Susan Stryker’s Hot Tub (19.06.)

Susan Stryker’s Hot Tub is a campy, experimental performance developed within the context of Poets Theater that reimagines classic fairy tales and mythological narratives from a transfeminist perspective. Set in a queer, mythically heightened underworld, the piece follows several characters on a quest for “the source” — a metaphor for transformation, collective empowerment, and trans* sociality. Combining absurd humor with political urgency, the work explores rage, care, and community as transformative practices.

Susan Stryker’s Hot Tub

Freitag, 19. Juni um 19:00

By Maxe Crandall

Producer: Panagis Marketos, Co-writer: Ari Banias, Props: mershandlee (Lida Badafareh and Mehrshad Atashi)

A horseplay piss play for Mother.

Susan Stryker’s Hot Tub follows hobby horse athlete Cindy as she quests for eternal horse status, encountering Frankenstein’s Monster (who’s conducting alchemical experiments in a San Francisco dungeon), two melancholic trans guys named Dallas and Zealous (whose kink is self-care), mean stepsisters training with a transphobic coach, and a Magic Horse who grants wishes through a trauma window.

Armed with golden tickets from Bed, Bath, & Bianca, they converge on the legendary hot tub of trans historian Susan Stryker, where ancestral waters transform rage into other things, like horses. Through complex dungeon renovations, a quest for bells and shells, and the philosophical question “Do you have to be a horse to be a horse?”, the play celebrates trans embodiment as constant spiritual becoming.

Poets theater is a performance tradition centered on poetic language, community collaboration, and the drama of local artistic coteries. Crandall’s practice pulls significantly from poets theater’s queer formulation in 1990’s San Francisco, where poets, performers, musicians, and visual artists staged messy, slapdash queer plays prioritizing language, interdisciplinary collaboration, and improvisation. Poets theater treats the stage as a site for poetic and social experimentation, where words, bodies, objects, and gossip take on meaning through juxtaposition, repetition, and the disruption of theatrical convention. The form values DIY production methods, rough edges, and the virtuosity of the amateur over technical polish. Minimal sets, homemade costumes, and no or few rehearsals produce an anti-professional aesthetic of chaotic communion, where an ecstatic liveness erupts from within the wild improvisations of performers and audience.

Maxe Crandall is a poet, playwright, and director. His performance novel about AIDS archives and intergenerational memory The Nancy Reagan Collection was recognized by the New York Public Library as one of the Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020. He is a poetry editor at FENCE and the Executive Director of Small Press Traffic, a Bay Area seedbed for poets who push boundaries in the arts.

🖼️ Performance

📅 When? 19.06. at 19:00

💬 Language: English

📍 Where? QUEER MUSEUM VIENNA | Baumgartner Höhe 1, 1140 Vienna

📩 no registration required

💶free admission, donations are welcome

This event is supported by: