I went to 12 Minutes Max at On the Boards last night. 12 Minutes Max is a night of performance (mostly dance, but also theater, music, etc.) by locals who, if they are selected by that installment’s curators, each get 12 minutes to do whatever it is they do. It’s a way for performers who are developing new work, or who don’t yet have an audience, to perform in a legitimate space, in front of a paying crowd. Predictably, a lot of it wasn’t thrilling.

But then, in the very last piece, the audience got their money’s worth. The main reason I went to 12 Minutes Max last night was to see SuttonBeresCuller do their thing. They are great—geniuses,actually—but they’re strangers to the theater environment. (They usually build their own environments and put them in unlikely places.) But holy shit they should do more theater. Culler and Sutton, as old men, sat at old desks and stamped approval on piles upon piles of paperwork, and Beres, stuffed into a plexiglass cube downstage center, wrote (backwards!) on the walls of the cube and spit cards and rolls of receipt paper through a slit above his head. Eventually he breathed enough fog into the cube so that you could see what he’d written. Meanwhile, a file clerk brought out more and more and more and more and more and more and more paper, a secretary came by, a cryptic CEO type came by, and the file clerk brought out still more stacks of paper, until the old men, unable to keep up, were obscured by towers of it. It teetered. It sometimes slid around. The amount of paper involved was unbelievable. Then the file clerk slipped on a piece of paper downstage center and startled the audience with a flying, impressive, unexpected, spread-eagle, stomach-down fall. What ensued was gradual madness, ending in paper exploding from the wings of the stage. There were no words ever. The characters never broke. The spectacle didn’t deter them. Maybe there weren’t big ideas in this, but it wasn’t about ideas: it was about stylized anxiety. It was impossible to look away from. And then the workday ended, and Beres was left in his clear cube, and the office went dark.

The audience roared. I’ve done it no justice here, but it was awesome.

John, Ben, Zac: Are you listening? Theater in this town sucks. Please do more theater.