It’s all a MESS! An Evening of **Smutty** Monologues with Convergence-Continuum | BorderLight 2026

Not their costume. Oh, no.

It’s not just that It’s All a Mess is a collection of monologues written by great local playwrights like Klae Bainter, EN Brettrager,  JC Cifranic, Samantha Cocco, Léo Fez (pictured), Mike Geither, and Christopher Johnston, and performed by some of my favorite local actors, it’s the fact that Convergence-Continuum has reintroduced the word SMUT to the popular conversation. That fact by itself tickled my trigger.

Making sex funny is hard (I said "hard") or at least it is when you are worried about offending anyone. It's a fine line, and so I have got to hand it to each of these playwrights, and this team of talented interpreters, that the evening was not only hilarious, but also earnest, hurt, kinky, angsty, and joyful.

In what was perhaps my favorite piece of the evening, it was also ornithological. Big ups to Michael Anderson for giving us the horniest bird obsessive since Matthew Modine.

You can look that up. 

I have eight shows (nine if you count another double-bill) booked for tomorrow. While none of them overlap, I am curious as to whether or not I will be able to successfully dash from one venue to another on time. Curious, but I refuse to be anxious about it.

My wife had a piece in the New York Fringe in 2001. I was running sound and had a lot of time on my hands. I think I saw sixteen different shows. If I play my cards right, I may see as many shows this weekend!

BorderLight Theatre Festival at Playhouse Square, July 8-11, 2026

Play a Day: Millenials Suck!

Alisha Espinosa

For Wednesday, I read Millenials Suck! by Alisha Espinosa and listed at New Play Exchange.

When you grew up defines your generation. But being a young adult comes with the requisite baggage of feelings and fears and it is the manner in which the latter copes with the former that makes you Millennial, Gen X, Boomer, Silent, Greatest, and so on, back and back through American history.

I mean, don't get me started. When it comes to generational politics, I am the one who gets a conference call from the lunchroom at work if the subject comes up.

Just yesterday, a Millennial cohort lamented "Why do people hate us Millennials so much Lol," and I said who are you calling people? Only Boomers do that. Another threatened to search "Millennial" on my fb page and I told them to go ahead, because I knew I was a card-carrying ally and then I told her her to search "Boomer" on my fb page and she came back and told me I am a joy to behold.

I did a "Boomer" search on my page myself and was surprised at how much shade I throw at them. It's startling.

Millenials Suck! is a collection of vignettes on a common theme, and it is alive with music and movement, packed with tales of aching and anger in the Big City. Espinosa chronicles the desire for and fear of commitment common to young adults, but complicated by the present moment.

We, Gen X, were raised in a nation that told us we should be able to have anything, because it was America, and it was easy -- our only war lasted a month and it was a rout. So any problems we have must be our own. These young adults today have seen that society collapse like a house of cards and refuse to take the blame for it, which is only correct.

If the Post-Millennials in my own home are any indication they will be much more cynical than their parents, and far more militant. But I digress.

The playwright wrestles issues of race and class and gender and ideology, with humor and style, creating a cohort of charismatic characters, trip from one small NYC apartment to the next (and also a county fair) with a wise and open heart. I loved this. I don't miss being in my twenties.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: Cooties

Alexandrew Recore

For Saturday I read Cooties by Alexandrew Recore and available at New Play Exchange.

If there is a theme for the plays I have been reading in April of 2019, it is the need for connection.

I should go back and check. They may all be about that. I mean, are all stories about that? They can't be. What about all plays? Maybe. Or at least plays I enjoy.

I don't like plays about men dominating everything. Those are plays I do not enjoy. I don't think they are plays I write. Maybe they are. I should go back and check.

Regarding today's script, which is titled Cooties. Anther digression which is not entirely irrelevant. The most popular sketch we ever produced as Guerrilla Theater Company was written by Beemer, about a boy and a girl playing in a sandbox, in which he keeps asking if he can put his shovel in her bucket. This ninety-second play was also titled Cooties, and though it is not the same play it could be.

Recore has recorded a whip-smart college roommate sex comedy, hysterical and at sudden turns touching and poignant. featuring crisp, hip and knowing dialogue, aloof and outrageous, with potential sex partners circling each other at arms length, like as if La Ronde were called L'amibe.

Ultimately, however, its about young people yearning not to be alone, expressed at times through verse and movement, with an audacity I envy. It is the comic strip I wanted to have written in college.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Play a Day: The Princess of Caspia

Ricardo Soltero-Brown

Twenty-one plays in twenty-one days. Three weeks of new work!

For Friday morning I read The Princess of Caspia by Ricardo Soltero-Brown, and which is available for download from New Play Exchange.

Bourgeois love is a complication of its own creation. It is only appropriate that the loopy love triangle present in this work are self-obsessed and selfish, and I approve of the message that ridiculous situations will eventually play themselves out ridiculously.

Getting letter-shamed by a world-famous political prisoner is a particularly inspired touch.

Yesterday and today I am attending a national arts-in-education conference downtown. The theme is "digital transformation" but I have a phobia about crossing the intersection of arts and technology.

I should write a play about that.

Play a Day: This Is How You Got Me Naked

Catherine Weingarten

This morning I read This Is How You Got Me Naked (a sexxxy comedy) by Catherine Weingarten, which is available on New Play Exchange.

God, I needed this play this morning. Weingarten writes entirely absurd but plausible Millennial dialogue with absolutely no shame.  If I didn't know any better, I would think this piece was written specifically to piss off my Baby Boomer colleagues.

Every generation tells their story of longing and unrequited romance. Every subsequent generation has their opportunity to say, yeah. That's not it.

Several years ago I was lurking in a coffee shop on a college campus, trying to think of what to think, when a cohort of young people settled in nearby and just started talking. I wrote some of it down. It seemed so random, like randomness for its own sake.

If I'd been paying better attention I would have followed the narrative, and not been distracted by the intentional distractions. I want you or I think I want you and in any case I don't want you to think I want you at least not until I know you want me. There's a million plays right there.

When did we move from friends with benefits to hookup bros?

I'm old.