DRITTY'S DREAMLAND

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Hi!

Mehgan and I are planning a winter extravaganza at the Empty Bottle on December 9 (it’s a Tuesday, baby). We’ve got the Lizzie McGuire Movie band and Brigid doing something insane. If you came to Snow Business last year, it will be kind of like that but with more country songs. And if you didn’t come to Snow Business last year, imagine a Chicks concert at Red Rocks mixed with a really good improv show mixed with that bit I do where I tape pancakes to my butt cheeks and fling them into the audience. I think I’m going to sing this.

Have you ever been inside the mind of a real freak? 

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On March 18, 2024, in the Annoyance Mainstage theater, a sold out audience took the ride of their life. Dritty’s Dreamland is a kid’s program (something you’d see on a barely funded midwest public access channel) that goes horribly wrong. The show; written by Chris Dritsas (Dritty), Zach Hacker, and Teddy Gales; stars Dritty as the host and a goofy crew of very literal characters like Mailman, Milkboi, and The Shitter that join Dritty on stage to deliver mail, pour milk, and shit. I played Ms. Craft, a craft teacher whose son is away at war.

Dritty and Zach (who also produced/stage managed the show) asked me to help build the set for the show. I hadn’t done much production design before, but I had painted a pretty gorgeous New York City skyline for my backyard production of Moonstruck in the fall and we repurposed it for the winter run of Little Orphan Boy (the musical Dritty and Zach wrote).

I still had virtually no experience building anything and as I’m looking back at my google calendar at the time, I am stressed the hell out. I was in the rehearsal process for our second run of Little Orphan Boy set to open April 20 and our first big Derek Begrudgingly production of Talladega Nights was going up on March 29.

There were also a lot of very specific needs for this set:

• We had to cover all of the theater’s walls. This show involved a lot of liquids (fake blood, fake vomit, fake shit, very real watered down milk, etc.) that were going to be splashed all over the place. Audience members in the front row had to wear ponchos. So to limit the amount of nasty stuff we had to scrub off the walls, everything had to be covered and then thrown away at the end.

• We had no budget.

• Like most shows I’m a part of, we had to set everything up on the day of the show.

The theater, a simple stage with white walls, had to be turned into a maximalist, bright kid’s show that was somewhere between Hug the Sun, Food Party, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse for as close to $0 as possible in about seven hours.

This show was also my first time working with Annaleigh Stone, my now beloved friend and favorite artist in the world. She built this insane cardboard toilet and sewed this curtain for my horrific window scene (among other things.)

When we got to the theater around noon, Annaleigh (and probably, Dritty, Zach, and Michael Serio) and I started by hanging pink and blue plastic tablecloths over the walls. About six tablecloths covered everything. Then we just started putting a BUNCH of shit everywhere. I didn’t buy anything for this show besides those table clothes and maybe some more paint.

I sourced all of the set dressings from 1) The Annoyance Basement 2) weird old props/party supplies I wanted to clear out of my house.

The goal was to take up as much space as possible so everyone at the theater cut hundreds of triangles and other weird shapes out of old construction paper we found in the basement. We used these wall glue dots to secure pretty much everything.

I also hung up a bunch of old art I’d acquired over the years and used the leftover cardboard from Talladega Nights prop making to make the “Slime Zone” signs and the cute little bookshelf.

My biggest project was covering the door. I was inspired by the Pee-wee Playhouse zigzag door and tried to recreate it with cardboard and a lot of duct tape. It took me two hours to secure it since I had to wrap the door completely in cardboard without impeding its ability to close. Looking back I should have just just used another plastic tablecloth or a big piece of fabric and then made the spiky parts out of cardboard. But I had a giant TV box I wanted to use and I was just a mere 27 years old!

Dreamland was…a dream

The whole process of building this set was insane and goofy and I remember diarrheaing in the unisex Annoyance bathroom from all the coffee I drank while hastily hanging those paper chains. It was the best day of my life. For me, 2024 was a fever dream of trying everything. I was finally doing comedy shows that people wanted to see and I had met a group of people who were down to give up their entire afternoons to figure out the logistics of a good blood splatter. Dreamland was just two years ago and I’ve learned a lot about how to make props and fill a space since then, but this show kicked off a psychotic energy in me that I’d never felt before.

Like…you can just cover a guy in milk on stage. The audience does want to see everyone in the cast puke on each other. It is worth it to spend hours building a set for a 45 minute show.

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Ok ad over, here are some recomendations:

• I saw the immersive show Port of Entry from the Albany Park Theater Project and Third Rail Projects a few weeks ago and it blew my mind. They built an entire apartment building in an old warehouse and told a beautiful story about family, immigration, and Chicago. I think their current run is sold out, but you should try to score tickets ASAP. It’s amazing.

• Astrachan at Hideout this weekend and Derry Queen next week.

• No Lonesome’s new album is so great!!! I’m a little biased cuz I’m in the music video.

• Next self defense class is Monday, Nov 10 @ 7pm.

• Fuck ICE every day, until the end of days.

Next Issue: I’m going to talk about training for Ragbrai, this delusional bike ride I went on with my friends last summer. I promise it will relate to creating and art.

Thanks for reading and, as always, don’t tell me about any typos unless they are really bad.