Show Response: Open Mic Night
by kanishk pandey, https://kanishkpandey.com/
Here is your day. You start it early to make it to an allergy shot appointment. You do this weekly to one day not suffer at the hands of everything. You schedule these early so that you can go to work unbothered. You go in. You get the shot. You leave for work. Yet, at one point, you notice an itchiness beginning to spread across your arm. Strange. A look down reveals a set of hives traveling down from your shots. Shit. You’re now in urgent care, where they’ve given you Benadryl and Prednisone, which relieve your hives but make you feel insane since it’s mixing a drowsy medication with something that sets your brain on fire. The doctor lets you know you luckily caught it before it progressed to anaphylaxis. Sick. Done being so close to death, you walk back to work alone.
Your day goes on. As if it never began, the work day is done. You stepped through it solo, dragging your feet to see if it speeds things up. But your day isn’t done. A friend invited you weeks ago to come see a show. You agreed and now you can’t say no - and you don’t particularly want to say no either. So you take the train into Manhattan, walk 20 minutes from the station rather than transfer, and end up at Performance Space New York, where you head to the fourth floor. You wave hi to your friends, who’ve arrived already, take your seat, and settle in.
Open Mic Night then begins. The show is by Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey. The two are also the only performers. The show begins with a simple ode to a space long gone, an illegal DIY venue that has now disappeared. It was where the duo met each other. Mounsey performed poetry, and Weiss performed stand-up. Mounsey tells all of this to you, and the rest of the audience, simply and quietly, stating it all as fact before Weiss enters onstage to hang a light and take his place for most of the performance. Suddenly, the lights change, from performance to as if it’s time to go. You are now within the show, as Weiss points at audience members asking preference questions, then stomps into the stands to hand the microphone to others for more detailed questions, then finally takes a few people onstage to give shoutouts to their friends before they’re shuffled back to their seats. All in the effort to get to know everyone better. Weiss claims that he needs to do this since he gets anxious on stage. You are asked, at one point, to pick between a tough cookie and a soft slice of cake. You know which you picked. It’s an onslaught of questions, tone shifts, intermixed with abrasive sound cues, that lead you, and the audience around you, to laugh the whole way through, as if your stomach is about to burst.
And then the tone shifts. Weiss now announces he’s tired of playing this character, and shifts into sincerity. You, and the audience, now find yourselves back at the beginning, when Mounsey first mentioned the long lost venue where the two met. Weiss recounts the feeling of loss, and recites everything he will remember to keep that space alive. And suddenly, you are very much in contact with the grief being expressed by this piece. You’ve never been to that venue. Yet, you’ve been in contact with people. And there’s a central concept suddenly fully clear - that, in the space of performance, where unique experiences are created rather than simply refurbished for consumption, a performer may stand alone on stage. But the whole experience is filled with other people. There is no loneliness, and even with the vicious entropy of time and money that swallows spaces and people and words, the collective within a performance experience will ensure everything to live on in memory. Even now, you find yourself with the memory of this venue now imprinted into your being. In the face of a world where things meant to help you may kill you, and where small spaces are so quickly devoured by massive real estate firms, there is still the unique theatrical experience where you can be not alone, for even just an hour and change, and feel fulfilled by the presence of other human beings, alive despite it all, together despite it all.
Weiss and Mounsey both accuse each other of having an addiction for performance. Despite sporting all the signs of discomfort with the setting, they nonetheless perform. Yet, perhaps that addiction is not to performance per se - but to the people and the connection inherent to the practice. Even in the most negative of settings, no one is truly alone in the world of live performance.
The show ends. You step out onto First Avenue. You face the cold. And the day suddenly feels worth it. You can go home or out, renewed again. You weren’t alone for a moment, and, at some point in the future, you won’t be alone again.
Open Mic Night ran from January 5th to January 18th, 2024 at Performance Space New York as part of Under The Radar
Photo by Walter Włodarczyk