The Brooklyn Rail

In 2020, playwright Will Arbery led an online class about the folders on his desktop. The dozen of them had simple titles: Plays, TV, Taxes. One read MFA Work. Another was just Work.

“It’s a landscape that we don’t necessarily talk about that much,” he said. “It’s a land that often frustrates me; I’ve tried to make it a space where I can find some level of beauty and silence and hope.”

He did so by making it his version of a comfortable office, which became easier once he learned you can personalize folder icon images. “I realized that that blue [folder] image was tormenting me,” he said. “Why would I ever want to open those up and engage with them?”

After customizing and organizing this digital workspace, he shared his screen, opened his folders, and walked viewers through thousands of kilobytes, hundreds of drafts, and “so, so, many applications—most of them resulting in rejections,” he said. “I don’t even want to get into it.”

Arbery’s class was by no means a play; nonetheless, his amusing and vulnerable plunge into sub-sub-subfolders that exposed increasingly granular elements of process took on a performative quality. This year, two new works—Admin Reveal: An Evening with Miss Lady Salad and The Following Evening—similarly channel a spirit of process-sharing, but boldly do so as an explicit performance. By gently theatricalizing labor that is often unseen, and unpaid, these works offer up artmaking as art itself. Evincing our deeply human need to experiment and play, these works also defy a theater industry, and marketplace at large, that prioritizes sellable, “finished” products.

Shawn Escarciga’s Admin Reveal, presented as part of the Exponential Festival at Brick Aux from January 25–27, mirrored Arbery’s screen sharing; during their show, Escarciga projected folders—Mental Health, Gay Stuff, Politics—containing hundreds of memes created for their Instagram account, @missladysalad, a hotbed of progressive political commentary with an uncompromising satirical slant. One mid-show meme featured Escarciga’s face—which, alongside high-power Democrats, a vampire-toothed cat, and The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, is one of the more popular motifs on their page—but their visage was a bit more manipulated than in other posts.

The image depicted Escarciga with many pairs of eyes popping out of facial areas beyond the expected sockets. It was goofy and grotesque, the way queer memes can be: distorted, embellished, freak-ified.

“I submitted this one to an artist residency,” Escarciga told their audience. “I didn’t get it.”

This passing comment shined a black light on the corrosive and distinctly American culture in which, under capitalism, and especially for artists, scarcity dominates abundance. This rat race for resources breeds a self-eating ecosystem, drying the twigs for Escarciga’s digital kindling—their memes frequently feature fiery hellscapes.

Ercarciga’s thousands of memes, shared daily for @missladysalad’s 16,000 followers, are often batshit, stinging, and wildly upset with the current State Of Things—not that they voice their disillusion in a direct manner. Escarciga’s Miss Lady Salad is a character, after all.

One recent post features Escarciga’s ecstatic face photoshopped atop three hairless, broad-shouldered, gleaming torsos as hundreds of shirtless white men dance in the background on what appears to be a cruise ship engulfed in flames. The caption is also sunny, and manic, in its dystopia: “I am HONORED to be the recipient of the first EVER Pelosi Prize for Aspiring Oligarchs!!! Fricckkkkkkkk!!!” it reads. “Nancy even made the call and started talking about ancient aliens being the reason the youth hate America Haha. So true bestie!!! As part of my award, I get to light a piece of ocean trash on fire (then feed it to a shark).”

Such ironic rhetoric was also a part of Admin Reveal. Opening their show (or meme boot camp? peek behind the curtain? unscripted one-person play?), Escarciga soberly noted that 2024 has already been a dark and challenging time, and so it’s important that we hold grace, and nuance, for—they then pause for dramatic effect—“cis white gay landlords.”

Escarciga’s politic is clear, even if packaged in prickly ribbon. Creating these memes, a process that took flight during the pandemic, Escarciga said, “kept me sane.”

And yet, to some, the exaggerated world of Escarciga’s Instagram page—which may feature, in a single meme, Joe Biden looking upward with promise as a muscly Shrek in a Betsy Ross-inspired singlet farts onto Taylor Swift atop a bed of beans with text in Comic Sans font reading, “Incremental change will safe us”—might seem like the opposite of sanity.

Through an unshrouded performance in Admin Reveal, one not behind a screen but accountable to humans in a shared space, Escarciga unveils the pixels that make a post, the posts that make a page, and the page that informs a perspective. Aware or not of the person behind the account, users repurpose @missladysalad’s memes each day. Escarciga’s work, then, is creating gifts: free, sharable content one internet admin oversees for followers’ enjoyment, pondering, or bereavement.

Toward the end of Admin Reveal, after a roller coaster ride of so many memes their absorption echoed the dizzying-numbing sensation of scrolling through social media in the period between getting into bed and falling asleep, Escarciga shared one final image. It may be a familiar one: co-created for ACT UP and Jewish Voice for Peace, Escarciga’s image was the inverted, Silence=Death pink triangle with a green base and black “seeds” to evoke a watermelon, a pro-Palestine symbol. The image connotes there is no liberation, queer or otherwise, without Palestinian liberation.

By sharing the image on their account, “This isn’t mine anymore,” Escarciga said. “And I don’t want it to be.”

The Following Evening is also a gift; the billing for this play, now running at PAC NYC through February 18, is “created by 600 Highwaymen for Talking Band.” Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, who are 600 Highwaymen and also a couple, made the play for another experimental theater pair twice their age, Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet, founding members of Talking Band.

The Following Evening features no screen-sharing or desktop folders but is its own excavation of process: all four artists perform in the show as slightly fictionalized versions of themselves. Some scenes are fragments of rehearsals for this very play, written and directed by Browde and Silverstone (which means Browde and Silverstone indeed interrupt Maddow and Zimet’s scenes to write and direct them). Other scenes amongst the pairs are vignettes of seemingly nugatory life events—a car ride, a bike accident, a show’s closing night. These feature mundane dialogue about the certain ephemerality and possible impact of performances shared across a lifetime.

Coming home after one unnamed performance from her long career, Maddow gripes, “And after all that the Times doesn’t come. And so now it’s like, did it even happen.”

For theatermakers who are married to an art form and each other, the line between creation and domesticity is indecipherable. At-home conversations propel future art, that art sometimes begets praise, and the praise, partially, fuels further conversations.

“Did you read that note,” Maddow asks her husband, “that someone left at the box office?”

It was a thoughtful note from an audience member: “The show changed the rest of my day, and how I was thinking about each conversation I had after that. The feeling lasted all week.”

“He could have sent an email,” Maddow says, “but he didn’t.”

Not all works elicit good reviews, a kindly audience reaction, or even an audience’s consideration by the following evening. There’s always another show to see. In one musical interlude, Maddow sits at the piano and is both reminiscent and existential: “All of us drinking the air, sleeping with mats in our hair,” she sings. “Finding the course, failing and worse. Don’t know, did anyone care.”

But Talking Band cared. And, by listening to their creative foreparents, so did 600 Highwaymen.

The lives of these creative couples may be viewed as a series of unpaid conversations, not even tax-deductible ones, that generated art. To express this more plainly, compensation for theatermaking can be seen as an iceberg: payment comes for the product, visible above the water’s surface, but the years of process remain largely unseen, uncompensated. Networking is process. Edits are process. Emailing, lunches, and commission-applying are process. Bemoaning all of this as process is process.

As Browde told The New York Times while discussing her current show and career, the city is “not doing great at holding on to theater artists.” She added, “We work in theater, so of course I think that things that are fleeting are beautiful, but also there’s something lost when each generation just is like lemmings off the cliff.”

Somehow, community persists, whether it’s between an admin and their followers or generations of theatermakers. Through Admin Reveal and The Following Evening, Escarciga, Browde, and Silverstone offer a window into their conversations so that they might inform our own—in how we appreciate, contextualize, and engage with art.

That deconstructs the producer-consumer relationship, one defined by transaction, and makes our connection to one another more intentional. Gratitude for theatrical experiences like these, that so magnanimously unearth how gifts are shared, might take the form of more conversations. This may not upend a broken economic system overnight, but it will facilitate an environment of conversations, responses, and dropped-off-at-the-box-office letters as continuously shared gifts—a system as unflinching, open-hearted, and sustained as any life dedicated to theater.