Suck It Wimps: Bringing Down "The Human Condition"

Let’s get something straight, right from the get-go: This is Molotov Theatre Group. It’s not Snuggle Bunnies Theatre. It’s not Care Bears Theatre. People looking for their share of warm fuzzies or deep thinking can just hold hands around the campfire with all the other navel-gazing space cowboys.

This ain’t your mother’s theatre company. Don’t come around here looking for spiritual insight into our place in the cosmic muffin. We don’t buy it, we don’t sell it, and we sure as hell aren’t going to waste anybody’s time pretending we have the answers – or that we care what the answers may be.

Molotov Theatre Group was founded because we were tired of the boring, clichéd “struggle to understand the human condition” that every second or third theatre company on the planet claims as its birthright. Screw that noise. Why bother wrapping a riddle in an enigma in a baloney sandwich?

Why ask why? Shit happens – sometimes for a reason, sometimes for no reason at all. People hurt people. Stuff gets broken. Things fall apart. Do you really want to waste your money on figuring out that crap, when there’s much more gut-busting crap you could be spending your money on? If not, then great, you’ve finally got a place to go: Molotov Theatre Group.

When the founders of Molotov realized we all had the same interest in the nearly forgotten tradition of the Grand Guignol French theatre of horror, we knew we were on to something. This was theatre for the common folks. Horror, disease, degradation – the regular shitstorm of accelerated weirdness that spells out every clock-punching hour of life in the world today.

We are the farthest thing from a critic’s darling. Molotov’s work has been called out in the press as “sophomoric,” “gratuitous” and “disappointing.” We’ve even turned off some people because they say we don’t respect our audiences.

Hell, yes, we’ll play that game. Look up the word “sophomoric.” Hey, don’t even bother, we’ll do it for you: “Conceited and overconfident of knowledge but poorly informed and immature.”

This from the bunch who think they can get insight into the “human condition” from a play. Excuse us while we take a moment to sigh.

Sigh.

Look, if you want to spend your time thinking about stuff that can’t be answered, more power to you. To you, we probably do come across as sophomoric, gratuitous and disappointing, because we don’t expect to have the heavy knots untied and laid out on a silver platter in 90 minutes plus intermission.

We don’t explore the human condition. We hold a mirror up to the sweaty, anxious, paranoid dark side of each of us. We whistle in the graveyard, we laugh on the way to the gallows. We do it because that’s what people do.

The thing in itself is the thing in itself. We make the dark funny or creepy. Because of that, the light is brighter by comparison. So who respects the audience more – the moldy snoot who thinks the tough questions can be answered in a few hundred lines, or the person who shakes you by the shoulders and tells you to OPEN YOUR EYES, TAKE A GOOD LOOK AROUND, AND THINK FOR YOURSELF?

We’re not for everybody. If you think you can handle it, there’s a place here for you.

For all the rest of you wimps:

Suck it.