Photo by Maria Baranova

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with writer, puppeteer, performer, and maker of adult-oriented childlike-wonders David Commander about his and Rob Ramirez’s new play, Fear in the Western World (Target Margin’s Doxsee Theater, Jan 2 – 19).  I’ve seen several of David’s shows now, and it’s hard for me to watch them with anything less than an ear to ear grin.  Even as he falls face-first into the dark, sticky, grosser corners of the American psyche, David approaches his work with a fearless spirit of play.  David describes his work as “modern toy theater,” and watching him I get the sense of a precocious and extremely technologically competent child sitting on his playroom floor, telling funny stories with his toys.  As David correctly points out, there is a particular pleasure in watching somebody make fun on stage, performing not just a play, but play itself.  It’s something I’d like to see more of.

David’s toys are detailed, and designed up the wazoo.  One feels, looking at his plays, how he has touched every item on stage — and though it all may be held together with duct tape and old White Castle receipts, it is that exceedingly human, cardboard-box-rocket-ship aspect of his work that I admire and cherish.  (Still, David’s cardboard rocket will more likely take us to some seedy alien dive bar, rather than, say, Never Never Land.)  His constructions speak to a dedication and attention and care that, underneath a mordant, somewhat punk-rock exterior, breathes warmth and life.

Fear in the Western World sounds like a scary and hilarious head-trip through the capitalist fear-mongering machinery of gun violence.  Below is an edited transcript of our conversation about the piece, about guns, and about, yes, fear in the western world.

Jerry Lieblich:
Where did this show come from?

David Commander:
The Sandy Hook shootings. I had just finished this art installation, and I was in that post-show depression, sitting on the couch, when the Sandy Hook shootings happened. And it was just really gut wrenching. I wanted to make a play to throw my two cents into the ring with gun violence. I wanted to give it an amusement park feel, like one of those haunted house rides. I thought it’d be cool if we could travel through the horrors of a brightly lit, entertaining and horrible world of gun violence. Because it’s so commoditized — gun violence has become a part of our capitalist system. In between the news segments about Sandy Hook, there would be commercials. It all gets used to create fear, money and everything American.

JL:
What about that made you think about carnival rides?

DC:
There’s a certain helplessness you feel as a passenger. If you’re on a roller coaster, you’re just on it. Once you’re in the ride, you can’t get out of the ride. You have to wait until the end, and there’s nothing you can do. And it feels like that with social structures and systems. You can vote, but even that doesn’t really do much. You can write to your congressmen, and maybe they give a moving speech in the House of Representatives. You feel powerless. And that vulnerability is a breeding ground for fear. And so it’s used against us, for control.

JL:
How does that play out in the show’s design?

DC:
The puppetry is building on what Rob Ramirez and I started with Steve of Tomorrow. We knew we wanted to make them smaller, and have more control over them. And I knew I wanted the stage to be a complete mess, with things all over the place. Since I couldn’t actually put the audience in a rollercoaster, I thought what we could do is have three cameras mounted on a tripod where there’s a corresponding screen and viewpoint for every camera, giving it a point of view perspective for the audience. We’d surround the audience with that view, and then take that camera and move it all throughout the theater.

That’s what we started with, at least. And a lot of my ideas completely fell flat as soon as we got in. Which was distressing! But actually a lot of good things were yielded from that, in the sense that we made a show out of that failure, and it’s great.

JL:
So what did you end up with?

DC:
We have a modular set now, boxes. We build the set as we go along, and knock it down as we go along. So we have the point of view perspective, and as we move through the play, we build sets and we build theater around the view. Hopefully it gives the audience a feeling of not just moving through the narrative, but moving through the space of the theater.

JL:
Tell me about guns and fear.

DC:
Well, guns are a very loaded topic. People are very passionate about it. I started off wanting to talk about gun control, but then started getting deeper and deeper into the idea of fear, and how fear is used for control, how anxiety is used as a currency. So it’s very much like all of my shows, where I try to cover a lot of different, angles of the same subject. I try not to be pro or con anything, though my personal views absolutely find their way in there.

The actual events, like Sandy Hook, are shadows and ghosts within the fake reality of the play. One of the layers is that I acknowledge that this is a puppet show, and this is a fake thing. The performance itself is kind of a ceremony. It’s like the ghosts in inside the haunted house are the real events.

JL:
I find it interesting that your reference points here — haunted houses, roller coasters, carnival rides and puppetry — are all forms of entertainment that I think we think of as being geared to kids. You’re dealing with a very quote unquote “adult topic” with these tools.

DC:
I gravitate towards playing on stage. That’s what I want to do. I want to play on stage. And I think an audience appreciates watching someone play. When someone’s entertaining themselves, it’s a pleasure to watch. If you’ve ever seen Calder’s circus, that’s a great example. It’s just some guy playing with these toys that he made, but it’s riveting. Or that the woman with the Chewbacca mask, laughing and laughing. We like to watch people have a good time. On stage, I like to create an environment where there’s a playful structure. Like the stage is a monkey bar set — we’re all swinging around, playing with these toys that we’ve made. But there’s a juxtaposition between that playfulness and the subject matter.

A dream of mine is to have a space, a space where I just play in it all the time. What could you create if you were able to invite people to your playroom? Like, this is something I do all the time, come in and look at what I’ve been doing. I just think that would be wonderful.

JL:
How have your views on guns, or on fear, changed in the process of making and thinking about this play?

DC:
I went into this thinking that I was going to make a very staunch anti-gun play. But as I went further into it, I realized I’m not really anti-gun. I’m pro-common sense. The problem isn’t so much the gun, it’s the feeling that we need a gun. People who are “second amendment people” might be very responsible gun owners. But I think that the danger is the fact that they’re so fucking scared, and they feel so vulnerable against their own environment, in their own houses, in their own neighborhoods, but they don’t do anything to take care of their environment or neighborhoods. They just grab their guns and shut their doors and wait for something bad to happen.

When I was in my early twenties, I lived in a horrible neighborhood in Philadelphia. And we would get broken into all the time. I had forgotten about this when I started the play, actually. But one time, this group of guys broke into our house, at noon, and they chased out the girl I was dating at the time. They were trying to catch her. Around that time, the same thing happened about three blocks away, and they raped and murdered that woman. It was a very bad neighborhood. So they chased her out of the house, the cops didn’t care, they blamed it on her. So we had a friend whose uncle was a meth dealer. And we told him we want a gun, right now. We want a gun, tonight. And we got a gun. That night. Serial number scratched off and everything. 50 bucks, off the streets.

We had a reason to have that gun. We were scared for a reason. And there are certain situations where you can actually be afraid, and maybe you should have a gun. And maybe one could say, well, you should move out of that neighborhood. And maybe we did have that option, but a lot of people don’t have that option. So there’s use for a gun in certain situations. But I don’t see everyone who has a gun living in these kinds of situations. If you look at the NRA websites and pro-gun websites, there’s pictures of people playing in this idyllic suburb, and the father is there with a gun holster. There’s no danger there. So I had this gun, me and that girl broke up, I moved on with my life. And years later, I’m living in a better section of town, but that gun is still in my bedroom. And I remember one time, like we were all really fucked up and we were talking about guns. And I was like, yeah, here’s my gun. And I’m just thinking this is bad, this is a bad idea. You shouldn’t have this loaded gun out. We’re all high on Coke. We’re all drunk. Why do I have a gun? I am not the person right now to have a gun. I’m not in danger. This is how people get shot. So I put it in a box, and now it’s gone.

But if you listen to what you’re told, if you listen to the NRA, if you listen to the commoditization of that fear, you have to have that gun. You just never know. You just never know when your door’s going to get kicked in, and a mob of nonwhite people are just going to barrel in and take everything you own and rape children, and the Mongolian hordes will come in… The fear that’s peddled is so tribal, and so basic, and so effective. People really, really buy into it.

So I’m not anti-gun. There’s justification for some people to have a gun. But not everyone, and certainly not a military grade kind of weapon. All of these sniper rifles that all of the mass shooters buy from Mass Shooter Weekly, there’s just no reason for any of that. The Second Amendment people say “oh, we want access to these military grade weapons to protect us from a tyrannical government.” Have you seen a Black Hawk helicopter? What do you think you’re going to do against the government? What you should do is you should vote in your interests. You can’t do anything with a gun. Look at what you’re up against. This isn’t Red Dawn.

JL:
What’d you do with the gun?

DC:
I moved around a bunch in my twenties, and you know how it is, the more you move, the less stuff you have, and the more stuff ends up in like your parents’ basement. So it ended up in a box in my parent’s shed. And my parents go through everything that I own. They’re very nosy. Lovable, but nosy. So my dad called in a fright. He said, “My God, there’s a gun in one of these boxes!” And I said, “Yeah, I bought a gun once.” He said “Well, I want to throw it away.” I said, “That’s fine, you can throw it away.” So they buried it.

JL:
Literally buried it?

DC:
Literally buried it.

JL:
So in between Sandy Hook and now, how have you been working on this play?

DC:
I keep different notebooks all the time, for different shows. Though actually, I’m coming close to the end of that. I have a certain amount of ideas for shows, and then I don’t have any more after that. So the notebooks are starting to dwindle down, as a notebook explodes, the show happens, and then it gets put on the shelf. So now I’ve only got two left. But this one I’ve had for a while.

At the time of Sandy Hook, gun control advocates were saying that this is the worst thing that could happen, innocent children getting blown away by a kid who got his parent’s gun. And if this doesn’t change our minds about guns, nothing will. And what do you know, it didn’t. There has been a wild inaction about guns and gun violence. Because of fear-mongers like the NRA, because of that commoditization of fear. Nothing has been done. And they say, “Oh, well, you know, taking away these guns won’t do anything. Guns don’t kill people… you know.” But also, if you do nothing, nothing will happen.

At one point, while doing research for this play, I was looking for a list of names of people who were killed in mass shootings. And I think the Washington Post posted a list at some point. I don’t even think it was up to date. And there were mass shootings I didn’t even know about. We’ve gotten to the point where it’s so commonplace now that if you wink, you’ll miss it. Sandy Hook didn’t change things, nothing happened, and it’s worse than ever.

And I think it will just keep getting worse. At this point, whenever a mass shooting happens, gun sales go up. There was woman who was a spokesperson for the NRA who got up in front of an audience at a rally and said something to the effect of “Gun grabbers love it when a mass shooting happens. Now they can have fodder to come for our guns.” And I’m thinking, lady, every time a mass shooting happens, you hear the sound of a jackpot going off. You know, your organization makes so much money every time a mass shooting happens. And to add to that, their solution is always more guns: “Classrooms would be safer if there were more guns in the classroom.” Which is crazy. But even as it is, it can’t even be talked about on the Senate floor.

JL:
What do you think the way out of that cycle is?

DC:
More education. More sensitivity. I think we just have to see things for what they are.

But I don’t know the exit. It’s a very American mentality, and it’s looping back into its own fear and growing larger and more crazy. So what’s the way out? I don’t know. More puppets. That would help.