The Idiot’s Guide to Mystical Interactive Theater

Welcome to The Ick, Season 4: DISGUST. This season I’ve invited a brilliant cast of writers and friends to explore what makes us recoil and why.

Season 4 will culminate in a print magazine and live reading in San Francisco. Subscribe here so you don’t miss event info and updates. Every paid subscription helps us cover printing costs.

Next up, Joe recounts his catastrophic debut as a playwright, and reflects on the self-loathing that can fuel (or spoil) artistic originality.

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I was new to New Orleans, and an absolute moron.

My buddy James and I were spanging under the Margaritaville sign on Decatur Street, flying a cardboard sign that read “Stranded Time Traveler, Need Flux Capacitor.” We both had jobs, but were fascinated by the street economy.

I told him I was thinking of reading tarot in Jackson Square, had even dreamed of making my own cards.

He was excited, encouraged me. He ripped up pieces of a waxy seafood box in the trash and handed me his markers.

I drew arcane, occult-flavored shapes on a few squares of cardboard. On the back, I wrote long-winded psychobabble, each fragment a part of speech. A mystical grimoire of my own imagination.

Three times I spread a couple cards in front of the tourist. They picked up the spooky shape that spoke to them, and on the other side the parts of speech would combine to create some gibberish:
Beyond the multi-headed labyrinth of 10,000 incarnations.
The voyager beyond the mystical half-light summons.
A reminder of the inner glow of the forgotten dusk.

Pretty dumb. Not much to it. But the first guy gave me a handful of change for a “reading” and from then on I was hooked on the attention.

Starry-eyed and over-eager, I would go on to run this mystical shtick into the ground: writing, directing, and starring in an overblown mess of a chaos magick stage play.

In it, I would attempt an ego death via public exorcism—one which I hoped would unlock my deep, unrealized potential as an artist and bring me to spiritual peace.

The Matrix of All Possible Phenomena

After that first night at Margaritaville, I set about reinventing myself as a streetside fortune teller. I sat cross-legged on Frenchmen Street next to an old guitar player who called himself Jack Parsons.

I was a promising academic philosopher before I bailed on grad school and rode down to New Orleans on a school bus. But even with university deep in the bus’s rearview mirror, I retained a love for big, obnoxious words.

I called the act “The Oraculatastic Phantasmagorinator.” I duct-taped a cardboard book together in which I told the origin story of an alternate universe. Its name: “On the Genesis and Continuance of the Mysterioverse.”

The author, circa 2015, performing street readings in New Orleans.

The day I got roped into the play, I was drawing the latest version of the Omniresplendent Cardboracle on the back porch of a Bywater bar, recently bought by aging ex-punks from New York. “Trippy Joe,” they called me. They were eager for acts. Would I show this art?

I had an idea: an interactive play. A magical crowd-directed fortune-telling experience.

I was not ready for the hyperfixation of Jane, the bar’s owner. Swiftly she scheduled a sequence of weekends, found the emails of the local press, spec'd out a marketing video. I felt a rising panic, but feared losing face. For all I knew, it was supposed to feel like this: horrifying, like a cartoon anvil hovering over my head. As an artist, it was my duty to press forward.

I was fond of drawing imaginary world maps, riffs on the JRPGs of my childhood. In each of them I’d always plant a spiral artificial island somewhere, remote headquarters of a shadowy, elite organization. I called it the MOAPP, the Matrix of All Possible Phenomena, an interdimensional intelligence agency. In my first few months in town, I made zines for the “MOAPP Field Guide” that I sold to the anarchist library—a kind of psychedelic softboi take on my new life in the seventh ward.

The character I “played” as I divined my cardboard gibberish was Eisman Hegel, a troubled young spy from within the MOAPP’s inner sanctum, on a classified mission in Louisiana.

I had been reading a lot of surrealist woo science—Jarry and pataphysics, Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic—and was searching through it for a cheat code out of my ennui. Though the sigils and tarots and neurolinguistic programming never worked, I didn’t stop trying.

Maybe if I stepped it up, reinventing myself in magical theater, I could finally pull off a successful spell and become who I was meant to be.

The Best Laid Plans of Interdimensional Intelligence Agents

In New Orleans, I found myself poorly equipped for adulthood. I was eking out a half-living as a tutor at an afterschool program and spending everything I earned on bar tabs.

The neighborhood was sketchy—a shootout broke out a few blocks from me while I did backyard yoga, bullets ricocheting off the stop sign. The chic downtown hipsters, on vacation from their trim jobs in California, curled their lips when I entered the party.

Nothing was stable or secure, and I wanted better for myself. Something drastic needed to be done. Something magickal, maybe.

Across the street, a group of clean-cut guys from Minneapolis moved in, other sore thumbs. They were aspiring comics, and I tagged along with them to their open mics. They always bombed.

I found a kindred spirit in Lewis, the worst of them. He was tense and full of self-loathing on stage, but in person he was charming and easy company. I gave him a “fortune reading” in the morning after a bad acid trip and we were fast friends. He would be my creative partner for the play.

We spent a couple of all-nighters fleshing it out. Roughly speaking, the play would be sequenced into three acts:

Act one: Eisman Hegel (me) and his navigator Gavin Treadwell (Lewis) would crash their spaceship en route to the MOAPP HQ, in the watery core of the Saturnal moon Enceladus. As Eisman, I would survive beatings and mockery from the Schizophrenic Space Wolves—essential elements of the psychomagic transformation.

Act two: After surviving the wolves, they’d end up in front of a giant Oracular Owl that, sphinx-like, would dictate a riddle. Stitched together from audience submissions, the riddle would form a long, mystical nonsense poem of the kind I was hawking in the French Quarter.

Act three: I’d face The Abomination in a duel for control of the Impulse Fountain—a crucial missing piece of the spaceship—seize it, and guide the audience back to their homeworlds with their MOAPP memberships.

original Facebook event listing for the play, 2015

Dread, panic, and writer’s block hung over the month leading up to the show.

There were details like stage design, actors, a script.
The interactive thing, would that work?
Rehearsals?
Jane had the city alt-weekly interested. Could I meet them?
I had four weeks and a brain I didn’t like living in. The pit in my stomach never left.

Thank God Lewis knew how to paper mache. The MOAPP agents would sail the galaxy in an cybernetic whale, the Beluga Cartesian, a black and gold painted monster that stood eight feet tall. We stayed up all night pasting strips of dough on the cardboard cutout of the whale, the room filled with solo cups stinking with cig butts put out in mache goop.

I received some welcome support: an artist down the street painted our owl on a bedsheet. A more seasoned comic on the circuit volunteered as lead Space Wolf, Murderface.

For each act, I’d chickenscratched a series of xeroxed worksheets with bizarre occult symbols and other flotsam from my late night manias. They had lists of questions, spaces to draw and free associate.

I planned that each attendee would find these worksheets under their seat. Behind the curtain, the cast would compile the responses to use onstage.

Broadly speaking, I was not a fan of the work. The plot was cheesy and on the nose, the questions sentimental. I looked upon the play, wincing, and pressed on, afraid of backing out.

“Dude, this is not good,” Lewis said, laughing nervously and tossing his handouts on the ground as we entered the final week.

I waved away his worries. I thought, What difference does it make, Lewis? There’s no escape. Just close your eyes and floor the gas pedal.

Slaying The Abominable One

On the night of the show, Jane created a custom MOAPP cocktail made of blue curaçao and rum, and I enjoyed bottomless access.

I was drunk before the curtain call, numb enough to charge the psychomagic with real violence. I encouraged Kellie, the actress playing the second Space Wolf, to really smack the hell out of me when we were taken prisoner.

Finally, I took the stage as Eisman Hegel.

Standing in front of a Powerpoint, I detailed the over-wrought concept: the audience would travel to the distant moon, burrow under the surface, and swim to the MOAPP HQ, where they’d be interviewed for membership. I instructed them to fill out several worksheets we’d use for ad-libbing throughout the play.

Hamming up my paralyzing stage fright, I misspoke, I dropped things, I appeared on the verge of tears. It was liberating, trolling and abusing the audience with this discomfort. It was also self-indulgent. Peoples’ asses started shifting in their seats.

The action started to mount. The audience boarded the Beluga Cartesian and that ghastly, eight-foot paper mache monstrosity crashed. The lights went out and the audience heard a piercing, drugged-out howl.

The Schizophrenic Space Wolves descended on the wreckage, prowling up and down the aisles. Murderface tormented the audience between rips out of a giant bag of flour labeled SPACE COKE. White powder flew into multiple rows of the crowd.

As I was tied up and stripped, the wolves read out worksheet entries of the audience’s greatest fears, mocking them, snarling in their faces, and howling at the moon.

I was forced onto my knees center stage, my mouth gagged. Kellie was really getting into it, delivering camera-jiggling, brain-shaking wallops from the heel of her palm to my jaw, followed by a maniacal cackle. I pleaded, cried, screamed.

By the time I was squealing like a pig, a few folks made their escape. Among them was Mac. In my crew of geeks and losers, he was a cool hand. If I wasn’t drunk and a little woozy with CTE, I might’ve panicked seeing him slink toward the exit.

After more abuse, Eisman eventually succumbed to his torture, and I laid unconscious on the ground while Gavin made his way to the Cyclops Owl. The play hovered on the edge of disaster.

At the end of the Owl’s vision, Eisman revived. I was delighted to hear the scattered applause as I got to my feet. As I dusted myself off, we ventured to the center of the planet, where there lived The Abomination—the primal embodiment of my frustrated ego.

Arnold, a colleague from tutoring, played The Abomination. Wearing a second head above his first one—a grotesque paper mache replica with throbbing forehead veins and a furrowed brow—and a leather trench coat, he sat hunched over his typewriter in the planet’s core. The Abomination had stolen the Impulse Fountain, believing it would give him the creative juice he needed to make something notable.

“I am a genius!” The Abomination muttered to himself. “A great genius! I’ve done it again!” He picked up the Impulse Fountain—a yogurt container I’d painted gold—the icon of the enlightenment. It contained more secret confessions from the audience worksheets.

“With this, I finally have what I need to finish my masterpiece!” From his massive cardboard typewriter, he read slips from the Impulse Fountain, ad-libbing them into his masterpiece memoire.

I had entered a flow state. Hiding on the side of the stage, readying my attack on The Abomination, the dread and fear faded.

As Eisman, I steadied my coward’s heart, encouraged by the astroturfed cheering of the audience. I unsheathed a cardboard sword, sticky with spray paint, and chased The Abomination across the stage.

Arnold’s massive second head got caught on a strand of Christmas lights. We stumbled, slapstick, around the patio. Audience laughter rose up. Pantomiming fear, the cardboard sword shook violently in my hands. Then, hovering over him dramatically, I plunged the holy blade into his heart.

As The Abomination writhed and evaporated, I tried to imagine those elements within myself dying too. A more robust applause swelled this time, and a couple cheers. We were all united in the relief that this weird, uncomfortable bondage was releasing.

Each attendee was instructed to reach under their seat, where they found their personalized MOAPP membership card. Lewis placed a single unicorn horn on my head as a crown. Abruptly, it was over.

selected cards from the author’s street readings and the Omniresplendent Cardboracle

There were a few surprised faces once we took a bow. A smattering of applause.

“That was… pretty good!” our neighbor said as the audience filtered out.

“Not bad,” another of the comics remarked. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, Joe’s really working some stuff out up there.’”

I was mostly happy that it was over. It wasn’t the masterpiece I hoped for, but I avoided catastrophe. Did the magic work? Would I know if it did?

A few weeks later, at a Bywater bar, I found myself explaining the play’s lore to a skeptical Mac. Burnt out on the ethereal realms, it felt good to be around someone more grounded.

“The Beluga Cartesian, our spaceship, well, that was modeled on the philosopher Descartes and the neocortex.” I took a long slug from my PBR. “A beluga whale’s forehead is protruded, much like ours, or a baby’s. And Descartes’ contribution to philosophy was the cogito, I think therefore I am. And you know, that’s the tiny, fragile ship each of us sort of pilots through the forehead…”

Mac took a long breath, squinting at me. His features softened. “I don’t really do well with the cringe stuff,” he said. “But it sounds like you really know a lot.”

About six months later, after a few more disasters, I quit my job and sailed westward to California, riding shotgun in Mac’s barely running truck with a new Chase Freedom credit card. Driving through Texas we listened to New Orleans legend Dr. John, who also went west and found himself in California. That would be me soon, I told myself.

I was wrong again, wrong as I’d ever been, wrong as I was in whipping up this deranged public exorcism of a stage play.

Looking back, I eked out a good time in spite of myself. The pomp and mysticism, the pretentious exercises, the masturbatory spiritual yearning—it was all unnecessary wrapping. I know now I would’ve been so much happier in my creative life if I aimed lower, wanted it less, and had a little more fun.

But on that all-night drive towards California, I hadn’t learned this yet. I was doubling down. Cleansed by the healing fire of reckless abandon, I just had to close my eyes and floor the gas pedal one more time.

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Joe Holmes is a writer, educator, and mushroom farmer. You can find him on Twitter at joetforhire and Bluesky at joetforhire.com.