The Exponential Festival and Target Margin Theater are proud to present BLOODSHOT by underlords. Written by Elinor T. Vanderburg and directed by Sanaz Ghajar, this vicious psychocaper pits the deprived against the depraved in a sleep-starved, pulp-inspired mystery, unreliably narrated and accompanied by sonic interplay by The Mombs. Learn more about Elinor, BLOODSHOT and underlords in this interview for our TMT Blog.
Target Margin Theater (TMT): Insomnia, epidemics, big pharma, and unreliable narrators populate the world of BLOODSHOT. What drew you into this world?
Elinor T Vanderburg (EV): Alas – it’s our world; it’s been our world all along! I have always been compelled by the “dark side”, and am deeply fascinated by the forces that drive ugliness in our society. However, I am a very porous person, very sensitive, which makes my penchant for the grotesque a little precarious, but I am adamant about leaning into where I am soft – it keeps me empathetic, which is both my sword and shield in a reality that makes less and less sense to me with each news cycle. In BLOODSHOT, insomnia serves as a metaphor for world-weariness, frayed nerves; we find ourselves with characters who have been separated from their ability to dream. This world encapsulates the way I’ve felt the last several years, overwhelmed with bad news that challenges every lesson on logic and kindness I was taught when I was a child. Between the police shootings of unarmed black men that were highly medialized in 2016, to Trump’s presidency, to the institutionalized oppression of women, minorities, and LGBTQ communities, and to the denial of the climate crisis, I feel like I am about to e x p l o d e – with sadness and with rage and with hopelessness – but like – I need to reply to some emails and my friend invited me to brunch tomorrow and this new Kermit the Frog meme is really funny. I didn’t know the dystopia would stream my favorite songs, you know? How can we hold the horror and the mundane side by side? We do this every day, seemingly with some success, and it’s wild. At first glance, BLOODSHOT isn’t explicitly about any of this, but… keep looking. Keep feeling, and ask yourself if what you’re feeling during the performance feels at all familiar to you. These daunting realities are stitched into the lining of this story, and, hopefully, will resonate with anyone who struggles with how to preserve their mental and emotional health during fraught times.
TMT: Who is underlords? Can you tell us more about your company’s history?
EV: underlords is the very informal, very collaborative horizontalist theater collective that my partner Drew and I started in 2017 when we co-wrote and produced our science-fiction musical, The Human Incubator. We wanted to make work within a structure that honored the underdog and approached topics from a deeply contextual standpoint, getting at a subject from underneath itself to create a play-world in which all collaborators and audience members can thrive, whether it is in presenting a variety of outlooks on the debate of reproductive ethics as in Incubator, or staging a bilingual English-American Sign Language adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (SheNYC 2019). We welcome a myriad of viewpoints and push for inclusivity of culture, concept, and collaborator. Our logo is u with a crown, because u are royalty no matter who u are, and anyone who participates in a production is a defacto underlord, forevermore. It’s a work-in-progress (isn’t it all?) and we’re finding ourselves with each collaboration.
TMT: You are a playwright / performance & voice over artist / illustrator, collaborating with director Sanaz Ghajar, choreographer Benjamin Stanley Hobbs and live musicians, The Mombs. How did you all come together? How did you collaborate? And following your Opening Night, where are you all now?
EV: A lot of the team met as students, long before we had a sense of the type of work we wanted to make. Matt Gliva, the singer and guitarist of The Mombs, was actually the very first person I met in New York – he pointed me in the direction of our university orientation after an ill-fated cab ride on the day of the Republican National Convention. I lived with Sanaz and Ben in our freshman year dorms. Mombs saxophonist Drew and I were rivals in playwriting class before we fell in love and began to write together. I think it’s safe to say that no one has seen me fuck up more as an artist and as a human than the four of them, which is one of the reasons it’s so exciting to make work as a team. The respect runs deep and there is an appreciation for the missteps of our past as well as a shared enthusiasm for our growth as individuals and as collaborators. The love runs deep. Our process feels very natural because we have this baseline understanding of one another and our work, and it lets us be fearless and support one another’s strengths. It’s been a blast and our tastes are whet for the next project.
TMT: During last year’s The Exponential Festival, you shared the stage with Moe Yousuf (Assoc. Artistic Director of Target Margin), Taylor Reynolds (The Movement Theatre Company), and Wednesday Derrico (Experimental Bitch Presents) in a panel about Responsibility, moderated by Russell G. Jones. Your guiding questions were: what is your responsibility to your community? What is your responsibility to the idea of morality? What is your responsibility to your legacy? What is your responsibility to your ancestors? How are these questions resonating with you one year later?
EV: I love that you’ve called these questions to the witness stand! That was so much fun and I love those folks so much. I was actually thinking a lot about BLOODSHOT during that panel, questioning whether or not such a grim and gory piece merited an existence on the stage. I believe that creators have a responsibility to create their work in a manner that represents their values and summons a mode of being that is better than what came before it, but that that does not start or end with the piece itself: it’s how you create with your collaborators, it’s how you address your audience, it’s how you work with your hosts. Maybe one artistic happening won’t stop a war or fix the climate crisis, but a supportive rehearsal room can beget another in the future, and another… and change a culture little by little, one space at a time. For me, it’s about happiness. Not much can happen when you’re fighting unhappiness, so anything I can do to keep the people around me feeling seen, heard, respected and loved, is what I want to offer to the communities around me. It is the least any of us can do.
TMT: Thank you and The Exponential Festival for being here with us at The Doxsee!
EV: Thank YOU! We feel so at home. Y’all run good ships. Keep doing what you do!