Dressed in a form-fitting Annie Shirt and dark jeans, DJ Bucciarelli took 168 York Street Cafe‘s courtyard-turned-stage as Jack, flashing a devious grin at the audience before bringing the mic to his mouth.
The wee hours of Sunday morning had just commenced, and he had a serous message for the bar’s packed house, there to hear a selection from GRINDR: The Opera — An Unauthorized Parody.
Yeeeaaaaah, I wanna feel your skin, he sang out. Pa pa pa pa pound me now I’ll let you in.
Tiiiick tock tick tock.
I wanna use you like a sit and spin.
I’m just your cuuuuum dumpster.
“Seriously,” he said, in case members of the audience — some laughing, some more reserved — thought they had misheard him. “Consider me a dumpster for your cum.”
Courtesy GRINDR: The Opera
Par for the course in an opera about the smartphone app that has grown to notoriety as the world’s largest gay social network, and has gotten flack for its use as a hook-up platform?
Only partially, it turns out.
Instead, GRINDR: The Opera is a complex, witty, and thoughtful exploration — if not also an ambivalent embrace — of the app, and a look inside its quickly churning digital mind. In this universe, Grindr has been turned into a meddling character (drag and Broadway veteran Cacophony Daniels) with honey-soaked vocal chords and a real siren song to coat them. Propelled by her users’ ember-hot lust, she rules the day, and the internet is her extraordinary, galaxy-sized chess board. There she can orchestrate (read: mess with) the fates of four men — romantic Devon, maddening Tom, twinky Jack, and daddy Don — from different “tribes,” and a lot of silly and serious song ensues.
Lucy Gellman Photo
Cacophony Daniels (Courter Simmons) as Grindr
Even teasers such as Saturday’s, a special four-song preview strung together by virtuosic narrator Summer Orlando during a rip-rousing Robin Banks Show, hint at this. “Cum Dumpster” may be funny and lewd, but it ceases to be off-putting when it gives sort of beautiful and devastating explanation to Jack’s promiscuity. “You Can Leave” destroys the entire stereotype of the man-whore cruising Grindr for hookups, replacing it with a bottle of wine and a back-rub. Even Grindr herself surprises and delights at times, lifting her voice in verse as a spray of raucous Grindr exchanges pop up behind her.
In this abridged form as in the full opera, the bumblebee-clad app is not always a cruel mistress. Yes, she may glint and glow like something toxic, but she doesn’t always sting. She also sews relationships together (er, sometimes), brings new friends out of the woodwork, leads men to surprising moments of self-discovery and — in leaving no stone unturned, no power bottom undiscovered, and no iPhone-kindled romance unchecked — doubles as a possible, if unorthodox, safe space.
Summer Orlando as the narrator.
It’s this unexpected promise of a safe haven — particularly when it may be needed most — that makes the opera so endearing. Indeed, audience members walk away with the realization that Grindr can be anything they want it to be, including a not-hotbed of sexual promiscuity.
This, says writer and composer Erik Ransom, is what it’s always been all about. After assembling the cast, some members of which he identified on Grindr, he made it clear that he wanted to make the show about the multiple faces that an internet app could have.
“I’ve watched the gay world change a lot as a result of smartphones and of apps like this,” he said in an interview before Saturday’s performance. “I get the reputation that it [Grindr] has, but there are literally millions of users and millions of individual souls each searching for some sort of connection, and that’s what these apps facilitate. Of course there’s a preponderance of certain kinds of activity happening on certain apps that have certain reputations, but that’s let out into the heterosexual world with Tindr, which I think is much more reductive than Grindr.
“Reductive assumptions that I’ve found is ‘this [Grindr] is just for hookups. If you’re looking for anything other than a hookup, then there’s the question, like: What are you doing with your life? But someone came up to me after a reading and said: ‘I met my husband on Grindr.’ It happens every day.”
“I think it’s important to the show that a relationship does come out of being on Grindr,” added Mallory Wehrmann, the show’s producer.
Roberg as Tom.
That message resonated with the cast.
“I think it’s helped to get the gay scene out of the public bathroom a little bit,” offered Daniels as she prepared to add another pair of eyelashes.
“I rethink my relationship with Grindr all the time,” added Olle Roberg, who plays Tom. “Sometimes I hate it, sometimes I like it — but it does raise legitimate questions about why we’re on there and what type of human connection we’re all chasing, long term or short-term.”
Bucciarelli, getting dressed and prepping for “Cum Dumpster,” agreed wholeheartedly. He has an intimate but not romantic connection with the app, he explained; he’s in a relationship, but uses it to find new friends in the queer community when he’s working on tour.
“We were in Des Moines, Iowa — small town U.S.A. Where are you going to go and meet people, find the local watering hole? Me and my roommate weren’t looking for sex, we were just looking for like-minded individuals to hang out and say: ‘hey! What’s there to do in this town for two 24-year-old gays?’ It was a really cool experience to meet people in every city.”
“It’s totally campy and over the top,” he added of the show. “Except you’re laughing and laughing and laughing and suddenly you start feeling legitimate feelings for each character. The show doesn’t judge anybody. It doesn’t judge any of these ‘tribes,’ as they’re called. It just follows all of these people — how we all know them, how their webs might intertwine. Just because someone likes being promiscuous on Grindr doesn’t mean that they don’t have goals, aspirations, feelings. And it doesn’t mean that they’re always going to be promiscuous either.”