Ben Franklin Sex Party
Pig Iron Theatre Club
1417 N 2nd St.
Philadelphia
Sept. 17, 2025
Showing through Sept. 20. Buy tickets here.
This show is part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, which is running now through Sept. 28. Find out what else is showing this month through FringeArts on their calendar here.
I was ready to write a rave review of “Benjamin Franklin Sex Party,” a clown show full of utopic imagination and historical revisions, when the director’s concluding lines kicked me in the face: ““What are you a bunch of r******? Do a bunch of r****** live here? Are you all r******?”
The absurd attempt to provoke the audience with a slur in the show's final scene was confusing; why would a play about imagining a better community include an ableist meltdown?
Written and performed by Sarah Kitnell, "Benjamin Franklin Sex Party" is an unserious investigation of our country’s origins and its potential future. It's showing now at Pig Iron Theatre School as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
With fascism knocking at America’s door, Kitnell has used Philadelphia’s favorite daddy Ben Franklin to ask: Whose idea was all this, and what comes next? “If our country sucks so hard, we might as well get off,” is Kitnell's tagline for the show. Kitnell turns the American fantasy of the founding fathers on its head, using sexual props to get the audience engaged and participating in the show's creation — and a fake country's founding — alongside her.
The story followed Ben Franklin through to modern day times, where he encountered the audience, who he deemed lacking "George Washington's madness" in their eyes. The audience was instructed to chant back to him instructions on how to collectively regain a sense of revolutionary spirit by saying: “Hey Ben, why don’t we start our own country?”
Benny then held our hand through some bureaucratic bullet points: We decided on a name (the Republic of Curtains Yourglasses); we free-styled a national anthem; we made a list of our likes and dislikes, or federal "ins" and "outs." Members of the audience offered their thoughts through a dildo microphone — other objects spotlit by the show were handcuffs, floggers, and a crossbow.
Our likes included: anal, freedom, weed, trust, olive branches, outdoor sex and solar power. Dislikes began with fascism and lying, then branched out to include hemorrhoids, constipation, and cops. Just like that, we had started a fresh nation.
The creation of our “ins” and “outs” catalogue was done in earnest consideration of the myriad struggles the world is facing right now, with big ideas like disinformation and authoritarianism bubbling up to the top. So why then did a slur like the "R-word," which has been making a crude comeback in Gen Z jargon, make the “ins” list?
In her final scenes, Kitnell admitted that she, too, was unsure about the piece’s conclusion: “I feel like there are better, smarter people to talk about this, but really I don’t know," she said of nation state formation and American history. Just when I thought she was underselling herself, she threw the insult back to the audience by calling us "r******" three times in a row.
The piece's early intentions seemed pure. The show did a lot of puritanical unpacking, showcasing peoples’ real desires and imagining a country where freedom could something mean more than the deadening crush of capitalism — but the author’s cop-out conclusion undermined the show’s momentum.
The comedic wins of the show were stained by the strange twist of violent language. In the end, Kitnell's message seemed to be that none of us could escape the gnarly undercurrent of our cruel history — not even for a night. It seems Ben Franklin is not capable of being the beacon of liberty we wish he was, even in our wildest fantasies.
