Masterbation Theatre Presents: “Speak the Speech Motherfuckers!”

I read somewhere that if you write down your goals they are more likely to materialize. So sometime in 2003 I wrote down my goal that I was going to put on a play in June 2004. I didn’t know how I was gonna do it, I had never put on a play before, but that’s what I wrote down.

Well in May of 2004 I found myself homeless sleeping in a parking lot in Downtown LA (I’m a career bum btw). I was conscious of the date approaching, but was ready to chalk it up to one more thing I said I was gonna do and didnt do.

I found out that it just so happened that the parking lot was behind the Downtown Playhouse Theatre. The guy who ran the theatre also lived in it, and he would jog past me every morning.

I noticed the theatre didn’t have anything scheduled for June. So with nothing to lose I started hounding him about me putting on a play there. At first he gave me the brush off like I was crazy. After all living downtown he had to be used to bums asking him for change, but this was a bit unique. But I was persistent. And finally just to get me off his back he said fine….He would give me the theatre for one night on a sunday (Fathers Day it happened to be) to put on a play. That was in a couple of weeks.

I thought “cool!”. I can put on a play, just like I wrote down I would! Then I realized my first problem: yes I had written down that I was gonna put on a play in June 2004….but I had forgotten to write down to actually WRITE A PLAY BY June 2004!

I had nothing….Well I did have this one thing. It was the first act of a play called “Masterbation Theatre Presents”. It was about a theatre class that I had sat in on a few years before. If I could get a few actors together I could write something for them. Because Im very good at writing for actors, and I could write quick and put it into the play, and at least I would have something to put on.

There were some people downtown that I knew were actors, so I asked them to be in the play….unfortunately they knew I was a BUM who slept in a parking lot, and most gave me the “he’s a nut” brush off. The working title of the play didn’t help either.

A couple of weeks went by and it was a Thursday. The play was to be on Sunday in a couple of days. I was sitting in a coffee shop reviewing the situation: I couldn’t find any actors to be in the play. And because I hadn’t found any actors I hadn’t written anything. the only thing left was to turn it into a one man play and star in it myself. But I still I had nothing really written.

Plus I had never acted on stage in anything in my life. This was gonna be my first time. And polls showed that “Public Speaking” was people’s greatest fear. Far ahead of being eaten by a shark, or meeting the guy from the Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the middle of the night alone on a dark deserted road. As I began to envision myself on the stage, sure enough I started to feel the deer in the headlights effect.

The reality started to hit me as well. There was no way this could possible turn out as anything but awful. If I go through with this I will be humiliated beyond belief…. I have to stop this. My philosophy was “If you can’t do something the best you can, then don’t do anything at all.” Right? I didn’t tell that many people I was gonna do this, so I could end it now without losing much face. Any disappointment I felt was completely over whelmed by the sense of relief that now came over me.

Then I had a epiphany…one of the strongest I ever felt in my life. “If I can’t do the best I can, then dont do nothing.”???

That’s just an excuse… That’s why I never accomplish anything in life. I just keep doing nothing. And I remembered the only times I ever accomplished anything in life, it was always half assed and by the skin of my teeth….so I thought “Fuck it….I’m gonna do this play.”

Before I hadn’t told that many people what I was doing. But now that I had decided to do it, I sent out a mass email inviting everyone I knew to the show. I printed up flyers and plastered the neighborhood with them giving the time and the place…all the while praying no one would actually show up.

Sunday night came. 13 people had actually showed up. I walked on to the stage and said:

“Hello…I’ve got nothing. But here it is.”

Then I went on to explain the whole story to them. How I lived in the parking lot behind the building, how I couldn’t get any actors and hadn’t written anything, but that I decided to do it anyway. From out of the audience I then got the first and last compliment of the night.

“Dude….you got guts.”

And so the play started. I had written out vague sketches of scenes on pieces of paper. I pulled people out of the audience and had them “perform” it on stage with me. It was awful. Humiliating. Far worse then I had imagined it would be. I never experienced such open end torture as being on that stage “performing” that “play”.

In what seemed like hours, I was stuck to that stage like a fly with a pin through it. More pins ran through me in the form of people leaving one after the other. All semblance of pride was being striped from me. When it was over there were 6 people out of the 13 left. I thanked each one individually as they left, cleaned up the theater, and slinked back into the parking lot for the night.

For the next several days I felt everyone was staring at me. Even though only 13 people were there, everywhere I walked I imagined I was surrounded by people who saw me humiliate myself on that stage. An unending number of eyes were always on me, and there was no escape.

I had believed that that level of humiliation would destroy me. However as the days passed I noticed the sun still rising. I was still breathing. I wasn't being annihilated. And as humiliating as the experience was, I began to gain confidence at the fact that I survived it. In fact I eventually decided to take my tolerance for humiliation to the next level: and make a movie.

Below is a videorecreation of the experience: