The Applause Machine: Part One—FAILURE IS MARKET RESEARCH
The first play Jackson Wallace ever sold was about a widower who built a time machine out of patio furniture.
Not literally patio furniture. The producers made him change that.
The machine became an antique wardrobe because one of the investors had seen The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and believed audiences understood wardrobes. Audiences did not understand aluminum lawn chairs, apparently, despite spending roughly one-third of their adult lives sitting in them while eating meat burned over propane.
The widower became thirty-two instead of sixty because sixty-year-old men, according to the commercial producer, did not inspire audiences to imagine the future.
The dead wife became a dead fiancée because marriage was “less aspirational.”
The ending, in which the man discovered that the past could not be changed and chose to live with his grief, was replaced by a musical number called “Tomorrow Has a Handle.”
The show closed during previews.
The reviews said it lacked courage.
Jackson kept the clipping. He kept all the clippings. He kept them in a dented metal file cabinet dragged from apartment to apartment, divorce to divorce, career pivot to humiliating career pivot. The cabinet was beige, the official color of crippling disappointment, and weighed more than most theatrical grants.
By sixty, Jackson had written thirty-seven plays.
Three had been produced commercially. Two had been workshopped. Seven had received readings in black-box theaters where the actors outnumbered the audience.
One had been described by a local critic as “an intriguing failure,” which Jackson considered the best review of his life because at least it acknowledged intrigue.
The rest existed in milk crates, Dropbox folders, obsolete hard drives, and one box labeled TAXES because no thief would ever open it.
He had written comedies about divorce, tragedies about ambition, satires about nonprofit institutions, and a musical about a regional sales conference trapped in a hotel during a biblical flood. He had written for rich patrons, poor actors, frightened boards, ambitious artistic directors, and audiences who wanted to be challenged so long as the challenge ended by nine-forty and included validated parking.
Each time, someone had explained why the work could not be itself.
Too dark.
Too political.
Not political enough.
Too male.
Too old.
Too white.
Too angry.
Too sad.
Too funny about sad things.
Not enough redemption.
Too much redemption, which was apparently sentimental.
One producer told him the second act needed a “hope event.”
Jackson asked what that meant.
The producer said, “You know. An event that gives us hope.”
Jackson said, “The characters are being eaten by the sea.”
The producer stared at him with the dead patience of a preschool teacher waiting for a child to pull a crayon from his left nostril.
“Maybe,” the producer said, “the sea learns something.”
For years Jackson believed the problem was access. Then he believed the problem was marketing. Then he believed the problem was networking, which is prostitution conducted near cubes of cheese and plastic cups filled with Trader Joe’s red.
He attended galas.
He shook hands.
He remembered names.
He forgot names and pretended not to.
He laughed at jokes told by people who had never been funny because their names were listed in fourteen-point type under MAJOR SUPPORT PROVIDED BY.
He taught workshops called Finding Your Authentic Voice while carefully hiding his own beneath a blazer purchased at a Village Discount.
He directed corporate holiday shows.
He wrote copy for a chain of urgent-care clinics.
He hosted panel discussions about the future of theater attended exclusively by people whose careers depended on theater having no future.
He managed ushers in historic venues where the light bulbs were insured for more than the staff.
He trained teenagers to evacuate four thousand people during a fire while executives held meetings about whether flashlights encouraged an atmosphere of panic.
He learned the first law of institutions:
Competence is tolerated only until it becomes visible.
The second law:
Nobody wants a solution that reveals who caused the problem.
The third:
The person who says “We’re all family here” is deciding which family member to leave at the gas station.
Jackson had been left at many gas stations.
His third wife left him because he worked too much.
His second wife left because he did not work enough.
His first wife said both explanations were probably correct.
By the time Jackson lost his job managing the front of house at the Belasco Crown Theatre, he had become nearly unemployable in the specific way older men become unemployable: he knew how things worked and had stopped pretending they worked well.
The official reason was insubordination.
The unofficial reason was that he had pointed out that the emergency plan required ushers to lead patrons through a hallway permanently blocked by storage boxes.
His supervisor, a woman named Myra who wore pink spectacles without prescription lenses, said his tone was “not collaborative.”
Jackson asked whether fire was collaborative. Myra said this was exactly the kind of response she meant.
He was escorted from the building by a security guard he had personally trained.
The guard apologized.
That afternoon, Jackson sat at a tavern beneath the elevated train and drank beer beneath a television showing a pharmaceutical commercial. Silver-haired couples kayaked while a voice listed possible side effects including stroke, infection, suicidal thinking, excessive diarrhea, and an overwhelming desire to buy a kayak.
On the bar beside him sat a legal pad.
He wrote:
WHAT WOULD I MAKE IF NOBODY COULD STOP ME?
He stared at the sentence.
The train passed overhead, shaking dust loose from the ceiling. A little dust fell into his beer. He drank it. At sixty, you stop sending things back.
He wrote:
A PLAY ABOUT A CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL THAT HARVESTS SADNESS.
A COMEDY ABOUT A SCHOOL SHOOTING DRILL.
A MUSICAL IN WHICH GOD APPLIES FOR UNEMPLOYMENT.
A LOVE STORY BETWEEN A CENSOR AND THE BOOK HE BURNS.
A FAMILY DRAMA WHERE THE FAMILY IS AMERICA AND EVERYONE HAS A GUN UNDER THE DINNER TABLE.
A MONOLOGUE DELIVERED BY A HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR WHILE SHE DISMEMBERS AN EMPLOYEE.
Then he wrote:
NO WORKSHOPS.
NO TALKBACKS.
NO DONOR PREVIEWS.
NO SAFE VERSION.
NO HOPE EVENT.
He stopped.
He circled the last line until the paper tore.
Three months later, Jackson leased a former appliance warehouse under the Kennedy Expressway.
The rent was criminally low because trains screamed behind the building, trucks shuddered in front of it, and the roof leaked in the shape of South America. The building had no proper lobby, no orchestra pit, no fly system, and one toilet that flushed only when threatened.
It was perfect.
He named it The Wound.
The logo was a black mouth with one gold tooth.
The mission statement was printed above the entrance:
NOTHING IS SACRED. NOT EVEN YOU.
The opening production was called Mercy Fuck. It was a three-hour comedy about a hospice nurse who euthanized wealthy patients and used their money to fund a failing community arts center. In the second act, the dead returned as members of the board.
The first audience consisted of thirty-seven people.
Eight left.
Three demanded refunds.
One threw a program at an actor.
A woman in the second row laughed so hard she vomited into her purse.
Jackson knew he had found his audience.
The reviews were apocalyptic.
“Repellent.”
“Immoral.”
“An assault on dignity.”
“An astonishingly sustained act of cultural vandalism.”
The last quote went on the poster.
The second production, Gender Reveal, ended with a suburban couple burning down a forest while trying to determine the sex of God.
The third, The Forgiveness Industry, featured a motivational speaker who hunted survivors of trauma and charged them to stop being victims.
The fourth was a children’s puppet show called Consent Is Complicated. It was not for children.
The fifth, The Patriot’s Colonoscopy, involved a United States senator, a live camera, and the physical discovery of a tiny lobbyist living in his lower intestine.
People came.
At first they came to be angry.
Then they came to be seen being angry.
Then they came because tickets became difficult to obtain.
Nothing makes Americans crave an experience like the suspicion that someone else has been excluded from it.
The Wound became fashionable.
Young people wore its logo. Older people denounced it on television and quietly requested house seats. Academics wrote papers explaining that the plays were not actually offensive if interpreted correctly.
Jackson rejected every interpretation.
A documentary crew followed him for six months and cut him from the final film because he made the young director uncomfortable.
The theater sold out nightly.
With success came committees. Jackson banned them.
With money came donors. Jackson accepted the money and declined the advice.
With celebrity came invitations. Jackson attended when food was promised.
He hired actors no commercial theater would touch: old women, fat men, damaged beauties, stutterers, former convicts, one actress with a glass eye who could remove it during curtain calls. He paid them on time, which made him more radical than the plays.
He hired stagehands over fifty. He hired ushers who had been fired for correcting patrons.
He kept a jar in the lobby labeled APOLOGY FUND. Every time a staff member apologized unnecessarily, they put in a dollar. The jar funded whiskey.
Within two years The Wound had become the most successful nonprofit theater in the city while refusing to register as a nonprofit. Jackson explained that nonprofit theater was commercial theater with less money and more meetings.
Then came the night of The Little Fascist.
The play concerned a timid elementary-school music teacher who discovered that authoritarianism was the only method that made the children play in tune. He began with seating charts and ended with uniforms. The final scene involved eighty children singing a perfect chord while their parents were loaded onto buses.
There were no actual children in the production. The children were portrayed by exhausted middle-aged actors wearing papier-mâché heads.
The audience stood at the end.
Not everyone.
Some screamed.
Some booed.
Some stood because others were standing.
Standing ovations are often panic attacks performed vertically.
Jackson walked onto the stage.
He usually avoided speeches. Speeches were where theater people went to turn an evening of art into a hostage situation. But that night he looked out at the audience and saw donors, critics, artists, politicians, students, subscribers, enemies, and several former wives.
He saw people thrilled by the freedom of the place and terrified that the freedom might eventually point at them.
Jackson stepped into the light.
“You keep calling this place brave,” he said. “That is how I know you expect us to stop.
“You call art brave when it attacks your enemies. You call it irresponsible when it notices you. You want a theater that walks into the village square, pulls down the pants of the people you hate, and confirms that beneath the pants they have the wrong genitals, the wrong politics, the wrong religion, the wrong vocabulary, the wrong reusable grocery bag.
“That is not art. That is a campaign rally with props.
“You say you want to be challenged but you don’t. You want to experience the flattering sensation of recognizing a challenge designed for someone else. You want to leave the theater with your values intact, your villains booed, and your parking validated. You want revolution as a matinee, outrage with an intermission, danger that ends before the babysitter charges overtime.
“Comfort is not peace. Comfort is anesthesia. Comfort is the little blue pill the culture slips into your drink so you won’t notice the building is on fire.
“Every institution eventually becomes a mattress store. Schools, churches, newspapers, political parties, marriages, theaters. They begin with an idea and end with everybody testing the lumbar support.
“The job of art is not to tuck you in. The job of art is to sit on your chest at three in the morning and whisper the name you have spent your whole life trying not to hear.
“If you come here and never feel accused, we have failed. If you leave here certain you are one of the good people, we have failed. If the play confirms every opinion you carried in, we have charged you money to look into a mirror, and you already own six of those.
“I spent forty years trying to give audiences what they wanted. You wanted likable characters. You wanted uplift. You wanted a redemptive ending. You wanted the sea to learn something.
“Then I stopped. And that is when you came. You came because, beneath all the slogans and customer surveys and focus-group sludge, you are starving to be told the truth in a room where nobody can change the channel.
“The truth is not that the other side is evil. The truth is that cruelty is portable. The truth is that every halo has an adjustable strap. The truth is that given the right fear, the right permission, and a decent dental plan, almost anyone will operate the camps.
“That includes me. That includes you.
“Welcome to The Wound. Nothing is sacred. Not even you.”
For seven seconds, the room was silent. Then the applause began. It grew until it became less an expression of approval than weather.
Jackson stood inside it.
He did not see the three people in gray coats at the rear of the balcony. They did not applaud. They watched.
One held a small black notebook.
One held a device that measured audience response.
The third smiled like a doctor who had found something interesting on an X-ray.
Three weeks later, Jackson received a letter from the Ministry of Cultural Hygiene. The letter thanked him for his contribution to cultural discourse. It requested a meeting. Jackson threw it away.
The second letter used the word required. He burned it in an ashtray.
The third letter arrived without an envelope, sitting on his pillow when he came home.
On it were four words:
WE ENJOYED YOUR SPEECH.
[TO BE CONTINUED…]
∞∞∞
Don Hall is a writer, storyteller, and creative mercenary whose wildly varied career—from homeless busker and Chicago public school teacher to theater producer, jazz musician, radio executive, and front-of-house manager at some of Chicago's most iconic venues—has given him an endless supply of stories and an abiding distrust of certainty.
He is the author of Belief Is a Thermonuclear Warhead, co-editor of The Literate Ape, and publisher of the Substack The Attention of Fools, where he writes about culture, politics, creativity, and the glorious absurdity of being human.
