Prepping For Peepshow

Now that rehearsals for Suburban Peepshow are underway and I've finally reacclimated myself to New York from San Diego (I didn't realize it would take as long as it did), I figured I'd let you guys know a little bit about what's going on with this new show...

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During this competent dramedy…I experienced bizarre hallucinations, nausea, confusion and an irritability verging on dyspepsia. … While sitting through yet another living-room drama about the endlessly fascinating troubles of suburbanites, you find yourself longing for pirates to crash through the kitchen window or zombies to shamble through the front door and chew the protagonist's face off.

—David Cote, in his review of Rabbit Hole for Time Out

This quote from Mr. Cote — along with Steven Soderbergh’s film Schizopolis and Blake Edwards’ A Shot in the Dark — rattled around in my brain for quite some time just before and during the writing of the play that my company Nosedive Productions is about to stage in a couple of weeks.

Writing Suburban Peepshow was surprisingly fast and painless, which is rare for a guy who often spends his time gnashing his teeth and biting his knuckles while sitting in front of the keyboard wondering what to write next. I had the idea for the opening scene one morning and was giggling like an idiot to myself, making sure I would write it down just to get it out of my system once I headed to my day job.

By the end of that day, I had written about 20 or so pages, really just going along for the ride and seeing where the characters would take me.

The next day, I wrote another 15 pages.

On the third day, I finished the rough draft.

All the while I was writing the script, I continued giggling like an idiot to myself.

Our previous play was The Adventures of Nervous-Boy (A Penny Dreadful), a pitch-black comedy that delved into the realm of horror. For those of you who saw that play and are now expecting to see Nervous-Boy 2: Anxious in Vegas, I’m afraid that you will be sorely disappointed. Suburban Peepshow is a full-on flat-out silly comedy.

The sole goal of me writing it was to make myself laugh.

The sole goal of Nosedive Productions staging this is to make you laugh.

When we open on April 5, I hope you have as much fun watching the play as I had writing it and also that you enjoy Mac Rogers’s curtain-raiser comedy, “Trailers,” as much as I did when he handed it in.

Giggling like an idiot,

James “New Girl” Comtois