"How the hell am I supposed to go to work when all the birds are dying"

There's a line early in Suz Murray's Kachonk about the morning commute and the existential crisis. The line hits differently if you once lived in New York. 

I looked around the room wondering what portion of the audience are creatives, or former creatives, who worked out a few years too late that the accumulation of capital in that city and the wealth disparity it produces make a genuinely hostile environment for making anything at all.

I met Suz on a production set about a decade ago, back when I still saw New York as the city where creatives thrive. Now, they are among the handful of people I know who somehow manage to make their fringe art and pay Brooklyn rents. 

Last weekend, Suz brought Kachonk, their one person interactive clown show to Philadelphia Fringe Festival for three nights. 

When they told me they will be in Philadelphia for the festival, I immediately asked if I could put up a few posters for them in my new neighborhood. This was half out of enthusiasm for a friend on stage and half out of excitement for the city I now call home.

Kachonk, written and performed by Suz Murray, is a critique of late-stage capitalism from the perspective of a soul that wants to stay free. 

The main character (Kachonk) sets themself free by quitting their job, a triumphant moment that lasts about as long as it takes to realize they can't pay rent without it.

Suz’ artful performance gets so much laughter out of the audience when they go around the room — actually around the room, to actual audience members — asking “do you have a job for me?” with a voice that gets more desperate each time. 

I look around the room again, this time wondering how many of us laughing have experienced the precise agony of being creative professionals supporting ourselves on odd jobs and freelance work, hoping there'll be time left over for the thing that actually fuels us. 

I have been that person. I have employed that person. Which is why, by the way, I now run a business around that person.

Later, Kachonk asks: how the hell am I supposed to go to work when all the birds are dying?

I don’t have to look around the room this time to know everyone in the room has asked themselves the same question before. “I'm forty,” Kachonk tells us a few minutes later. The audience responds with a huge laugh. 

***

Off the stage, Suz spent years working as a director of photography before coming back to theater.

I decided to claim what felt genuinely true about who I am as I was about to turn forty. Came out six weeks after moving to Philadelphia. Started a company a year after that. There's a particular quality to a decision made at that age. It isn't reinvention, exactly. It's more like finally stopping the negotiation.

“There’s something very queer about performing another person,” I told Suz when I sat down with them.

“Yeah, coming out has also brought out… it's going in, you know? I'm more in touch with my artist self,” they responded. “In all of the forms, there's so much where it's, like, the truest essence of self. It's what you're showing everybody. And the whole thing is that you're truly connecting with people as this base form of who you are."

I think about people I work with. Most of them, creatives, struggle to stay in touch with their creative work when the market — by design — requires them to run a solo business around it. 

***

The irony of staging a show about how impossible it is to make art while surviving capitalism, while being responsible for its production logistics and marketing is not lost on me.

The Philadelphia Fringe Festival is unjuried. There's no panel deciding whether your work is good enough. It also runs on a Bring Your Own Venue model. FringeArts runs the platform and the guide; finding a venue, picking your dates, and attracting an audience is on you. More than 300 independently produced performances this year, across neighbourhoods and galleries and rooms that are not usually theaters.

So the artist is also the producer. And the marketer. And the box office.

Which is the joke inside the joke. The show is about the impossibility of doing the work while also doing everything else, and it only exists because its maker did everything else.

I don't say that as a critique about the festival. I say it because it's the most honest description of a creative life I've seen staged, and because the festival's whole structure is built on the assumption that artists will carry that load, and thirty years in, they still do.

And yes, while not ideal, I’m proud that Philadelphia is, still, a city where you can make something without first proving you deserve to, which is presumably part of why artists come here in September to do the thing they couldn't afford to do in New York.

The 30th Philadelphia Fringe Festival runs until September 27, in hubs across the city: Cannonball, which is the largest and runs an artist-led model of its own; Dumb Hub, which is entirely clowning and alternative comedy; Circus Campus; Studio 34; and two new ones, The Lemonade Stand for emerging artists and Performance Garage for dance and theater.

Almost none of it will be reviewed. Most of it you'll only hear about from someone who went.

So: go. Pick something you know nothing about. Go to a room you've never been in, in a neighbourhood you don't usually visit, and watch someone do the thing they've arranged their whole life around being able to do.

You'll be in a room with people who made something without permission. In this city, that's not a small thing. It might be the whole thing.

Listings at phillyfringe.org.