once invisible Person become visible, and therefore gain their humanity.
HOUSE OF KAREN is, in many ways, my most personal play. Back in 2011, my mom moved out of the house in which she raised me and my sister. Since that time, she’s never been permanently settled. Through the years, she’s alternately stayed with different family members, always on temporary bases, and every time I talk to her she says, “I need to figure out what I want to do.” My mom is drifting around the world like a ghost, totally lost with no kids to raise and no house to maintain. In great frustration, I’ve called my mom “crazy,” because it hurts me to see my incredible mother in such pain that so often seems self-inflicted. And I don’t know what to do. So, to empathize with (i.e. contextualize) my mom, I wrote a play about the gig economy and the nomadic culture it fosters.
We are animals on a huge rock randomly floating through infinite space. We are all lost, alone, and desperate for company. Some are dismissed as “crazy,” and it is those very people that I want to welcome into my plays, to be greeted by the love of an audience, and suddenly to be endowed with purpose. I want to give the disenfranchised purpose. I can’t think of any better use of the theatre.
A few years later, I learned that among its many indignities, one of the most prevalent symptoms of homelessness is the constant felling of being invisible in the world. Around that time, I was waiting for the subway in Queens. On the crowded platform was a homeless man, nearly naked, wildly and passionately dancing and singing. As you might expect, everyone else on the platform had moved away from his vicinity and was ignoring him. I imagine everyone thought he was just “crazy.” But I don’t know. If I felt I was truly invisible, why wouldn’t I be dancing and singing, especially if no one sees me doing it? If anything, would I not be dancing and singing as a desperate way to get people’s attention, to, in other words, become visible? This is the impulse behind PERSONHOOD, in which we watch a once invisible Person become visible, and therefore gain their humanity.
HOUSE OF KAREN is, in many ways, my most personal play. Back in 2011, my mom moved out of the house in which she raised me and my sister. Since that time, she’s never been permanently settled. Through the years, she’s alternately stayed with different family members, always on temporary bases, and every time I talk to her she says, “I need to figure out what I want to do.” My mom is drifting around the world like a ghost, totally lost with no kids to raise and no house to maintain. In great frustration, I’ve called my mom “crazy,” because it hurts me to see my incredible mother in such pain that so often seems self-inflicted. And I don’t know what to do. So, to empathize with (i.e. contextualize) my mom, I wrote a play about the gig economy and the nomadic culture it fosters.
We are animals on a huge rock randomly floating through infinite space. We are all lost, alone, and desperate for company. Some are dismissed as “crazy,” and it is those very people that I want to welcome into my plays, to be greeted by the love of an audience, and suddenly to be endowed with purpose. I want to give the disenfranchised purpose. I can’t think of any better use of the theatre.