Everything is Awful

Everything Is Awful is a comedy where magical things happen to cynical assholes. Gary is trying to be a good person: new office job (that he hates), working on a grad degree by correspondence (that topic of which he cannot remember), tries to help the needy when he can. But his boss Paul (who is a ghost) and coworker Rachael (who is hot but kind of terrible) keep landing Gary into extraordinary situations where doing the right thing bites him in the ass...

Simone Veil was nice enough to give the OK for me to mess around with and stage her comic strips. She published an amazing comicstrip series, Pictures for Sad Children, in a very iconographic, minimalist style. Reading the work, and studying a lot of semiotic texts at the time, I wondered if it could be used as a playscript. In school, I was exploring alternative ways to create playscripts (using poems, comics, short stories, paintings as scripts instead of formal playscripts) and I wanted to see how actors would interpret these specific sequential images and act them out.

What came out was a heavily-adapted and much more theatrical version of Veil's comics, with some original material written by me thrown in there to string the disconnected comic strips together into a one-act play format. Four actors performed as an ensemble, playing multiple characters in rapid succession. As Veil embraced the bare essentials of the comic form, I had to do the same with theatrical conventions. The actors wore the same all-white costume, and different characters were indicated by the actor putting a simple iconographic costume prop on top of their 'base' uniform. None of the theatrical action - rigging, offstage areas, costume changes, props tables - were hidden from the audience. It turned into a slapstick deconstructionist black comedy.

Comics certainly have potential to be used as play fodder, but one thing I learned is that there eventually has to be a written 'script' for actors to memorize, stage managers to put in their binders, designers to take home, and to be generally used as a consistent reference document. It's more a matter of formatting and the intention of the comic artist - if I were to do it again, I think the play-comic would have to be composed specifically for the project. Comics can do a lot of things that simply are not possible in real life, the form is not limited by physics or time or scale. But as a script you could add facial expressions, dialogue pacing, and non-verbal cues for an actor to follow, or as a storyboard for visual sequences you want baked into the script. Stage directions are so... imprecise, sometimes.

2023 edit: Pictures for Sad Children has a very complicated history, as does the author. I embarked on this adaptation well before the author pulled her comics from the internet. I received consent for this project via email in advance of adapting and performing the work in the early 2010s.

If you're curious about the history of this comic project, google it. I have a signed print copy of the original strips that I will treasure forever, given to me directly by the author way way back in the day. The comics are amazing, and I still think about them often. You can find them with some sleuthing, but I will not be posting them here.