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

Closed Loop of Consanguinity | BorderLight 2026

Carol Laursen & Emily Liptow

I am always so grateful to have the opportunity to catch something I missed the first time around. Emily Liptow and Carol Laursen were developing Closed Loop of Consanguinity at Cleveland Public Theatre as part of Soft Launch last winter (where our elder child was also presenting) but we missed it. Here it is again!

Carol and I met at Ohio University and we performed together in Michael Frayn's Wild Honey in 1990, and later in Eight Impressions of a Lunatic for Red Hen Productions. I have directed her In Shakespeare. We are both citizens of Cleveland Heights, her children were child-minders for our children. I love Carol.

Closed Loop of Consanguinity is a brief, semi-improvised dance and movement piece in which the two artists explore the space and objects and each other and at times even the audience. The event begins with a voiceover inviting the audience to switch seats, to have a different perspective, and I kept thinking of that as I watched them, asking myself what their perspective was at any given moment.

After the show an audience member I was speaking with wondered what "consanguinity" means and I told them it's having a common ancestor, to be connected by blood.  I also admitted I looked that up before the show.

Consanguinity is on a double-bill with In Visible Orbit, created and performed by Greenhouse. They perform strenuous choreography to anxiety-inducing music, allowing us to bear witness to the physical toll the work takes on them, at the same time how dedicated they are to the performance. It's a celebration of grace and exhaustion, pain and exhilaration.

While I was there I ran into playwright Eric Coble. He strongly recommends H.O.P.E., Natasha Mirny's modern interpretation of the myth of Pandora. 

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

I Hate Memory! | BorderLight 2026

 "The past is a dick."

Esme Thorne (with Balint)

My brother introduced me to the works of Jim Jarmusch in the late 1980s. When I first visited his new St. Paul apartment in 1989 he had a handsomely framed poster of Stranger Than Paradise. It's one of his favorite movies, and we often quote that or Down By Law whenever it seems appropriate. And cousin Eva taught me about Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

Much later, I took my fourteen year-old son to see The Dead Don't Die, Jarmusch's 2019 zombie comedy film. I thought it was okay, but he really dug it. I thought I recognized Fern the waitress, and sure enough, that was also Eszter Balint. It was crazy. I have only ever thought of her as a teenager, but she's my age.

The other night she made an appearance at the Cinematheque, and you might ask why she would come to Cleveland for the screening of a film she made over forty years ago, or maybe you were already aware that her musical memoir I Hate Memory! is playing BorderLight.

A Hungarian immigrant, and the child of dissident theater artists, she first settled in New York City in the late 1970s. They lived at the Chelsea Hotel. No, really. She was in the thick of it, at that time, in that city, as an adolescent. As a child.

The show is a happening, as Balint tells stories, plays songs (great band) penned by herself ... and Stew! The young musician and actor Esme Thorne takes turns as the teenage Balint. The playwright's own vocal quality is a like a punk rock Blossom Dearie. There are projections and banter. It's a play, it's a concert.

It's a rough show. I mean that in any number of ways. It is a rare opportunity. Get there.

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

Gr33n Hamzies & Eggoes | BorderLight 2026

Dan Zanes was lead singer of the Del Fuegos and a wild garage rocker and swiller of Miller High Life until he started having kids and that's when he started recording children's music. I, too, had not considered the child audience until I started fathering them.

Fathering. What a terrible verb. I digress.

Faye Hargate and Renee Schilling collaborated on the Visual Theatre Award winning Her Mark for BorderLight 2023 and they (with Joan Hargate and Jeremy Paul) have devised a new exploration of motherhood with the creation of Gr33n Hamzies & Eggoes, an original and exploratory art installation for the very, very young.

I felt a bit odd, I knew I would, appearing as an adult without a child escort, but they don't judge. The space had just opened and there were already five kids with their two adults, and Hargate and Schilling, costumed as what appeared to me to be DIY store associates were making suggestions and accommodating needs as the child audience explored and commented and created.

Dan Zanes with my family (2005)

I was provided with stickers I was told I could put anywhere I liked (I put hem up high, there seemed to be no stickers up there for some reason) and was offered a basket of "dream boxes" the team had created previously in collaboration with a CHUH school.

In fact, dreams were a theme, the walls featured trees that asked "Where do you go when you dream?" with answers like, "I hear music in my dreams," and "I see my dog, he is no longer with us."

The night before I had dreamed that we lived in a society where cannibalism was permissible, but it was unseemly to discuss it. You had to be very discreet when disposing of long bones. I didn't write any of this on the trees.

Before I left there was a group activity where our hosts read the Dr. Seuss book which inspired the title of the installation. There were many questions from the children. How did you set this all up? What is that? Are you a rapper?

It's a calming, welcoming room, and the kids I saw appeared very happy to be there. This is an non-ticketed event. I recommend bringing a young person. 

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

In the Castle of Eternal Sunset | BorderLight 2026

Hogan Wayland & Brady Craddock

I might have missed this one entirely, were it not for another company having to unfortunately pull from the festival. I looked at the performance map and In the Castle of Eternal Sunset was playing at the same time so I swapped my tickets for that, without even looking up what it was about.

And it just so happens to be a play about the randomness of experience! Epically poignant.

The show is being presented in the upstairs space at Parnell's, a room I have spent much time in but God as my witness I can't remember if I have been up there since Covid. Waiting at the bottom of the steps I met Lethan Candlish, who is also presenting at BorderLight this year, and he handed me an honest-to-goodness promotional card for his show, Who Am I, Again?

Handing out your card at festivals was such a big deal in the early aughts, by the time we did Double Heart in 2013 it seemed to be a dying art. For And Then You Die in 2009, I handed out actual bottled water with the show attached as a sticker, which was burdensome but I'm proud of it. Which is all to say, go see Lethan's show! He brought cards!

Lethan Candlish

In the Castle of Eternal Sunset is written by Charles Green and comes to us from Knoxville, Performed by Brady Craddock and Hogan Wayland, an audience of twelve circles the game table as these two play Dungeons & Dragons and navigate an epic quest. 

There is a random element; on the throw of a die, an audience member will read a passage from a game manual, a poem of memory, nostalgia, and loss, while the agile performers execute tableaus of connection and discovery. This participation lent the proceedings an element of electricity and alertness.

Our crew didn't play Dungeons & Dragons, we played its scrappy knock-off, Tunnels & Trolls, which had fewer rules and took itself a lot less seriously. The game master was usually Fred, and his adventures were tightly wound, fraught with excitement, and strewn with hoary in-jokes and characters that were usually a thinly veiled swipe and either someone in the room or one of our usual targets. Eternal Sunset is much more earnest, and reflected a sincerity we were all too protective to permit. 

After the show I had to dash, we were seeing Lucinda Williams at the Beachland Ballroom. I have plans to see many more shows Friday night!

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

The Protest Café | BorderLight 2026

What if the United States threw a once-in-a-generation celebration and nobody came? Well, after last weekend, we all know the answer to that that question. When I was a kid, the American government commissioned all kinds of things to celebrate the Bicentennial, including the short film People People People, created by animators John and Faith Hubley. 

It is a surprisingly frank depiction of life on this continent (or this part of it, anyway) from before the arrival of European colonizers, and including some of the more unsettling aspects of what they (we) did once they (we) got here. The Bicentennial was a celebration, but it was also an education. And even the government, for a brief moment, strove to educate people.

First on my dance card for BorderLight 2026 was a selection of American protest songs, The Protest Café, bringing together some of my favorite folks. I have seen Eric Schmiedl and Tina D. Stump work together, most recently BUCKEYES; Buses & Baseball at last year's BorderLight, and this show also brings in Chennelle Bryant-Harris and Chelsea Cannon, both of whom composed the entire cast for Schmiedl's play adaptation Huck Finn, which I produced for the Great Lakes Theater outreach tour in 2018.

The program began before the rains began, it was a lovely evening. Eighty degrees, but cloudy, on the Patio at the Hermit Club. I had enough time after work to grab a pint at the bar and settle in to a table, where I found familiar faces and made new friends. I am reminded of previous festivals in other cities, where I felt alone and desperate for connection. Here, I know everyone. Like, really. It makes me so happy. It feels like home.

The Protest Cafe is brief and joyful, but powerful. We were invited to sing along, and I was delighted not only by how many lyrics I knew, but by the songs they chose. I was expecting something old-timey. Union songs! The Bourgeois Blues! Instead we were treated to protest songs from the entire span of the last century — and even one from this.

Looking around, I saw a one or two (white male) faces that weren't necessarily happy with the menu of songs. I wonder what they thought was going was going to be protested, the King of England? The First Amendment? Immigration? There's a spirited rendition of Irving Berlin's When That Man Is Dead and Gone. It was written about Hitler, but if in hearing it you are thinking about someone else, someone in particular, well surely that's his fault and not yours.

The company is inviting and warm, and so very patriotic. This one's free, but you need to make a reservation as seating is limited.

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

BorderLight Theatre Festival (2026)

When the BorderLight Theatre Festival debuted in 2019, I was so excited! I have had several delightful experiences participating in theater festivals from New York to Minnesota to Alaska, and the thought of having our own, right here in Cleveland? The possibilities were thrilling.

I have been grateful to have had plays in the past three festivals, by accident and by design. Give Me Your Keys commissioned and produced Step Nine in 2023, Talespinner Children’s Theatre remounted their spring production of The Toothpaste Millionaire in 2024, and I self-produced The Right Room in 2025.

This year, while I do not have a show in BorderLight, I have made plans to see as many shows as possible. While I expect there to be a lot of my friends in the festival in any given year, I have so many friends in the festival this year!

Some of the shows I am dead chuffed to attend include (but is not limited to) Eszter Balint’s punk rock memoir play I Hate Memory!, Kierstan Kathleen Conway’s queernoir Our Souls Did Touch, and Anne J. McEvoy’s monodrama Blessed Unrest: a Fantasia on Martha Graham’s Demons.

I plan to report on what I see and hear this weekend, check back to see my posts and follow me on Instagram. And tell me what to see!

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