Warrior Needs Food, Badly

Our 2005 show Camelot is Crumbling left me more emotionally exhausted than any other show we've done. I'm a great believer in taking responsibility for my own work, and that if a show of mine is poorly received, I'm at least partly to blame for it -- but the fact remains that I had invested a tremendous amount of myself in a project that ended up generating low audience numbers and active hostility from a number of critics.

When 2006 rolled around, I had no desire to undertake something so ambitious again so soon -- our first two shows suffered largely from their scope exceeding their venues, both essentially being sprawling epics crammed into an hour-long Fringe slot -- so I began flipping through my piles of unfinished scripts, now looking for any short-form work I'd done -- outlines for ten-minute plays, half-finished sketches, rants from my blog at the time. What I found was that my short-form stuff was divided into two categories: political satire and pop-culture parodies. The former became Libertarian Rage. The latter became Warrior Needs Food, Badly.

Libertarian Rage ended up being another exhausting project, too, though for different reasons -- that it was (unsurprisingly) a show riddled with so much negativity: a lot of my anger about our last project, and how we regard our entertainment, found its way into the production, but mostly the script was just my way of laughing bitterly at a system that I felt completely shut out of.

In a weird way, I regard the two shows as having a symbiotic relationship: they're both sketch comedy showcases, for one thing, but it's deeper than that -- that the jaded cynicism of Rage felt to me to be in diametric opposition to the wide-eyed optimism of Warrior. If Rage was a play about everything I hated about America, then in some sense Warrior was a love letter to the country of my birth. And all the things I love about it! Its hyperactive desire to entertain; the way so many cultures are blended together, while still maintaining their own distinct identities and qualities.

Lokasenna was based on Scandinavian mythology, Camelot on British. But in 2006, we devoted two shows to exploring that mythology which is uniquely American.

I doubt that anyone thinks that deeply about it, when they're watching the two of us running around and bumping into each other. But on some level, that's what it means to me.