As presidential election nears, Brian Copeland reprises popular show
It’s the fall of 2024 and I find myself doing something I thought I’d never do again. I’m reprising the show I created during the 2020 election cycle on life in the age of Trump. When the show ended prematurely in 2020 due to the COVID shutdown and President Joe Biden won the election, I thought I was done. Former President Donald Trump was gone. The tenor of the country would change. We’d find a way to heal the enormous chasm that had been created since his infamous golden escalator ride in 2015 and we’d become one nation again. My show, “The Great American Sh*t Show,” was moot. It didn’t even remotely occur to me that there would be an audience, let alone a need, for this play ever again. America would be a nation once more instead of warring tribal factions.
Well, here we go again.
“The Great American Sh*t Show” started by accident. In 2019, my longtime director and collaborator, David Ford, the dean of the solo play art form, was putting together a festival featuring several of his students. The festival was called Times Unseen and its theme was monologues on how the fabric of the country had changed and how America’s traditional norms were being swept into the ashcan. The festival consisted primarily of new performers doing their first solo work. Ford asked me, as a veteran performer, if I’d do him a favor and write a special 15-minute piece with some of my musings on where we were as a country. I had so much stewing in my gut, I readily agreed.
I decided to start at the beginning. I wrote a piece I called “There’s Something in the Air.” It was about that surreal morning after the 2016 election when former President Donald Trump, despite all the hate, vitriol, misogyny, xenophobia and racism he espoused, stunned the world and captured the White House. I wrote about driving from the East Bay into San Francisco and inadvertently cutting off a car. The vehicle caught up to me, and the driver, a bearded, middle-aged White man, rolled down his window and yelled the N-word at the top of his lungs. I grew up in a predominantly White East Bay suburb in the 1970s and being subjected to that epithet was a daily occurrence in my childhood, but it had been decades since I had been exposed to it. There was a righteousness in the driver’s voice that was almost like he had somehow been granted permission to spew that venom in public. I knew in that moment that my country was now different.
Legendary San Francisco Solo Artist Charlie Varon was in the audience the night I performed it and as I exited the stage, he was on my heels.
“That was great,” he said. “I felt every word that came out of your mouth. We should do a show.”
Ford agreed to direct us, and we were off to the races. It was decided that Varon and I would each do two pieces. We had some goals. We wanted to express how we felt about the current circumstances, how to navigate them, encourage people to speak up and, most importantly, let our audiences know that they weren’t crazy. What had been happening was not “normal.”
The response exceeded our wildest expectations. Every performance sold-out. People told us that we were avatars expressing all the anger, sadness and frustration they’d been experiencing for years now but didn’t know how to articulate. We were saying what they were thinking and feeling. Some even told us that, for them, it was almost like a therapy session.
Several people emailed me in recent months requesting that I bring the show back.
“We need it now more than ever,” one woman wrote.
After careful consideration, I agreed. Varon is busy phone banking and knocking on doors talking to voters so I’m solo this go-round. I rewrote the show to reflect 2024 and added new monologues. I’m doing this play again for two reasons. First, to remind people that we can’t allow the normalization of the abnormal. Second, to let them know, in what is hopefully a funny and entertaining way, that this is no time for complacency. If ever there was a time to act, this is it.
• Details: Copeland performs “The Great American Sh*t Show” at 7 p.m. Oct. 17 at the Marin Center Showcase Theatre at 20 Avenue of the Flags in San Rafael. Admission is $34 to $45. For more information, go to tickets.marincenter.org. To see other show dates in the Bay Area, go to briancopeland.com/gass.