The Church of Loneliness

Pictured: Matthew Armstead as The Founder (left) with Fionx Chin as Doe (right). Directed by Cat Ramirez. Received residency support from Almanac Dance Circus Theatre.

At the time of writing this, I just finished some progress on my newest play: Every Room is a Pluto Room, which I talk about in this bullet list. This play is tricky to write for several reasons. The first is that it requires a lot of world-building, as it takes place in a “Church of Loneliness”, set in a dystopian world where people are placed in a caste system based on their desirability. I find myself frequently writing some dialogue that feels very heavy in the exposition, and I know it’s going to hold an audience back from engaging with the work. For now, I just have to write whatever comes to mind and hope for the best. As a writer, I’m used to being very meticulous with my first draft so that it feels close to “production-ready.”

I’ve had to accept that I’m going to write a bad first draft. Since I re-opened Final Draft a few weeks ago, I had about 20-30 pages written. As of now, I’m at page 40, and I even have the ending finished already. I have a tendency to write all my scenes out-of-sequence, and to go straight to the most compelling visual images I have in my mind. Filling in the details of these characters is also a struggle, as a lot of them sound the same. I’m also not a fan of the dialogue. I have a habit of writing in I sentences, and at some point I’ll have to go back and see how I can weave a bit more poetry into it.

There’s a lot to unpack about that critique: “they all sound the same.” What I mean is that they sound like mouthpieces for different ideologies surrounding desirability politics, sex positivity, and dating as a whole. There is the main character - the Founder of the Church – who feels like a queer representative of the incel movement as a whole. Part of why I wrote this play is because I think there’s a large gap in other people’s understanding of why the incel movement exists to begin with. We paint this picture of the movement consisting bunch of white guys who are sad that they can’t get laid, when the reality is that it began with a bisexual woman named Alana in the 90s.

The truth that I want my audience (especially the queer white feminist section of my audience) to understand is this: sex positivity is not a choice for some people. It does not come easy, and not everyone can just will their way into having better, more fulfilling sex lives. I wish that the current members of the incel movement would use the language of desirability politics in order to define their struggle and recognize that it’s pretty privilege and fatphobia that are oppressing them – not “hypergamy.”

I use this sentence to describe what I’m writing: “This play is designed to make the prudes AND the sluts uncomfortable.” So many so-called sex positive spaces that I’m a part of skirt past their own whiteness and lack of inclusion, and I often find myself rolling my eyes at people who claim to be sex positive. Sexual trauma inhibits sex positivity. Desirability politics inhibits sex positivity. Our sexuality inhibits sex positivity. With all of this in mind, I have a hard to believing that a generic paradigm of sex positivity is worth celebrating.

But off the soapbox, and back to the play. I want these characters to feel interesting and likeable, and I have a hard time knowing if I’m there yet. There’s a character named Doe who I spent a lot of time with today. Doe is the Founder’s second-in-command, and helped them build the Church from scratch. They’re asexual, but also a kinkster who does rope play. I’m trying not to allow their sexuality to define them as a character, but in a play that seems so dependent on how we relate to love and sex, it’s sort of impossible.

In an ideal world, I would be creating this play with a creative team consisting of sex workers, former love addicts, ace people, queers, and pleasure activists. But because theatres often suck at working with communities outside of the arts, very few community-driven dramaturgy models exist outside of groups like Cornerstone Theater Company. I often wonder: how do I do this work without funding? How do I pay people for their time, perspective, and education if I have no money to give? The only solution is for me to write this damn thing myself, and to educate myself as much as I can about other people’s struggles. Another artist friend, Severin Blake, suggested I put on a story circle surrounding the themes of the play. I might combine that work with some of the information that Cornerstone shared with me about their best practices for making art with communities.