Philip Kenner and I are both from New Rochelle, NY, which means that we grew up in the shadow of two malls—the ultra-luxury Westchester and the populist Galleria (RIP). In Phil’s play THE MALL THE MALL THE MALL, which will run at The Tank from February 26 – March 22, three friends must solve a mystery to recover Buffy the Vampire Slayer merch stolen from a Hot Topic store.
I sat down with Phil earlier this month to discuss his relationship to 2010s nerd culture, the roots and evolution of the play, and the influence video games have on his writing.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Elise Wien: Tell me about the origin story of this piece.
Philip Kenner: This play began with a very different first draft. I wrote a draft of THE MALL^3 that nobody will ever read except the people in my grad school class. The draft was the play as it is now, which is a fun adventure comedy about teenagers, and then it launched 30 years into the future, and all the characters became adults talking about how that time actually wasn’t so good, and they were going through really hard stuff at home. And it reveals that this plucky cartoon world of Act I was a way for them to cope with their difficult childhoods. It was very self-serious. And it was clear to me, and everyone in the class, that it was not working. And so, in a sort of “fuck it” gesture I thought, well, what if I don’t attempt to make the play serious or deep at all? Rather, what if I just let the fun and the nostalgia and the craziness be what makes it serious? Take those things that are usually unserious and run so far in that direction that they become what the play is actually about. And from that, this version of the play was born.
There’s so much about this play that is insanely specific. It’s born of a very particular corner of the internet, a la Tumblr, a la fan fiction, you know, Superwholock, Homestuck, Pokémon, ATLA, Zutara blogs. It’s all of these things that might sound like gibberish, but were very emotional and important for a lot of teenagers at that time. It’s no secret that I was very on Tumblr when I was in late middle school/early high school, I was writing so much fan fiction. I was posting that fan fiction. I was co-writing fan fiction with people who were basically strangers to me, but with whom I had a deep artistic relationship. To this day, I don’t know who these people are and I was co-creating my first legitimate writing with them. That kind of intimacy with strangers, with fellow teenagers on the internet, shapes you in a very particular way. I wanted to write this play about what it meant to be a teenager who was in the process of being shaped by all of those influences.
EW: That’s a dynamic that shows among the characters too, this tension between co-creating, between being deeply interconnected with others, and then being genuinely lonely. Because many of the people who understand you most are not with you IRL. Can you talk a little bit about loneliness and friendship and how they work in this play?
PK: A lot of those friendships are built on the question: what if we were lonely together? What if we were these unknowable, undefinable freaks, but with each other? When you and your friends are obsessed with the same stuff, that can create its own sort of ferocious sphere, because you’re only defining yourself by what you’re consuming. And when you’re defining yourself by what you’re consuming, then the only other people who will understand you are people who also define themselves by what they’re consuming. And it can be that you’re not surrounded in your actual, real life by anybody who’s doing the level of research and engagement with the content that you are. And so that loneliness is an inverse effect of being really, really engaged with a specific amount of content. It’s like: you see yourself in this game. It expresses something deeper about you. It’s art that really resonates with you. But then it’s not resonating with anybody else around you, and so now you’re sort of alone in this place. Naturally, when you were raised by the early internet, you find other people who love these things, and there’s this ravenous need to be seen all the time. And these people on the internet can see you and you can see them, and they understand all your references.
There’s a line that the main character Naomi says, in the very beginning of the play, “I don’t have to do the exhausting work of introducing myself. They will see me. They will see I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They will say, She loves Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They will know who I am.” So it’s like, what a huge lift it is to try to explain yourself to everybody in your life. How wonderful it is to walk into a space and have someone say, I see you, Buffy. Fan, I see you, Legend of Zelda fan. I know all the same fan theories.
EW: You describe this play as a nerd paradise and also an adventure comedy. I know that you’re a lover of adventure video games. What influence did gameplay have on the production of this piece?
PK: Video games do a lot of really wonderful things, both storytelling-wise and psychology-wise. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey is baked into the design of any good game. There’s often a literal portal and call to action, and an elixir to bring you back to the original world. So there’s a structure of: you are an individual, you go on a transformative journey to learn something deeper about yourself, meanwhile you also gain some physical object that is magically strong and consequential in your original world.
And the other thing that video games do is—especially for teenagers and children—they satisfy needs that are not being met in the world. The world can’t meet all our social desires. In video games, it’s often possible to get all the computer characters to like you because you’re doing all the things that you’re supposed to do, and because you’re in complete control of what’s happening. And for a teenager, that’s amazing. Everybody likes you and you’re in complete control: these are the two things you famously don’t have in real life, but that as a teenager you want so badly. The way that shows up in THE MALL^3 is in these characters conquering a world that is trying so badly to coerce and harm them.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly, there is an unapologetic texture to video games: colors are bright, powers are huge. It’s, by design, way more interesting than real life, hence all the dopamine. Trying to put that in a play is a really fun challenge—to say: we’re going to turn the saturation up on this world, on our real life. Here’s something so quintessentially teenage, so quintessentially early-2000s, and we’re going to turn up all the sliders, the saturation, the volume, the contrast: the evil villains are going to be so evil, the heroes are going to be such heroes. That model gave me permission to turn the sliders up on everything.
EW: Having been to a rehearsal, I was personally delighted by these high-saturation villains.
PK: What’s more fun and gay than a really good villain, right? Much has been said about the queer coding of Disney villains—they’re always exaggerated in some way that the protagonist isn’t. They’re either really large or really skinny. They’re very flouncy. Their movements are liquid. They get to speak in a more flowery, complicated language. Even in media for children, villains will often speak in an inaccessible way, and that creates this effect of like, oh, they’re other, they’re scary, they’re threatening. Giving myself permission to write really rich, obnoxious villains was such a gift. That’s also one of the fun parts about video games, there’s almost always a bad guy, an uncomplicatedly evil bad guy, who wants a simple thing like power, or money, or Princess Peach.
EW: Princess Peach!
PK: And then it’s very uncomplicated that you have to stop them. To say, Oh, I’m gonna kill them. Done. Solved the problem. What can be exhausting about theatrical villains is that sometimes we get over-nuanced. That’s not to say there’s no nuance in these villains. Or that I don’t like writing with nuance. I love nuance. I’m obsessed with nuance. But it can be fun to match that video game style and say: no, they’re just a villain. They want these teens destroyed. They’re just evil.
EW: Yeah, sometimes this feels true to life also, right?
PK: We’re seeing it now. We’re seeing it now. And it’s not, you know, I’m not going to go on a whole thing about how my mall play is political, but it’s just to say that we are in a time where we’re encountering things and saying, oh, that might be true evil. The limits of our ability to understand that everybody is a human being are being tested biblically. It’s not worth holding that space for people who are actual monsters, like… fuck them. (Now I’m on record now as being like, no nuance! Get rid of nuance! But you get – readers will understand what I mean.) The performances that Mikey Fiocco and Mia Wurgaft are doing are so unbelievable.
EW: They get to have a cartoonish level of expression.
PK: That’s an ethos I have about playwriting in general. Having come from acting training, I’m always writing something I would like to do, something that I think would be fun. Usually when I’m writing plays, I’m in my room like a crazy person reading all the parts out loud and seeing how I would do it, and then making decisions about how the character should go from there. My hope is that it’s just an hour and 15 minutes of fun being a villain. Just being a total monster.
EW: This play is called THE MALL THE MALL THE MALL: can you tell me about your relationship with…the mall?
PK: Malls were the first place where I could be independent. It was like, here’s 20 bucks, go to the mall, have fun. Basically, you go to the food court, you go to the Apple Store, take photos in the photo booth, go into the Hollister and try on a horrible flannel. It was the first place you were allowed to be independent. But it’s also a space where you are being constantly advertised to, and not even slyly. The whole point of the mall is to shop and spend money. You’re in the viper’s den, because everything around you is like, spend money, spend money, spend money. This is who you are. You could be a Lululemon person. You could be a Gap person. You could be a Hollister person. It provides you all these identities at the small cost of whatever that outfit costs. It’s a space where as a teenager, you could run around and learn who you are with your friends for the first time, not in your house where your parents might be listening, not at school, where teachers might be listening, but just totally anonymously. And yet, you’re a teabag in the boiling water of capitalism.
Photo by Grace Barry.
Tickets for THE MALL THE MALL THE MALL can be purchased here.
Leave a Reply