The Soapbox Play

Everyone did them

After 9/11

The Soapbox Play

Suddenly the world was different

Not just because we were fighting terrorists

But because suddenly every playwright

Was an expert on foreign policy

And Eastern religion

All of them had the same theme:

The President is an asshole

Muslims are great people

And 9/11 wasn’t really 9/11

It was something else

It was a symbol

It was a metaphor

It was a paradigm shift

Well, I mean, it was that

It was also planes flying into buildings

I mean, we saw them

I saw them

I was just seventeen

And I saw my whole future

Just change, you know?

Like, whatever it was going to be

Regardless of what it was going to be

Now it was going to be something different

Fuck, I’m not here to tell you about 9/11

Jesus, who wants to hear about that?

Thank God they stopped writing plays about it

Or at least, plays that people actually feel obligated to see

I graduated from high school

And got a role at the Orpheus Theater

In one of those soapbox plays

That I won’t even say the name of

Because you shouldn’t even look it up

It’s that terrible

And, you know, this really has nothing to do with my politics

Because I’m not liberal or conservative or anything

I was born in the 90’s

So I vote for whoever’s going to let me smoke pot

And not the tax the shit out of me

The thing about that play that drove me nuts

Was—we’re up there, supposedly in character

But really, just facsimiles of these, like, ideas

About, you know, terrorism and shit

And the audience is nodding at us

Like, Hmm, yes, that is true

War is bad

And I’m thinking—

I know kids in war

Like, I have friends

Who went to war

None of you fuckers have kids in the war

Because if you did

You wouldn’t be sitting in some air-conditioned theater

Listening to some British playwright

Lecture you on how awful you are

Because people who have kids in the war

Aren’t really concerned with politics

Or theater

Or any of that shit

They’re just concerned with their kids not dying

If they vote Republican, it’s because the Republicans are telling them

They’ll stop their kids from dying

If they vote Democrat

It’s for the same reason

If they’re sitting in a theater

Nodding nodding nodding

At the bullshit they’re being fed

So they can go back to their East Side apartments

And regurgitate it

Into each other’s mouths

Like fucking baby birds

Then no

They do not

Have kids

In the war

THE war—God, listen to me

Fuck

I mean, we were preaching to the choir, you know?

What’s the point?

We should have done that show in Georgia

Alabama

Arkansas

Then we would have been making an impact

We also would have gotten our asses kicked

But oh well, right?

Isn’t that better than doing theater

For the nodders?

For the ‘Yes, we agree and we feel so guilty for being rich’ crowd?

I mean, that’s not theater, right?

You wouldn’t call that theater

Man, I was glad to get off that fucking soapbox

At all those people

Paying money

To tell them

That they should be feeling guilty

About all the things

They were already feeling guilty about

I felt like saying—

‘There’s so much to feel guilty about that you don’t even know about.

That we all don’t even know about’

You know?

Nah, you don’t know

How could you right?

How could you?