Farting Drill by Milo Cramer

For me, watching Not Not Jane’s was an extremely joyous full-body experience – head to toe! – like the fabric of the universe is being ripped open, and we’re invited to step thru – into another universe (bought on a debit card?) – where we can celebrate and mourn our silly lives – and discover new vocabularies for talking about the hidden, hard, and mysterious parts of ourselves. 

The play invites nay demands we enter a space of DEEP, DEEP LISTENING – after listening that deeply for 90 minutes (every new word a surprise), I walked away in a buzzing state of heightened attention – newly re-grateful – shaken! – the play is like an encounter with a strange unknown animal – one feels one is discovering a new species of flower or beetle – and the beetle is staring at you, it’s curious about you, no now it’s judging you, it’s asking you probing questions about yourself. Who could “review” a beetle? What is the “point” of a beetle? It’s a whole living beetle! With 6 legs and 4 eyes and it’s blue.

I guess I feel like: our world right now is obviously so so bad, it’s old news, it’s almost redundant to describe how bad things are – and Mara’s play offers in response an unhinged commitment to (for lack of a better word) magic. A magic that exhumes pain. I have certainly dug deep holes for myself – how to get out of them??? If only there were chairs! I certainly have some kind of Mother Wound – is there a more accurate word for it?? If only we could find the proper word? I know my mother has a Mother Wound too. And my relationships have been, alas, convenient. This whackadoodle play is too true.

In one charmingly self-aware moment, the play playfully accuses itself of being “word jazz” – and I remember, years ago, some fancy person critiquing a (different) play (by someone else) (but of the same family tree) by calling it “word salad” – and I just wanna sayyy, as someone who has spent many hours struggling to create meaningful writing – I don’t think what Mara is doing is word jazz or word salad – I think it’s unbelievably rigorous and specific. Word triathlon. Word churning word milk into word butter. Piercing our thick veil of boring collective exhaustion/fear/self-protection and cruel normalcy requires a powerful spell or a farting drill and here it is, Mara’s got it. We are all so so weird – weirder than we get to acknowledge. And grief is more painful and idiosyncratic than can be realistically described. Ditto RAGE. I feel in Mara’s blistering “word jazz” an intense and hungry but deliberate and careful reaching towards some sublime and heretofore unimaginable healing space, or a deeper and more honest vocabulary for talking about how to all be in a family with each other. 

In conclusion, I am a baby made of poop, and I’m crying out for love, but I don’t know what love is, is it attention? Is it money? Mara’s play made me think about this!! In our tidy tidy world with strict strict rules, even aesthetically, Mara’s play insists on space, on opening vast spaces. Take off your mask. I stubbornly go to The Theatre hoping all my dumb ancient baggage and oppressive daily blahblahblah will be touched, rearranged, blessed, tickled, destroyed, shared, transformed. No one knows how to do this – everyone’s just guessing. But mission accomplished today 5/28/25 at the dress rehearsal of Not Not Jane’s, 2:30pm in 440 Lafayette Street room 3a.