Cheap Thrills

Cheap Thrills is about fragmented people, living in a fragmented world, suffering from an exhaustive inability to face the world around them. It is a story that chronicles one night of a family in a dilapidated old house and the visitor that changes their world forever. Cinematic in scope, viscerally charged and electric, Cheap Thrills is a story about complacency amid a world where nothing is certain, where people are obsessed with images that create their personality for them, where people choose the easy way out, where people are afraid of the dark.

In order to echo the fragmentary world of its characters, Cheap Thrills unfolds like an urban myth made up of interviews, dance sequences, arresting visual imagery, disturbing and regenerative music, and emotionally charged dialogue. It is a story that is filled with loaded contradictions and humorous absurdities that dissects the convoluted, distressed American psyche. Through the acts of these strange characters, the audience witnesses themselves cast as clowns on stage – giving them an uncommon vantage-point to the horror and beauty of being human in a world of uncertainty.

With a nod to film noir, it all starts when a man named Dave comes to an old house in the middle of the night. He has a frontal lobe disorder (similar to amnesia) and does not know where he is. He sees a sight that terrifies him in the window and he buzzes the door unable to resist. He steps into the house and gets involved in a strange series of games that enchant and transform him. Dave’s identity is re-written by the bizarre family he encounters.  Although he has never met them, his amnesia leaves him a partially open slate and he is easily coerced into believing their fictions. Madame Les Roux, a francophile who is unable to throw anything away and is obsessed with dramatic film deaths, leads the pack of over-the-top characters. Her brother, Jesse Ventilate, is equally disturbed – he is a sexually compulsive sumo wrestler who is in love with his sister’s daughter, Sissy Chambourd. Sissy, a young Stevie Nicks look-a-like, has had a confusing childhood and routinely escapes to a world of prostitution and fantasy dancing. Her brother, Danny Martini, completes the uber-dysfunctional family album with his gay boy-scout, zealous interviewing, horny teen eagerness.  This family represents an exploded version of an American family – they are equal parts John Waters and Jean Genet with a handful of Bette Davis thrown in for good measure.

The bizarre people Dave encounters lead him through an even more bizarre series of events. They push him to the greatest crime – murder – only to awaken his true identity. The horror of waking up from a nightmare is nothing compared to the horror of waking up from amnesia to discover blood on your hands.

Cheap Thrills was developed at HERE Arts Center in New York City where it subsequently premiered.