“(a play in a) DARK ROOM” is a queer psychological-thriller premiering at Colchester Fringe and the Alma Tavern & Theatre next month. It is the follow-up show to Dr.Pant’s critically acclaimed and controversial comedy (of sorts) Pup Play, which you can read our interview about here. In this show, Davis the Janitor cleans up all sorts of bodily fluids at his night job in a dark room. Piss, cum, shit, vomit, poppers — no stain can scare off Davis, the self-proclaimed “pig of pigs”… until a lingering violent threat forces Davis to confront the only stain he cannot clean. “(a play in a) DARK ROOM” is an intense, disturbing, often funny, and unapologetically messy exploration of queerness. The show blends autotheory, multimedia visuals, dynamic movement, and an original electronic score to challenge respectability politics, confront trauma, and find hope. It is on October 30th and November 1st at Colchester Fringe before transferring to the Alma Tavern & Theatre in Bristol on November 4th. Paul Levy asks Dr.Pant’s a few questions about his controversial, messy, and provocative work.
PL: You describe Davis as someone who is comfortable with who he is, yet you place him inside a story about trauma. What interested you about exploring trauma through someone who is not searching for an identity?
NAP: A central point of my work is that I try to avoid queer characters who are not fully out. That story has been told a million times over. I want to see more stories on stage about characters living in their queerness, particularly when that queerness is as messy, weird, contradictory, fluid, and different as mine. Davis in this story is proud of his self-proclaimed title — “THE PIG OF PIGS!” Can you tell me the last character on stage which boldly expressed his love for the piss pool? Probably not. Davis is unapologetically proud of who he is. His identity is not a tempered or safe version of his queerness. As he says at the start: “I hope that makes you uncomfortable.”
What interests me is what comes after someone makes that proclamation and asserts that identity. That’s the real messy drama that I think we’re often afraid as queer theatremakers to discuss. In my previous play Pup Play, Professor Handler David asserted a cruel reality: If you are queer, you put yourself in danger, knowingly or not. You will at some point be presented with the choice to be yourself in spite of that fear or to run back into the closet. Neither choice makes you safe but one frees you. Only in standing defiant to death itself do we change our world for the better. DARK ROOM goes further: what happens when someone makes that choice and the worst does happen. How does our community survive in spite of our scars and stains? Does our community have a future?
PL: You use the word “messy” positively in describing the play. What can messiness reveal that a carefully constructed piece of queer theatre might conceal?
NAP: The play is literally messy. There is a piss pool after all along with many other bodily fluids. By the end of the show, I will be a mess. ‘Messy’ does not mean my play is not carefully constructed. The play has a clear structure, it has been rehearsed and workshopped to hell and back, and will continue to be developed over time. The messiness is the literal gross questions the play asks.
Abstractly, I think messiness is important to queer theatre. There should not be clean answers. That’s ingenuine. Too much polish and reassurance and it loses its realness. I’m not interested in those clean answers of “be yourself” and “love is love.” I want to interrogate that. I do believe those statements are true, but they must be explored with messy nuance, not cheap slogans.
PL: Your PhD asks how kink and fetish can actually be staged. What have you discovered that could only be learned in a theatre rather than argued in an academic thesis?
NAP: Academia is where we theorize. Theatre is where we practice and live. In my academic work, I theorize what and how the world should be. In my plays, I write characters which live those theories. So in that way, they co-exist with one another. That’s what I’ve discovered. Theatre is a place where we experiment and test the theories put forward and imagine what the world could be.
PL: Autotheory deliberately blurs lived experience and intellectual argument. Is there a point in DARK ROOM where you want the audience to stop knowing whether they are watching theory, autobiography or fiction?
There are several points. Unlike Pup Play, Davis’ journey leans more into fiction. That said, not all of it is and some of the scenes are word for word quotations from my life. His experiences are reflections of real-world incidents and events. The goal of the autotheory is to have the audience contend with how they define truth. In blurring these lines, I think you have more artistic control. Everything the play says is true but what it means to be true is for the audience to decide.
PL: Davis cleans up disgusting things for a living. Why a janitor? What does cleaning allow you to say about bodies, shame and what society would rather have removed from sight?
NAP: Davis cares for his community. That’s why he cleans. It is his act of caring for his community. Davis has a special gift of being able to look at filth and find joy in it. Where you see vomit, he sees love. At least, he used to. The play is about him rediscovering his ability to look past the filth and see what it promises. Davis does not clean to hide his community, he cleans to care for it, so that they can continue to be filthy.
PL: Trauma on stage can easily become spectacle. Where did you draw the line between making the audience encounter Davis’s trauma and exploiting it theatrically?
NAP: Because the show is one-person, the trauma is always centered on the person experiencing it. The actual central act of violence is never shown during the show. What is explored is his fear, his anxiety, his dreams and nightmares. I do not need to show Davis being hurt, which would just be exploitation. I need to show how the pain has affected his mental health and emotions in the aftermath. As a writer, I’m carefully trying to find the balance between authenticity and shock. Am I describing this to upset the audience with horrifying details or because Davis needs to communicate something? When Davis discusses his scars, he keeps the dialogue blunt and to the point.
PL: You are interested in queer utopianism, yet this sounds like a play that spends considerable time somewhere painful and uncomfortable. Where can utopia exist inside a dark room?
NAP: Utopia, as explained by theorist like Jose Esteban Munoz, is something which we glimpse. It is transient and limited by our present. Queer spaces let us see beyond our present and imagine a world better than today. Dark Rooms are one of these spaces. Only by being lost in the darkness, we find the red light. I believe by going through these painful and uncomfortable places we catch a glimpse at what our world should be.
Part of Davis’ journey is that he’s lost his ability to imagine a better world because of his hate and fear. All he can see is the stains of today. He has to find his hope once again, despite his scars.
PL: Pup Play repeatedly destabilised its theatrical form because David himself was unstable in his understanding of who he was. If Davis already knows himself, what becomes unstable instead?
NAP: David’s understanding of himself was unstable because it was contradictory, not necessarily because he didn’t know who he was. He knows he’s David – a pup, professor, a handler. How can these contradictions co-exist in a world which does not recognize them and makes him fearful? David is lonely and desperately looking for someone’s approval, to look him in the eyes and see him for who he is. It’s an academic and introspective exploration of asserting identity.
Davis is more pragmatic. He’s content with who he is and what his job entails. He begins where David ends — I am who I am and that’s good enough. “If I am myself, the rest then follows.” However, Davis’ instability is that his self is wounded. The self he knew is terrorized by a scar which refuses to go away. That scar is infecting him, turning him hateful and angry, instead of the kind person he once was. He is trying to return to his prior self but his wounds will not let him.
PL: After Pup Play, you encountered torn-down posters, threats, hostile emails and attempts to restrict how the work was promoted. Has that experience changed anything you put on stage, or only strengthened your refusal to change it?
NAP: Strengthened my refusal. Pup Play showed to me that the people who acted hostile to my work are stupid and ignorant. They assume what my show is but dare not look in the eye. Pup Play never needs to change because its true. You can hate it all you want but my pack of pups are not going anywhere. I should never have to censor my work or my identity. Anyone who asks me to do so is wrong.
And I think ironically, DARK ROOM is going to have less hate against it. And it’s very ironic, considering DARK ROOM makes Pup Play look like family entertainment. And if you’ve seen Pup Play, know that I do not mean that lightly. But because DARK ROOM does not feature a pup hood on its marketing poster, it will likely have less hatred directed at it. Hell, the act of getting it produced has been a breeze compared to Pup Play. Now that said, I’m saying this well before the October marketing push, so I guess we’ll see what happens.
PL: There is an interesting danger in making “unapologetic queerness” itself into a principle. Can being unapologetic ever become another expectation that queer people are required to perform?
NAP: I don’t think being unapologetically queer is ever a danger when it comes to our identity. As long as certain principals underlie that: love, empathy, care, truth, safe, sane, and consensual. Unapologetic does not mean an unwillingness to change or ignorance, it means not having to excuse and hide what makes us different. I often find that when people are apologetic, or don’t wish to be seen, it’s because of an underlying self-loathing or fear of others. We deserve to live our lives as we are. Why must I apologize for being who I am? I need to apologize for being a pretentious asshole, not different.
PL: David, Davis and eventually Dave are deliberately linked versions of a name. Are these three genuinely separate people, or are you constructing three different ways of looking at the same queer self?
NAP: They are separate people. David is referenced in Dark Room in passing which implies they all live in the same world. Dave, who you reference, is from the planned third piece Sir (For the Enthusiast) which is still in very early development.
What connects these three characters is exactly what you said, they’re all different ways at looking at the same queer self. They’re all asking the same questions about how we are “unapologetically queer” but through their own lens. David is education. Davis is care. Dave is connection. They deal with the same issues of hate and violence but do so through their unique expression of self. My hope is for the works to all feel different in form but all arrive at the same answer.
PL: Suppose someone leaves DARK ROOM deeply uncomfortable and strongly opposed to something the play has shown them. What would make that response interesting to you rather than simply hostile?
NAP: I think being made uncomfortable is a good thing! If my work makes you uncomfortable, that means something about it is fundamentally challenging your world view. It’s asking you to do something which might not be easy, to be aware of your complicity to homophobia, or come to terms with the real world.
I like when people disagree with me. I don’t expect them to agree with me. We don’t change the world by trying not to offend or make anyone uncomfortable. Not everyone is going to like my work. For every award I win, sell-out show, and standing ovation, I get a two star review that comes along with it. That’s fine, so long as you seriously engage with my work.
The problem is when they disagree with me they call me a disgrace to queer activism who should kill himself. Don’t tell me you “didn’t see the point”, because the point is very blunt, tell me why you refuse to engage with the point or why you think the point is wrong. It’s easier to be hostile or dismissive than to challenge my views or to admit they might be wrong. If you disagree with me, tell me. Let’s have a coffee and talk it over. That said, I expect to be treated like a human being and with empathy. At the end of the day, even if we disagree, we deserve to live our lives as we live our lives. Write your own damn show if you got a problem with mine. Show me how it’s done.
(a play in a) DARK ROOM is on October 30th and November 1st at Colchester Fringe before transferring to the Alma Tavern & Theatre in Bristol on November 4th.
Please follow @pantsoffproductions on Instagram and Facebook
