Total Modeling
Studio 34
4522 Baltimore Ave.
Philadelphia
Seen April 3, 2025
Showing April 3 and 4
Is this guy gonna flash us?
That was my dominating thought while watching “Total Modeling,” a cybernetics-themed clown show running for two days at Studio 34 as part of Philly Theater Week.
Spoiler alert: You do get a direct look at Benjamin Stieler’s butt by the end of the performance. You fortunately don’t have to worry about facing a frontal view.
I somehow knew that Stieler was gonna pull down his underwear at some point during the hour-long, one-man show, which was marketed as a 40-minute “philosophical odyssey weaving together professional wrestling, despair, nakedness, invisibility and buffoonery.”
I hadn’t read into that line, or the word “nakedness,” before I attended. But there were enough up–front phallic allusions that I immediately started some on-edge wondering about where the improvised script was going to take us.
There was no predicting the rest of Stieler’s “part lecture, part throwdown” slapstick showcase, which followed a highly unhinged, schizo alcoholic bouncing between his identities as a donkey, an invisible man, a bird and a guy named Jean Claude. There were probably a couple other characters packed into the overarching psychological self-examination; I’m not sure how fully I followed this experimental story.
Stieler’s sketch was essentially a semantic set-up of cybernetic comedy. Cybernetics refers to the “transdisciplinary study of circular causal processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system’s actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action,” to cite my favorite website, Wikipedia. The subject of cybernetics is used to predict and monitor all kinds of complex and self-regulating systems, from supply chains to the human brain.
Stieler made fun of that philosophical branch by fixating on the psychological implications of cybernetic solipsism. That prompt laid the groundwork for the artist to brainstorm a bunch of absurd and arbitrary logic on which he could build surprising inside jokes with his audience.
The whole event was set on an imaginary boat, which was a joke in itself given that cybernetics is derived from the Greek work kybernetikos, which means “good at steering,” referring to the skill of helming a ship. The boat in Stieler’s show, he revealed, “is called a painkiller.”
It all went something like this: Stieler downed Jack Daniel’s on stage. Then he self-reportedly went blind from staring at his watch. And then he got into a fit of circular causality.
The fundamental joke revolved around a throw-away line that came late in the show. “I can’t really see the metaphor…” Stieler said after acting out a bunch of nonsensical plot lines. (At one point he sang Les Mis, then sobbed and dumped his head in a bucket of water, next he was physically fighting with a stuffed suit.)
The whole confusion was anchored by a Jerry Lewis-as-Nutty Professor impersonation by Stieler meant to mock a contemporary buzzword-addicted academic: “It’s all data, baby! You gotta get access to the data!” he shrieked repeatedly out of nowhere.
With said data, he said in a preachy, nasally voice, glasses slipping down his nose, “We want to create new neural pathways so we can see new things that we’ve never seen before … What we’re doing is we’re storytellers, we’re creating something that does not exist yet. We’re using our storytelling ability to extend into the future, and then when we’re there we’re using that extension to leverage the present into the past, using our storytelling.”
Then he startled us by switching back into his persona of rageful desperado: “That’s what I could do if I wasn’t blind, and I could see the data! But I’m totally blind!”
It was kind of cathartic to watch someone stumble through their respective introspective mess hall, however fictional. It was like talking to someone on my street in the middle of a meth-induced episode, except way less upsetting and with a lot more punnery.
As more layers of logic were loaded into oblivion, Stieler shed more layers of clothes. At some point he was in a bird costume; then a shredded, striped suit. The costume transitions were long and awkward, which made it all the more hilarious — and freakishly unhinged — each time his pants incidentally collapsed onto the floor.
But in the end, Stieler didn't make any certain points about cybernetic data collection other than a loud “Oh my god, fuck total modeling! I know what I am!” at the show’s conclusion (he was, one more spoiler alert, a man named “Benoit Francois,” not any of the characters as whom he previously cosplayed). That was the moment shortly after which he pulled down his boxers and forced the audience to feast our eyes on his behind.
The thesis of the show was, perhaps, Stieler’s talent. He didn’t break at any point during his marathon performance of sweating, singing, screaming and drowning. His theatrical dexterity reminded me of Cole Escola, who’s received fresh success for their Broadway show Oh, Mary! in which Escola acts as the deranged wife of Lincoln without integrating any historically factual information about the former first lady.
In an absurd world of uncertainty, shows like Oh, Mary and Total Modeling make strange sense. If anything, Stieler’s work is reminiscent of psychological horror works like Beau is Afraid; both are comical and extravagant showings of the internal chaos caused by drugs intended to calm us down about the anxiety-inducing state of all things.
Maybe that’s why I knew we were doomed to get mooned all along. After an hour of getting stuck in Stieler’s many heads, it only made sense for the show to wrap up with his bare ass.
Not to mention, the whole skit started with a donkey tap-dancing routine. It ended, officially, with a standing ovation.
