Suffer a text breakup?
Come share your pain
So on an ordinary day not long ago, a New York woman happily texted her longtime boyfriend about a Broadway show she thought they might see. He texted back with something like, “Show sounds great. But while I have you here, I've been thinking about our relationship …”
And he proceeded to break up with her! By text!
Unusual? Hardly. Rude? Totally. Sad? No — it's hilarious!
At least in the funny-ina-good-way minds of New York's Allison Goldberg and Jen Jamula, who act out these kinds of exchanges on stage in their new show, “How to Break Up by Text,” coming to San Francisco's WeWork Mid-Market creative space for a one-night performance Aug. 4.
It's comic catharsis, an interactive floor show in which people submit their own texted break-ups in advance or right there in the audience, then Jamula and Goldberg throw the comments up on a big screen and perform them with various characters of their own creation. They do it verbatim from the texts — because you truly can't make this stuff up.
The show is billed as part comedy gig, part therapy session and part drinking game.
“In exchange for your bravery, you get a free shot,” says Goldberg during in a hilarious phone interview last week. “Or maybe we should give you the shot first!”
It's the latest project from the former Yale classmates and founders of the sketch comedy group, Blogologues. The two teamed up in 2011, and have since earned national media accolades and even landed on Time Out New York's 2014 list of “Top 10 Funniest Women In NYC.”
As with the “Break Up” version, the Blogologues troupe does side-splitting interpretations of actual posts from the wacky, wild world of the internet — everything from bizarre Craigslist ads, threads on My Little Pony forums and overly-detailed Amazon product reviews to rants on dating sites, exchanges on Tumblr and even expletive-laden blogs about decorative gourds. They've done theme nights on religion, sex, employment, family, election season (think #nastywoman tweets). They've riffed on a horrible first-date story that went viral last year, performing the woman's tweets as a mini opera. And they've taken an OkCupid dating profile and turned it into a game show.
While in the Bay Area, the comedy duo will also present one of their Blogologue shows — this one based on a Breitbart column about birth control making women crazy — at Palo Alto's Lucie Stern Theatre Aug. 18 as part of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley's New Works Festival.
Jamula and Goldberg came up with the “Break Up” show about a year ago, quickly amassing plenty of material — because breaking up may be hard to do in person, but technology allows the cowards among us to take the easy way out. And leave a record.
“You can't believe how many people break up by text, and not just casual relationships but long term,” Jamula says. “Like the one with the woman texting about the Broadway show,” she adds. “For one thing, the guy texts, ‘while I have you here.' He didn't have her ‘here.' It was on a device, you idiot.”
Jamula and Goldberg have been amazed by the eagerness of audience members to submit such personal communications. They insist they try not to be mean, merely putting the facts out there and having some fun with them.
Indeed, tweets and online comments are now a common comedic source for late-night TV hosts. But there's something oddly appealing about performance art as public confessional.
“It's about sharing something you feel is ridiculous or unfair — not just with your friends who will support you, but with total strangers who also get it,” Jamula says. “There's this whole common thing of reading something in an online interaction and being confused. And somehow experiencing that together, finding out that other people were confused too — it helps.”
It certainly helped one man who was in the audience of a “Break Up” show in New York and shared his “epic story,” Goldberg says. The guy had been dating a woman for six months and he thought they were completely in love. Then one day, they were casually texting about something innocuous and she casually texted back, “Oh by the way, I'm moving to L.A. and I've already told my landlord. I didn't want to blindside you.”
“By definition, that's pretty much blindsiding you!” Jamula says.
They performed this exchange and then called out to the audience, asking if the man would like to stand up. “There was dead silence for a few seconds, then he stands up and the audience goes nuts,” Jamula says. “We called him up onstage, put a crown on him, had the audience shout affirmations at him. For him it was really cathartic.”
They've seen trends, such as break-ups done by emoji. Lots of them, Goldberg says. “We joke that it's how you let people know that you really don't care.” Or ghosting, when someone goes radio silent and stops all communication without warning. Or just plain putting someone off and hoping they'll go away.
“One very funny one was when the guy kept trying and kept trying and the girl kept making excuses,” Goldberg says. “She finally writes back that she was seeing someone else, even though she wasn't. He texted back, ‘Any interest in pulling me in as your third?'”
While all this is fun and games, the show is actually meant to convey some serious points.
“Our ultimate point with this show — you really shouldn't break up with people by text!” Jamula says, chuckling.
“We're trying to encourage people to bring back humanity and human communication,” Goldberg says. “It's through comedy, but we really want people to think about how they treat each other. Technology has allowed people to take the easy way out, even if it's not the right thing to do. Man up and woman up!”