Popination Competition
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Meow Wolf.
Hear me out. Also, I know it’s not an exact rhyme, but I just felt like it was too appropriate and close enough. You’ll see what I mean.
A couple weeks ago, on a Tuesday, I competed in the inaugural Drop your Shorts comedy contest event, which took place at Meow Wolf in Denver, in their lovely little performance space. I say ‘little,’ but it’s actually a nice mid-size—pretty sure there were about 200 people in that audience, including the participants. I had submitted 2 of my 10-minute plays I’d written for erstwhile 24-hr theatre festivals and one of them was accepted as a finalist, to be produced at Drop Your Shorts to hopefully win one of three prizes.
And so, once selected, it was up to me to figure out a way to cast, direct, and dress it in a way that it would show up as a well-produced short, worthy of competition amid many well-known Colorado talents when the time came.1 And so I took the directing task on myself, cast myself as one of the two characters, and a friend as the other, held a couple rehearsals at The Clocktower and one full dress rehearsal as part of our March Blue Dime Cabaret show. We found appropriate costumes in our own closets and a park bench on my co-actor’s own porch, and the rest was history. Er, theatre. You know what I mean.
But Meow Wolf is not a pub!
Well, no, but it has some little bars. They’re concession stands, sure, but I’ve counted concession stands as Popinations before: here, and here to name a couple.
But. Why Meow Wolf? Why not the Clocktower again?
One of my 10 minute one-act plays was selected to compete in the inaugural ‘Drop Your Shorts’ play festival which will take place in March over at the stage space in Denver’s Meow Wolf museum. What does this have to do with the Clocktower? The showrunners for Drop Your Shorts are its owners. I guess they had originally wanted to host Drop Your Shorts in the Clocktower, but wanted to have a bigger audience than the snug speakeasy can contain. And so we met, playwrights, actors, directors, and showrunners, to Q & A, chat logistics, plan rehearsals, and all around get to know each other.
When it came time to perform for realsies, I was more excited than nervous, though it’s true that the addition of it being not just a one-act festival but a competition did sort of hone an extra edge on my anticipation. Seeing Colorado regulars of the theatre biz made me both reassured I belonged there as one of the great local talents myself, and also a little pressured. My roles as casting director for my variety show as well as in charge of this play mostly, made me forget a bit how many of my peers are just as good at some of this stuff as me.
And so, having sound-and-light-checked, and learning that our play was going up 4th which was right after a 10-minute intermission, I decided to take my audience seat with a (hopefully) relaxing pint until it was time for me to change and get into places.
Theatre? I hardly know her.
Each play I was able to see (and even the one I peeped from the backstage monitor) was fantastic. There were no duds, no weak offerings, though one or two did fall slightly short of the rest. But none were anything but wildly entertaining.
Which made me perplexed as to my continued impostor syndrome, which did flare up ever so slightly, halfway through: WHY DO I HAVE THIS SYNDROME AT AGE 53, AND WITH MY RESUME? HMM?! WHY???
I won’t go further into this, as I have written about my journey in and (almost) through impostor syndrome in the ‘mess’ays below, though I must say that I’ve gotten so very much better about it, even since the progress I relate in these Musings:
There’s something magical about the feeling of standing just in the wings, positioned for a stage entrance. Lighting is dim to nil, costume is donned, stage action sounds echo through the air…2 It’s one of those limbic states where the world hangs suspended in time, and anticipation becomes breathless euphoria. I remember one evening at CSF3, in the wings of the outdoor stage (‘Shakespeare under the stars…’), breathing in the summer air, scoping the lighting truss, I scanned as much of the audience as I could see through the crack in the flats, and I thought, ‘There is nothing like this. I will never forget this.’ And I haven’t. That moment appears in varying versions in my dreams pretty often, too.
Today’s Blue Dime Cabaret stage is so exposed that I don’t really have those moments anymore; more of a motherly love for the acts I cast and watch from the audience. There’s no real backstage space to speak of, certainly no beautifully dim wings to wait in. But that’s fine too—those shows are indeed a different sort of monster and my multiple roles in them require my onstage and offstage presence to be much more malleable and liquid and nearly simultaneous.
My basic impressions of Meow Wolf? Ehh. Not sure. I’m not interested at all in trying to experience the museum part, that’s for sure: it smacks of over-stimulation to me, big time. Not that I’m neurodivergent (that I know of), but maybe it’s just an age thing, that I’d much rather spend quiet time with classical art or sparkly natural history, more than a moving and digitally neon immersive warehouse of intrusive actors and too-bright light. Yeah, I guess I really am too old for this shit, aren’t I.
I can appreciate, though, the premise, even though it’s not for me. And as far as immersive theatre goes, I do hear that it’s a pretty decent place to get a paying job as a performer: many of my former theatre students from [UNIVERSITY NAME REDACTED] ended up getting cast as several walkaround actors, and seemed to be making some decent cash at it. And yet again, I have also heard rumors that said performers had been shorted their pay, or fired, or any number of such things that happen to performers who dare to ask for pay for their work. So. /shrug/
It’s funny—I’ve been Musing personally upon the ‘immersive’ theatre trend that’s been so big the past few years, and wondering why I don’t dig gigs like that. Mainly because it takes real serious talent and often sky-high levels of tech to actually pull off a compelling ‘experience’ like that. Like, it needs to be brilliantly written and acted if a found environment is used, or it needs that plus phenomenal (and expensive) tech to build the world competently, let alone completely.
Why immersive experiences instead of plays? And why a pageantlike ‘experience’ instead of a variety show? Why immersive theatre instead of, say, Cirque du Soleil? Do audiences have such big heads that they need to be part of the show, not just an observer of it? Actually, in this day and age, where everyone on social media is required to be an influencer, I wonder whether I haven’t hit on something. It’s no longer the Age of Aquarius, it’s the Age of the Entitled. (Okay now I really sound old…)
More importantly: is immersive theatre dead yet? And almost as I type this, the Onstage Colorado podcast is asking some of the same questions, so I guess my cynicism isn’t really cynicism after all, but a veteran artist’s seasoned observation. At least I’d like it to be that and not Old Person Shakes Fist At Cloud…
All in all, it was a win just to get in,4 and though we won nothing but a banana as a consolation prize, it was still a huge treat to be a part of Drop Your Shorts. Plus, Will is a filmmaker and wants to make a short film out of my play. We’re planning on shooting it in April. Should be great—I’ll keep you informed.
Then again, an outdoor matinee is another scene. Literally. Ahem.
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, in Boulder in the summer on the Mary Rippon outdoor stage (usually). I have some bitter feelings towards it, but I would also highly recommend adding it to any Boulder tourist’s itinerary. I can feel both things at once.
#bars