I’ve been working dramaturgically on two projects the past few months: The Civilian’s AI-inspired Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) and Matthew Antoci’s I Am My Own MILF. Both have irreparably damaged my instagram algorithm. Below, you can read my dramaturg’s note for MILF before checking out the show at the Kraine Theater on Feburary 15th, 17th, 24th, and March 4th. It’s going to be a party.
It’s Giving MILF
“All that once was lived directly has become mere representation”
- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle.
One week ago at the time of writing this, YouTube star MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) released a video entitled “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time.” The video details Donaldson’s Christ-like payment of cataract surgery for one thousand people who would otherwise be literally blinded by the inequitable American healthcare system. Tears are shed. Hugs are had. The video is interrupted by an advertisement Donaldson did for Experian. It’s been viewed eighty-five million times, just one of the many recent examples of controversy swirling around the gestural charity of the terminally online. At what point does the commodification of philanthropy diminish its goodness?
The American spectacle of giving is not a contemporary idea. In fact, it’s the oldest rhetorical trick in the book - divert the sex-scandal by buying the town a new library; get a few likes on Instagram by building houses in another country; even Daddy Warbucks knew the good PR that would come from adopting an orphan for Christmas. It keeps the American story alive by fortifying the wealthy’s role as the moral elite and the impoverished as the abject dependent. It toes (perhaps usually crosses) the line between acts of goodness and acts of de-facto colonization.
But, as with Donaldson, the modern capitalanthropist is a benefactor hyperreal. Gone are the days of the simple sleight of hand trick; the deceit of giving has become more abstract, fragmented with the increasingly athletic American consumptive experience. The expectation now is that we’ll view the act cynically, providing nuance and context for ourselves. Our solitary act of decoding, our feelings of ourselves as keen anthropologists of irony and meta-irony - all of this is a part of the expected experience. We feel that we’ve become too shrewd to fall for such an old fashion fraud, but in reality it’s this very feeling that is used and mechanized by the hands of the wealthy. We’ve fallen for it again.
I AM MY OWN MILF considers a specific permutation of this spectacular giver - the woman who gives in both sense of the word: The Real Housewife, her Lady of UpperEastSideia. She’s a modern day soap opera character, a Scheherazade of drama and trauma who deals in the business of charity. We forgive her shady dealings because she makes for such good tv and because it’s so damn pleasurable to somehow know both more and less than her. We consider her in the logic of an instagram scroll. We’re mad. We’re horny. We’re alone. She’s a queen. She’s a twitter icon. She has a million likes. She only has three likes but that means she’s serving, mama. We accessorize her. We love her. We hate her. We view her with a complicated sense of knowing. She’s queer. She’s homophobic. She’s mother. She’s mommy. She pays for the seat you’re sitting in. She pays for the theater holding the seat. Hell, she owns the building. It’s in her French tipped-hands the nonprofit theater scene of New York rests.
And it’s not us, but her, who has the very last laugh.
And we kind of love her for it.