Tent Talk: Tonee Bollocks and Gabriel Sweetbottom with the DC State Players

Tonee Bollocks and Gabriel Sweetbottom may or may not be their real names*. The DC State Players may or may not exist. And their Fringe production of Agamemnon may or may not be a terrible show. There’s a lot of questions in the air as I sit down with the two of them to talk about bringing the classic Aeschylus play to life this summer.

They don’t give easily. I ask them to explain how they tell people about this show.

“That’s a very hard thing to do,” says Bollocks. “We would like people to experience the show before we tell them exactly what it is.”

“But, we do realize that we also have to sell tickets,” says Sweetbottom.

A few moments pass in silence. I push a little harder. Eventually, they spill the beans about what on earth they’re up to.

Bollocks comes clean first. “This is community theatre,” he says. “The DC State Players is a community theatre that has put together what it thinks is an amazing show. But the show is doomed to begin with. It’s due to poor casting. Poor writing. Poor directing. A poor idea of what theatre actually is. Things fall apart. And comedy ensues.”

Even though there’s no evidence that the DC State Players existed before this project, the two guys admit to having worked together before. They met a few years ago at The American Century Theatre in Virginia, where they both appeared in a production of Stalag 17.

“I was the only person in the cast who would be his friend,” says Sweetbottom, cocking his head at Bollocks. Bollocks nods.

So, where did this show come from?

“When Gabriel was in college, he was in a production of Agamemnon,” says Bollocks.

“A freshman translated it,” explains Sweetbottom. “So it was already pretty rough. And we had freshman actors in the production, and naturally they didn’t know how to act, much less do Greek tragedy. I was one of them.

“We only had three shows. We are currently in the record books as putting up the worst show that’s ever played at Illinois State. We’re legendary.”

What? How come?

“It was just the worst show ever done there. Lights fell from the ceiling every night. People broke body parts. I broke three toes during the production trying to die onstage playing Agamemnon.”

It’s rough being the lead.

“No, I was the replacement. The original Agamemnon left. He was the only good actor in the cast, so he figured out what was up and he left right away.”

Sweetbottom recalls a freshman who played, rather overzealously, a watchman. “One night, he ripped down the entire black curtain on his way onstage. He’s supposed to carry on a giant trunk. But that night it caught on the curtain. We tryto get his attention, to tell him to wait, but he keeps walking onstage, and the curtain is slowly tears off. We just watch it slowly fall apart.”

He’s not even particularly proud of his own contribution to the show. “There’s a line in Agamemnon that people still make fun of me for. Even people who didn’t see the production. When I die, and I’m offstage, I say: “I am hit… I am hurt to death… I am hit again.” And throughout the entire rehearsal process I said, I’m not ready to do it. Well, when will you be ready? I’ll be ready at the show, I said.”

Were you?

“No. I just screamed it.”

Since we’re still on the subject, I ask him how he broke his toes.

“When I came onstage, I had to walk down this two-step platform. I’m staggering, because I’m dying. I’ve been hurt to death. So I bash my feet on the first step of this platform. And then, stupidly, I do it on the second step as well. Then I have to die onstage. So I’m just lying there, and I’m dead, and my toes are broken, and I’m tired, and I’m breathing visibly. It was a pretty convincing death, all told.”

Bollocks brings us back to the present. “Gabe brought this idea to me. He suggested that we do Agamemnon, but that we put it up as a company that just doesn’t have their act together. So, we got a bunch of our friends together to tell their most horrible and embarrassing theatre stories. We gleaned a bunch of ideas off of that, and then we started writing.”

But not as themselves, right? As… Tonee Bollocks and Gabriel Sweetbottom?

“Right. We wanted this whole project to look as if it were coming from a real community theatre. So we created a website for DC State Players, and we decided to promote the show with some videos. We shot this video series for the website as if a film company had come in to shoot a documentary about community theatres, and they decide to interview us. The crew asks us questions, and we answer them in the most sincere way possible,” explains Bollocks.

“The answers are pretty spot-on,” says Sweetbottom.

It’ll be interesting, I suggest, to watch what might happen to DC State Players after the run of Agamemnon. What, exactly, will be the legacy of this ill-fated pseudo-troupe? We’ll have to wait and see.

“The original idea for this production was much less in-your-face,” says Bollocks. “Originally we thought that we could have the audience not really know what they’re going to see before they get into the space. But then at some point we decided that just telling people to come see a community theatre doing Agamemnon in Fringe probably wasn’t going to bring a lot of butts into seats. So we had to spell it out a little more for people. We did actually want people to come and watch the show.”

“Yes. Our original idea was more subtle and less of a broad comedy. There was simply going to be a sub-story going on under the story of the Agamemnon show. But at some point in the process we just said, ‘screw it!’ We’re just going to rewrite this whole thing and play off the strengths of the actors we have. And when anything went wrong or surprised us during the process, we just wrote it into the story.”

Still, Sweetbottom assures me, it lands. “All of the characters may be exaggerated, but you can relate to it. If you’ve ever gone through a rehearsal process, or if you’ve ever gone to see bad theatre, you can relate to this show.”

“I think if you’re in the arts at all, or you see theatre, you can’t watch this show without recognizing some of these moments,” Bollocks adds.

If you ask me, it sounds a lot like Christopher Guest’s classic 1996 comedy film Waiting For Guffman.

“It’s funny,” says Sweetbottom, “because originally when I came to Tony with this idea, I hadn’t thought of that. And that’s what he said to me. Isn’t that just like Waiting For Guffman?”

They stare at each other for a moment.

“But we decided to go with it,” says Bollocks. “And we did tell all of our actors at the beginning of the rehearsal process to watch these kinds of comedies. Spinal Tap. Waiting For Guffman. Noises Off.”

I ask them if the actors found the films helpful.

“I don’t think they ever watched them.”

———————–

Tonee and Gabe share their marketing tips

Watch the entire video series.

*Finally, the truth can be told.  Tonee Bollocks and Gabriel Sweetbottom have assumed the original identities as Tony Bollocks and Gabriel Swee.