1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way
Oakland
Through June 28, 2026
The Fourth Wall is always a crack open in Taylor Mac’s dramatic creations, at least by my experience; audience participation is welcomed and encouraged. I’d first seen Mac’s superb “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus” as produced by the Oakland Theater Project a few years ago. It was funny and terribly clever. Generous helpings of blood and poop (tastefully depicted of course—haha!) elicited deservèd laughs. And although such peepee-poopoo stuff is base and gross, it’s an element essential to the tale.
OTP’s current production of Mac’s 2020 play “The Fre” features coprophilia that’s decidedly less eruditely presented. But hurling mud and feces—represented by semi-soft brown-colored balls made available in regularly refilled buckets for the audience to throw at the cast ad libitum—is part of the metaphor. Thing is: the metaphor was maybe a bit too metaphorical.
Playwright Taylor Mac is a character in The Fre, dressed as a rat and played by Arielle Powell. Speaking in rhymes, rat-attired Mac jumped and scurried from place to place outside the small theater in the now vacant and cavernous former FLAX space, up and down skeletal steps and structures, all the while exhorting the audience to have low expectations of what they were about to see. Then the doors of the venue opened and Mac invited everyone to enter “the butthole of regression.”
The stage is a ball pit, filled with the aforementioned brown balls, graffitied tires and tree trunks, inflatable pool rings, dirty beanbag chairs, hula hoops, a video screen, and a banner scrawled in messy hot pink that reads “Land of the Fre: Home of Two Bridges.” The Fre is a place whose denizens are unabashedly and unapologetically crass, rolling around in their beloved grime and muck. Audience members become the newest citizens of this realm, prompted by the video screen to fart, clap like seals, and perform other acts of ludicrously outré vulgarity.
It is the return of the Hero, played with flamboyant gusto by Myles Bell, that sets the play into motion. The Hero, once a member of the Fre community, left long ago over a bridge that connects the Fre to a city. He comes back as a learned cosmopolitan who speaks in rhyming couplets. And he wants to see the bridge that connects the two worlds severed forever. The dissonance between the Hero’s erudition and the infantile, foul-mouthed vocabulary of the populace of the Fre is very funny at times. “Admit it: you like getting dirty as long as you have a way out!” exclaims Frankie Fre (played by Kiril Bolotnikov) to the Hero. “Admit it! Admit it! Admit it! Boo-yah!”
Eight characters (including a puppet, Bobby Fre), comprise the cast, but the Hero and Frankie Fre’s back-and-forth make up the majority of the dialogue. And while questions on the nature of defined and proscribed realities underline the drama’s theme of acceptance, I found that the chaos of so many characters doing so much at once undermined what structure there could be to make this message more resonant. Then again, perhaps that’s Mac’s point—to deconstruct rigid thought systems. And this production is, in Mac’s words, “a queer, all-ages play,” so the grimy simplicity of its metaphors and symbolism of anti-intellectualism and divisiveness is most certainly intentional—complacency versus cerebral pursuits.
This was an amusing clown show to be sure. And it was fun to randomly throw balls at the cast while they were performing. I mean, we’re all in this pit of poopy mud together, right? As Frankie Fre says at one point, “That’s the way it is in the Land of the Fre—you gotta be in it!”
