Producer notes for HASHTAG MAYHEM!

 

People always ask me, “where do you get your play ideas – because that’s some messed up shit”. It’s my contention that everyone has a dark side. It’s human nature. Good. Evil. On one end of the spectrum you’ve got Grammy who yells, “Dammit”, when she loses at sheepshead and at the other end you have a man in prison for murder. And everything in the middle. Fortunately, most of us keep our “dark” sides in check. Some do not. The characters in each of these plays are in the midst of a “dark” moment and they’re trying to work through it.

“Dark”, “mayhem”, “sordid” – whatever you want to call it, it’s probably best that you’re just an observer this evening.

Singer/musician Tom Waits quipped, “All the good in the world you can put in a thimble”. Perhaps. Even Walt Whitman, whose poetry typically took an optimistic view of life, commented in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that, “It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil; I am he who knew what it was to be evil…”. But I see a silver lining in the six plays that make up HASHTAG MAYHEM!, and it’s this – if you don’t know the “dark”, how can you see the “light”?

Just watch your back…

– Jeffrey James Ircink