"It takes an audience to tell us we're being self-indulgent."

I've spent the past week in New York, helping playwright Tommy Smith and musician/comedian/spaceman Reggie Watts work on a new show called Dutch A/V. The line above was the week's money quote.

The first part of the Dutch A/V project involved us going to Amsterdam in March with high-tech spy glasses: normal-looking glasses with hidden cameras and microphones that turn your head into an audio-visual sponge.

We filmed tourists, tramps, prostitutes, students, drunks, hash bars, architecture old and new, alleyways, markets: It was an exercise in video flaneurie, per Susan Sontag's definition:

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world ‘picturesque.’

We reunited in New York this week to leverage the footage into a show, with songs and monologues by Reggie and a few other folks.

At this point, Dutch A/V is just a workshop production, a rough draft. I didn't expect anybody to show up to see a rough draft—but they did. They showed all the way up, nearly selling the place out for the first two nights. By the third, we were overflowing and turning people away. (Admittedly, it's a small place, only 30 or 40 seats. But still: surprising.)

Reggie is his own draw, but he couldn't have accounted for everyone who came and bought tickets. "No, no, that's the way it works," Tommy Smith said. "People come to see workshop productions here."

I have trouble imagining a rough-draft show in Seattle selling out most of a weekend. When Seattle audiences do pay to see a workshop (pre-Broadway tryouts at the 5th Ave Theater, Mike Daisey's Cargo Cult), the shows aren't perceived as rough drafts. They're more like sneak previews.

A Seattle-based playwright (who frequently bitches about the lack of a local-play/workshop culture in Seattle) wrote to me earlier this week: "Are you telling me you had to climb on a plane to NYC to do your first workshop? Did I tell you or did I tell you? What else can we expect from you now? Maybe a production of American Buffalo? Dan Savage as Teach, Paul Constant as Donny and you as Bob?"

Hardee fucking har.

Here's what workshops are for, as far as I could tell—the pleasant surprise of hearing people laugh at jokes you forgot were funny and (more importantly) the unpleasant surprise of hearing people not-laugh at jokes you still find funny.

Because it takes an audience to tell you you're being self-indulgent.

Now for your Sunday-night Reggie:

(If you get an insurmountable "explicit lyrics" warning, try this grainier version of the same bit at SXSW.)