Loser

LA, 2022

A Ceaseless Fun Production

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Quarantine depressed me, and so I wanted to make a play about a depressed person. I wanted to make the audience feel stuck with a man who was stuck himself: stuck in his mom's basement, stuck in his emotional development, and most importantly stuck between different modes of meaning-making. I wanted our protagonist to be open to everything, paralyzed by the options, and therefore trapped at the existential crossroad forever.

Unfortunately, this was not a fun character to spend an hour with. In order to make him more likable, we had to kill him. Instead of trapping the audience in the room with our "loser", we trapped his cousin, an upwardly mobile striver bro, in the loser's post-suicide basement bedroom. What followed was not just a comparison of two differently-toxic men, but a conversation, a synthesis, and even a merging - all leading to the inevitable, gnawing question: "who is the real loser?"

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Co-Written with Soren Royer-McHugh

Performed by Soren Royer-McHugh

Stage Managed by Simon Greenberg

Lighting Design by Ian Momii

Marketing by Nicolas Murphy