The P.A.P.P.i.D. Plea.

Hello All,

    It's me, Jeremiah Liend. Look, I've got this kickstarter, dig? I'm trying to crowdfund this play that I wrote. It is the third play in as many years that I have created, after determining to create a new play every year in order to submit something to the Pulitzer Prize board. It's a $50 application, you see? You send in copies of your manuscript, and an optional DVD, and according to the one person who has ever responded to my queries, the board looks entirely at the script, in order to determine their prize winner. The exact details of the process are apparently shrouded in secrecy, and this secrecy mentioned in response to a question set my mind spinning in a certain way.

    Although my first successful Kickstarter after 6 consecutive unsuccessful attempts, I thought producing 21st Century Play was going to kill me. It took years off of my life, and lost me enough money to make me feel bad about myself as an artist, student, and parent for some time. I thought I was going to have a heart attack, over the course of three weeks. I had to rewrite the script. I pulled the set up, from the ground. No one had used the Black Box in Bangsberg for 4 years. But, there was life, in that old stage. Ghosts, too. But not scary ones. The cast and crew of that production solidified and galvanized an exclusive team as those on the planet I could count on most to provide excellence. Ours was the last performance in that space, before they converted it to something else. We sent in the scripts and the DVD to the Pulitzer Prize with a week to spare.

    While working on the finer details of the video production for kickstarter backers, I also began reworking a play that I had written a while ago called Four Garys. I wish I could say that it was more of a tribute to Gary Burger, but it might be too weird, for that. Sci-fi Space Puppet Theater. Puppets are hard, and expensive, and I actually got terribly screwed over by a professor who shall remain nameless. There were clear successes, such as finally being able to produce a show that was able to transition from rehearsal and preview in Bemidji to premier in Minneapolis. Everyone of us Garys in that show had a crisis of faith, at some point. But we pushed through, and made weird art. There were only three of us playing four Garys, because I couldn't lock down a performer in time. I ended up playing two Garys, which was a mindbending first. The greatest compliment I recieved was from a dear friend who was blown away when I explained there were only three of us. He saw a fourth Gary, somewhere. I like to think he was there. I lost money on Four Garys, but learned a lot, despite being unrighteously jacked out of actual educational credit. I have not heard about the prize, this year. It will help, not running up against Hamilton.

    As a consequence of shattered hubris, driving panic, and the aforementioned jacking, I threw a screaming diatribe at the screen and called it P.A.P.P.i.D.: Post Apocaluptic Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Into it I poured the sum total of my hate and loathing, and distilled that into the most hilarious of satiric offerings. It has a little something for everybody; the lovers, the haters, the artistic masturbators. Knife fights and hard drugs, you know? All the cool shit Tennessee Williams never lived to do. Kill humanity, for instance. Take humanity, and kill it all. Kill it all, over the course of a horrifying 387 year thermonuclear winter mutant holocaust. Hundreds of years in gasmasks, bathed in radioactive and biological decay. But through this, above, beyond, and below this, is the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Not to be confused with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an award that in no way serves our acronym. Because like cockroaches, and cockroachpeople, the theater critic is a rare breed that ignores the instinct to die. For so long as there are creators willing to bleed and die for art, there will be those willing to poop on it to make a buck. The board of six assembles in 2399 to decide the prize for 2400, and everything goes terribly wrong. But, it will not happen, if I do not fund things.

    So, this is my rambling plea to you, dear reader. Look at you, able to read two dense pages of incomprehensible web text when you could be otherwise scrolling FB or mean tweeting. Bless you. Thanks, for that. Why not go a little bit further, and like/share/kick this thing? Just, take the time to share it with every rich, bored, amazing person you know? I don't want $1,000,000, I need $3,000. For the cost of a lousy package at a resort where you get food poisoning, we can create an original play. On the cheap, but not for free. A comedy that makes people laugh with abandon in an age of apocalypse. We are not selling crazy, or wishes, or dry hand jobs through towels, because Kickstarter doesn't allow that sort of thing. Tickets and DVDs in advance, and a pizza party if you live in Bemidji. You'd do it for Jim Belushi. Stay weird, kids. There is only one love, and we all have to share it.

Regards,

Jeremiah T. Liend

Registered Dramatist

P.A.P.P.i.D. Kickstarter Shortlink: http://kck.st/2l5h1f1