While Jen seems befuddled by her experience at To Be Determined by SuttonBeresCuller at On the Boards—she uses the adjectives "dull," "pointless," and "awful," but also writes that she "began to feel that it was me, not the 'event,' that was the problem"—I was delighted.

Jen describes the work (with photos) here, but in brief: SuttonBeresCuller took up residency in On the Boards, tore up all the theater seats and smashed a wooden airplane into them, roped together a huge number of banal objects (stuffed animals, VCRs, working televisions, a working electric fireplace, etc.) into a precarious-looking katamari*, built a trailer home made of lath, and invited a bunch of performers they found on Craigslist to do shows (magic, folksongs, makeovers, Bollywood dancing, hula-hoop dancing) throughout the space and throughout the night.

On the night I attended, people kept using four words that start with "c": Craigslist, context, culture, and Culture. The big-c/little-c culture conversation kept happening as people tried to calibrate their relationships to the performers, asking whether an unknown rapper or a guy playing "Hallelujah" on the acoustic guitar (culture) "deserved" to exist on the same stage that had seen Diamanda Galas, Romeo Castellucci, and Laurie Anderson (Culture)**.

One acquaintance from the theater scene (who has performed on the OtB stage) wondered aloud whether the performers "realized what an important theater they were in." Others were more nuanced in their conversation, noting their sometimes condescending reactions and talking about whether their instincts to privilege some categories of performance over others made them a) discerning or b) just narrow-minded, pretentious jerks. "Think about all the esoteric stuff you've seen on this stage that's left you cold," someone else said. "Is that esoteric stuff necessarily superior to a Bollywood dancer?"

Tellingly, most of the people who got tangled up in whether there's a difference between culture and Culture were on the younger side.***

More mature, established artists—in my case, Pat Graney; in Jen's case, Trimpin—seemed to love the topsy-turvyness. I did, too. Normally, I'm not interested in taxonomies of high and low, Culture and culture, but TBD revealed how seriously some people take those taxonomies and how uncomfortable they become when they feel those (imaginary and arbitrary) borders turning porous.

I'm with anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who wrote in a 1966: "Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."

The job descriptions of the philosopher, the anthropologist, and the critic aren't all that different—they all look around and wonder why people do the things that they do. Opera is culture. "Hallelujah" on the guitar is culture. A bunch of people standing in a theater with glasses of wine, wrestling with whether they should look down their noses at the performers is culture, too.

The most dynamic, interesting stuff at TBD was happening in people's heads. SBC occupied a theater, elegantly and cleverly dredged up tough questions, and made their audience uncomfortable with innocuous things like VCRs and magic shows.

By my lights, that is a successful work.

Tonight is the final night. Tickets are just $15. You can buy one here.

* Wikipedia says that "katamari" translates to "clump soul"—and the katamari of banal objects was definitely the clumped-together soul of TBD. Wikipedia also says that a popular Japanese video game based on the katamari story was designed for "novelty, ease of understanding, enjoyment, and humor." Is something that is novel, accessible, fun, and funny always-and-everywhere inferior to something that is familiar, thorny, sad, and dour? That's just one question TBD is asking.

** Some of those conversations reminded me of the "activities-people" conversation from The Breakfast Club (starting at 12:15 in the video below) with the jock and the princess as the representatives of Culture, and the nerd and the criminal as the representatives of culture: "Do you belong to the physics club?" "That's an academic club." "So?" "So academic clubs aren't the same as other kinds of clubs." "Ah... but to dorks like him, they are."

I know that's not a perfect comparison, but I couldn't stop thinking about it while I listened to people tie themselves into knots over how comfortable they would allow themselves to be with their own condescension.

(And the theme song of The Breakfast Club is eerily appropriate to this discussion: "Will you stand above me, look my way but never love me? Rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling, down down down.")

*** This reminded me of when I saw The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh at ACT Theatre in 2006. The story, about a writer, his developmentally disabled brother, and a rash of child murders, offended scads of people who walked out during intermission. Most of the walk-outs were young. I happened to be sitting next to an older lady with paper-thin skin and an elegant dress—every inch of her screamed out theater subscriber! "All these young people walked out at intermission," I said. "Why didn't you walk out?"

"Young people always walk out," she said. (I'm paraphrasing because I didn't take notes on the conversation.) "People always think the old people are easily offended, but it's really the young people who get offended."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because older people—those of us who aren't stupid—have lived so much longer, seen so much more," she said and touched my hand. "I've seen so much in my life, you know. It's very difficult to offend me."