Sitrep 12: April 27, 2025: Theatrical Proctology

Holly Hughes’s admiration of Karen Finley for, among other things, “going into the dark part of sanity” and “pokin’ around in there” (182) has given me an aspirational label for my own CV: Barrett Hileman, Theatrical Proctologist. It maybe doesn’t fly in polite company, or even reflect any lived reality, the fact of which probably reveals my own ties to the darker part of sanity, but in whatever way others view my creative output, I know my work is at its best when it is poking around, trying to find out what I don’t already know. If successful, I can assemble the findings into some kind of form that makes it shareable with others.

Hughes was new to me, World Without End was new to me, and I tried to just let it all wash over on the first pass. There is an intellectual response to this work, but that feels like standing on the edge of the pool and dipping a toe in at a safe distance. Work like Hughes’s is best absorbed by belly-flopping into the deep end and splashing around a bit. Yes, I know, there’s no right way. Like Hughes, “I really believe in art and I believe in allowing the audience to have their own personal subjective view” (176). But I was also too tired to hash out Burroughs and Henry Miller and Sue-Ellen Case and academic paltriness when I read it, so I tried to sit back and let the piece wash over me. If I was going to evaluate the nooks and crannies of the impression the play left, there had to be an impression. And what I feel, or felt when I read the work, was that I was in capable hands, being cared for on some level as an audience member, being led through something, into something, something with a point of view and a desire to manifest it, by someone asking me to poke around, to poke in places I might never have been or might not want to know, or that might even be unknowable. In sum, I was left with an awareness of craft. Hughes was moving me places and having me arrive at others, and it gave me confidence that her work would be worth a second pass and the labor of studied observation. But that is just a precursor to what I actually want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is Hughes’s interview with Rebecca Schneider in TDR, the interview that culminates in the theatrical proctology I started with. Two quotes shared by Emmy in her effervescent presentation resonated just as strongly with me as they did with her. Hughes’s belief that she is “a theatre-artist first and a lesbian second” (177) somehow felt incredibly refreshing and nearly novel to me in today’s theatre landscape. The habitual legitimatization of theatrical work through non-theatrical credentials is so prevalent that it's refreshing to encounter an artist who seems both not ashamed of her identity and not necessarily trying to make it a marketing tool to achieve theatrical or academic orthodoxy. I do wonder if her approach could be a unifying one when it comes to canon, power dynamics, claiming space, etc. Is there a kind of theatre-making, and therefore a world, that moves beyond an endless stream of trading out different forms of border patrolling? For example, when Hughes speaks about sex in her work, she finds more similarities than differences: “there’s desire to possess and voyeurism and objectification.” Her ideal sexual relationship is one in which the object becomes a subject, and isn’t this an idea worth considering regardless of the kinds of bodies involved (177)? In the second quote that Emmy shared, Hughes points out that “A lot of people have experienced being an outsider. Everybody feels queer in some sense of the word” (176). This universalization is something that resonates with me and is something I felt last semester when first encountering the ideas in Jose Munoz’ Cruising Utopia. If, as Munoz intimates, queerness is a kind of collective searching for the not yet realized ideal, then Hughes’s work at least makes space for a different kind of inclusion, focusing less on dividing up the toys based on what distinguishes and categorizes, and more on trying to name some of our realities, entertain ourselves while facing them head on, and pursue something empowering and connective in the aftermath. Is this a way forward? To me it feels honest and rooted in some kind of optimism, a kind of proctology grounded in love.

P.S. I also really did enjoy reading The Chinese Lady. It would be interesting to explore more of Lloyd Suh’s work and career. He’s been sort of on the fringe of the mainstream in New York theatre for a long time – this is the first work of his that seems to have made the mainstream regional theatre rounds that I can recall, but I’m not necessarily an expert here.