"The Writing on the Stall"
Spotlight Theater
December 4, 2024
I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into with The Writing On The Stall, a “bathroom graffiti musical” by New York City-based multi-hyphenate performer Caitlin Cook. Though I wasn’t super in the mood for musical theater on this Wednesday night, I was still intrigued because the piece (which had an Off-Broadway run this past spring) was set in a dive bar bathroom—a scene where I’ve spent many a sad-drunk, happy-drunk, manic-drunk (you name it) night.
And it’s fun to visit the iconic Spotlight, the late-1920s Riverview darling designed by Bruce Goff, in all its piano-key-window, art-deco-meets-international charm. I checked out the women’s bathroom first thing: No graffiti to be found in the single-occupancy closet, but the space is cramped and the door just barely closes and locks with some force, which set the tone for the night.
Most showgoers had taken their seats by the time I bought a Bison Social Tonic and a bottled water in the lobby. Onstage, text on a projection instructed us to DM our favorite bathroom graffiti to @thecaitlincook. Below that ran a slideshow of some winners:
- If you ever feel powerless, just remember that a single one of your public hairs can shut down an entire restaurant.
- On a scale of 1-Chris Brown, how violent was your poop?
- Don’t drink and drive. Take acid and teleport.
The graffiti spanned a delightful range of scatological, irreverent and inspirational—all of which are true of Cook’s one-woman act as a whole. After some technical difficulties, we were welcomed to her onstage ladies’ room about 20 minutes after the show was supposed to start. Cook sat on the stage’s centerpiece, a toilet, and the unmistakable sounds of a drunken pee filled the space. “Does anyone have any toilet paper?” she asked, and seemed genuinely surprised when someone in the front row threw her a roll. “Did you just have this?” she laughed. In return, she took off her underwear and threw it to the audience member. She started bitching about someone named Beatrice singing karaoke, asked the crowd what our least favorite thing about Beatrice was. Someone said something about her singing voice.
At first I thought she’d arranged for these people to be part of the show. As more awkwardness bloomed with every patron’s response—my guess was they were theater folks and thus more comfortable speaking up—I was a bit terrified I’d be called on, but it seemed I was just far back enough (and reserved enough) to be safe. Two more pairs of panties entered the house.
Cook’s show (whose production in Tulsa was part of a five-city tour in Oklahoma and Texas) is part performance of her 24-minute album The Writing on the Stall and part planned riffing on theories of high vs. low art, differences between men’s and women’s bathrooms, and the like. An Oxford grad, she studied art history and found herself caught on the high-art question: Why do Greek statues have such small penises? (In Cook’s words, “why dem dicks so small?”) Turns out, there are reasons—some comfier than others—including Aristotle’s theories on procreation and teenage boys being the sex symbols of the time.
In 2016, Tulsa’s M.W. Vernon wrote in The Tulsa Voice, “Bathroom graffiti more or less functions like a pre-Internet Reddit or Tumblr. It’s harmless, low-cost deviance. It’s the one place in real life where anyone can anonymously make their mark or identify their presence before a captured and diverse audience.” Cook has gone further to argue, in the words of a bathroom graffiti artist/theorist she encountered in the wild: “Since writing on toilet walls is done neither for critical acclaim nor financial reward, it is the purest form of art. Discuss.”
In both song and banter, Cook covers the basics of bathroom graffiti (also called latrinalia, I learned from Vernon’s article): For a good time call—your mother, me Ishmael, 867-5309. Dicks (and balls, and tits) in men’s bathrooms. Uplifting scrawls in women’s bathrooms: “Live as if you’ve never been ghosted.”
The show takes a darker turn when we learn about a tragic event that colored her teenage years in California—and how one piece of latrinalia urging the reader to live unafraid pulled her out of a funk following that dark time. All in all, it was an engaging, human performance with a reasonable balance of heart, brains and goofiness. While at times it felt a bit unfocused, its chaos is warranted. It’s a piece on the beauty of bathroom graffiti, after all. And at exactly an hour long (even without being in the mood for sing-songy dialogue) it was a quick but packed-full ride—just like a midnight trip to the Soundpony bathroom.
