Julia Mounsey in Open Mic Night. Photo: Ian Faria

I’m going to come right out and say that certain kinds of audience participation made me panicky long before I became a theater critic. Experiential/ environmental theater, where each audience member moves through the performance on an individual journey? Totally my cup of tea. A performer getting the whole audience out of their chairs onto the floor? Right there with you. (Yes, all of these things get awkward when you’re trying to take notes, but happy to run with it.) But the minute a performer wants to engage me, just me, directly; the minute my words and thoughts become something the audience is meant to hear–instant desire to crawl under my chair. Which is weird in its own way–I’ve been a teacher and I’ve given countless presentations and I may be the only person in the history of off-off-Broadway theater who truly didn’t hate giving curtain speeches. But something about being asked to cross that liminal boundary between audience and performer on the spot and on the fly has always made me intensely anxious, and being at a show in critic mode has only made that worse.

So you can see where a show called Open Mic Night, a show that bills itself as a “pressure cooker of tension, risk, and awkward engagement,” would be both intriguing and terrifying to me. Creators Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey work at the boundary between autobiography and fiction, or storytelling and acting, and what, after all, is an open mic night but an invitation to stand on that boundary? 

In a tiny space with two banks of audience members facing each other across the narrow stage, Julia sets herself up at a laptop and kicks off the piece with a reminiscence of how she and Peter met, at a never-named, never-legal experimental theater venue in a New York that almost no longer exists. (Since the specific venue itself is imaginary, I’m drawing a distinction between “Julia” and “Peter” the “characters” who perform the piece and Mounsey and Mills Weiss, its creators.) She was a poet, and he was trying stand-up, she says. He was terrible at it; he never got past crowd work. 

In the DIY spirit of such a space, then, Peter enters, sets up a ladder, hangs a lighting instrument, focuses it, and takes his place on the opposite side of the playing area, facing Mounsey, with a mike. (Hanging and focusing the light was just a bit of business, it seems; this section of the piece occurs under blaring fluorescent house lights.)He starts doing–you guessed it–crowd work, mostly at first asking audience members a series of snap either/or questions that gradually tend toward the philosophical. He talks to the crowd; Julia coolly looks on, judging and guiding his performance. It starts to become a little clinical, though it’s hard to say whether it’s the audience or Peter who’s under the microscope. The audience is asked to raise hands to a series of questions about how much money they make and–in a moment that feels like the intercession of Mounsey and Mills Weiss rather than the Julia and Peter who inhabit the playworld–they ask those who leave their hands up the longest to donate money to Under the Radar on the spot with Venmo.

But the part that made me the most uncomfortable, but which also I can’t stop thinking about, is when Peter started asking audience members to give shout-outs to specific friends–the first few from their seats, the last few to actually come on stage. In the slightly abrasive persona of a mediocre-to-poor standup, while being guided and judged by Julia the arbiter, Peter is asking for an act of radical sincerity. The show, at this point, isn’t itself at all sincere; it’s a performance evoking a “scene” that never really was, and reminding us how puzzling and uncomfortable those scenes can be. But the audience members called upon in this segment are asked to reveal something true, something positive, and something that speaks to the social web in which they are enmeshed. It’s something that sits a little uneasily in a frame of inept standup–I kept anxiously waiting for that vulnerability to be exploited, and was relieved every time when it wasn’t. 

Because the other side of the wholehearted chaos that is an underground experimental theater scene is a deeply passionate, deeply social web–the lack of air conditioning and the broken folding chairs and the six clip lights and the “donation gets you a cheap canned beer” policy that Julia and Peter describe are all accurate, but they’re not the point. The point is equally the work and the people you do it with. 

The last part of the piece, where Peter delivers an elegy to the space–but only after contextualizing the way that an elegy comprises equal parts grief and nostalgia–starts to acknowledge that dynamic. It’s a tough balance: Delivering an elegy to your own youth and its lost dreams while simultaneously mocking the inevitability of an elegy getting mired in nostalgia’s tendency to sand down the past. Framing all of the above in a way that interrogates the process of making that kind of art in the first place. Trying to remember what was real, what was meaningful, in a way without sentiment.

I’m not sure it hits the balance, exactly. Sometimes it felt so intensely private that I’m not sure whether in the end, the audience for this piece is actually the people in the room watching it; sometimes it felt like it was playing at a lightly casual cruelty that is every artist’s internal dialogue with themselves. Julia and Peter have to be the first ones to tell us that the work they’re elegizing wasn’t very good anyway–but is that true, or is that just the way they can stand to remember it? Once you’ve put so many caveats and frames around your show and your memory, is there any way to remember it with sincerity rather than sentiment? 

It was pointless, but it kept us alive, he says. And now it’s gone.