November’s show, “It’s about Damn Time,” had a piece in it called “Porn Dogs,” with Chris Mathews, Bridgette Elizabeth Moody, and Thomas Michael Whyte III, written by Mathews.
It was sheer perfection for what it was. I sat there gasping, and said to myself at the end, They’re having a Pulp Fiction moment.
Generative art is not one unending stretch of greatness. Like waves in the sea, where three or four small waves are followed by a large wave, there are highs and lows in the artistic caliber of the pieces.
That is, if you don’t sell out artistically. My friend Andrew Golla used to say that a lot of in-demand directors had a gimmick. Let’s say the gimmick was a parachute. In every production, they would figure out a way to involve a parachute in the set, and when theatres were casting about for a director, they’d say, “Hey, let’s get the parachute guy!” And in he would come, with the same old thing that worked before, but wasn’t really fantastic all the time.
So here we are with this group, DAMN (Dramatists and Actors Meeting Now), that I have only barely started to get to know, and am starting to produce with, even if I am sure that Chris Mathews and I were producing at the same fringe festivals thirty years ago, but not in the same room! So we never met, because I ended up going in lots of different directions and doing theatre in other cities, and it is only just now that I am finding him and his company.
So I was frankly skeptical that they would be able to top that last piece. Like Pulp Fiction, it was such a perfect concatenation of artistic themes, ripeness, casting, and The Right Play somehow, that we must humbly say, Okay. I will not dare to hope for that again.
For another four plays.
But Mathews has impressed me. One Ton o’ Fun was not . . . exactly . . . Porn Dogs, but it was a wise, light touch of meta-theatre, and it really pulled the room together.
Steam Spiegel 
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