I was in Austin, Texas this weekend, and had the thrilling opportunity so see some theatre by the Rude Mechanicals, a fabulous experimental/political theatre company there.

Cherrywood is the name of a neighborhood in Austin--as far as I can tell, a neighborhood populated by brown folks, and not the folks who tend to inhabit the Governor's manse or own Dell computers.

The play's description doesn't do it justice, but it is at once a call to riot, a dream of a collective utopia, and a vision of the possibility of werewolves, all at a kick-ass housewarming party.

What I'm most interested in, though, is the idea of collective utopia that the play imagines. The basic gist is that there's a cocktail party throw by weirdos. Someone gets shot, but that's incidental. anyway, people get offered a chance at lycanthropy, and with it comes not only a certain invincibility (and a disdain for Abba) but also a chance to wish things into reality, including the option to not be a werewolf (I think).

Interestingly, feminist theatre critic Jill Dolan is on the board of directors for the Rudes, and the correlation between this vision of a resitant utopian collective seems right in keeping with her work on utopian performatives. Utopian performatives are not precisely a model for what should happen on stage, but for how what happens on stage should feel like, its experiential element for the audience, one that resists hierarchy, encourages community, and in its very definition, imagines human interaction as it should exist, but not as it does in the world at large or has in the recent past.

What I like about this is that it suggests that theatre critics are not merely parasites who feed off of "real" artists. This is a case of theory inspiring praxis, which I suspect happens a lot, but it's nice to see it in action, and in such a damn funny play--one that imagines a radical alternative utopia just down the street from the current president's last known address.

Plus I almost got a grown man in very tight biker's shorts to sit on my lap and sing some Modern English. What could be better theatre than that?