On Halloween day this year while I was out pumping gas, a werewolf came out from behind a firetruck and stared at me with its paws down. We had a moment. It lingered on, oddly, for some time. So much so it started feeling strange, like an outer body experience. The strangeness of it all still puzzles me. Why were we so committed to this gaze? And for so long? Why so performative? I still don’t know who that was behind that mask just as much as they still don’t know who I was unmasked. In that moment though we were nobody and everybody in an odd way, and the absurdity of it is what made it all real coincidentally. We were performers engaging in an absurd and impromptu staring contest, and, oddly enough, it felt right in the moment. As time has passed, it still feels right. Its compelled me to examine the art of performance and the roles we play in this melodramatic moment of American history. Because if you look around, it’s not that far fetched to see we’re living through a prolonged theater of the absurd right now. Everyday feels like a downward spiral of flat characters along flat paths in flat narratives with flat plots. Everyone seems to be haplessly complicit with the choices forced upon them without ever questioning whose forcing them and why. All the while allowing a flatness to be forced upon us to live within, dream within and eventually die within like a holiday ornament in storage. Take your flat identity, take your flat life, and, most importantly, accept your flat death so you can be easily packaged away afterwards. Like me and the werewolf, to see the absurdity in real time and remain silent to it is to be complicit in the absurdity’s performance with you. By not distancing yourself from it in real time, you are accepting your role within the story its curating. And in the history of performance art, this commitment to waking the audience up out of “the fantasy” of a story so that they can stay in tune to the deeper political messaging is known as ‘The Estrangement Effect.’ Its a distancing technique accredited to Bertolt Brecht, a 20th century German playwright who once famously said “art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” This saying gets to the core of how estrangement works. It’s not concerned with what is truth, but, rather, 'how' is truth and 'for whom' is truth? For instance, estrangement isn’t concerned with the truth behind a mask, but, conversely, it’s concerned with the effect that mask is having 'on whom' it’s directed towards. Because that is where the distancing, alienation and/or estrangement is taking place in real time. The Estrangement Effect turns attention itself into the spectacle, so it can observe the ways in which attention morphs its target. I know you’re looking over here, but I’m going to make you look over there instead, and, in doing so, observe what estrangement does to you, knowing that I’m the one that made it strange. It’s uncomfortable, but intentional for political purposes. And the Estrangement Effect caused by our absurd subservience to these flat outcomes we’re forced into in modern day America (facilitated mostly by 'careerism' & 'tribalism') is that everyone has become newly stereotyped by them. A new strangeness that an unseen puppeteer (or profiteer) curated via astroturfing. And by not committing to destroying the puppeteer, we’ve all succumb to this astroturfed culture we're in where these new stereotypes thrive. We have all been made strange to one and other anew in this absurd play, call us ‘the everyman’ of this melodrama. And what level of importance does this ‘everyman’ play in this modern melodrama? The Everyman of today has been relegated to a side character unfortunately. Someone insignificant to the development of the main plot but still there to refract a truth and induce estrangement on an audience demo not known to them but known to the puppeteer. The character of Jaques in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ comes to mind as a good doppelganger representation of this secondary role the modern-day everyman has been relegated to in our modern-day melodrama. In Shakespeare’s play, Jaques is a stereotypical wannabe who speaks entirely in ‘woe-is-me’ prose whenever given attention. He is banished to the forest by the Duke to wander with his fellow outcasts. He leads an inconsequential role in the plot, and is just used by Shakespeare to estrange puritanical audiences within the Elizabethan time. “A fool!” Says Jaques, “A fool I met a fool in the forest. A motley fool…all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts...”