THENEWYORKER,M AY13, 2019 17
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OFF0FFOFF
TALEOFATUB
I
n the bathroom of an apartment on
the Lower East Side of Manhattan,
on the first night of spring, Philip San-
tos Schaffer, who is twenty-seven, sat
cross-legged in a dry bathtub, lookingthe
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offered themselves to her to wear as
earrings that evening.)
Amid the moss were plates of spring
vegetables and ramps picked upstate by
the chef Danny Newburg. “You have to
forage on the table if you want to be
fed,” Meslay said. For dessert, there was
an abstract “edible portrait,” made up of
mango, lychee, coconut, and raspberry
macarons, set into a chocolate frame. An
architect and pastry chef named Savinien
Caracostea had based the dish on a short
story by Edgar Allan Poe in which a young
woman sits as a painter’s model for such
a long time that she eventually withers
and perishes. He called it “a nonlinear
dessert experience.” The Clark lovers
were given palette knives, and they de-
voured it with gusto.
Ian Desai, a Clark lover in his late
thirties who is writing a book about
Gandhi’s library—“I wanted to write a
book about books that was unabashedly
intellectual, but that wanted to meet the
world where it is”—tried to start a toast
wave, whereby people progressively
clinked their glasses of fumé blanc around
the table. The first time he visited the
Explorers Club, he was twenty-three,
and gave a presentation about a trip he’d
made retracing the voyage of Jason and
the Argonauts.
The toast wave reached Anthony
Vitto, a Clark lover who wore round
spectacles and a tangerine bow tie. He
looked perplexed. “I’m a neurologist,”
he said. “When I go to meetings of neu-
rologists, I don’t experience anything
like this.” Siyanko was talking to Alice
Duncan, a gallerist, about the legacy of
Puritanism. “There certainly is a fear
of the sexually explicit in this country,”
Duncan said. “But I don’t think Renoir
is sensual. I think he’s blowsy.”
—Nicolas Niarchoslike the Buddha’s brother from Brook-
lyn. He was wearing shorts in a blue
Hawaiian print and a matching shirt,
under a Michael Kors women’s blazer
from a thrift shop; his black hair was
in a bun. “The world is about to end,
and this is the only place to survive,”
he explained, in an agitated but not
crazy way, to Michelle Stern, who owns
the apartment, and her friend Thomas,
who lives nearby. Stern and Thomas
sat on two wooden chairs sardined into
the space next to the tub and in front
of the toilet. Turning on the tub’s fau-
cet, Santos Schaffer held up a mug and
offered his companions coffee, tea, or
ramen “made with N.Y.C.’s finest tap.”
Here’s the great news: there was room
for one more person in the tub, Santos
Schaffer informed Stern and Thomas.
Both declined the chance at salvation.
Santos Schaffer is an actor, and Stern
and Thomas were the audience. San-
tos Schaffer was putting on an origi-
nal play for them, “The End of the
World Bar and Bathtub,” an interac-
tive piece that takes place in your bath-
room, providing you have a tub. (Tick-
ets are a hundred dollars for two, which
is the most and least you can purchase.)
He débuted his play in March, 2018,
and is approaching his fiftieth perfor-
mance; if records of this sort of thing
were kept, Santos Schaffer might qual-
ify as the longest-running Chicken Lit-
tle Off Off Off Broadway.
“I love the idea of making some-
thing that tours to people and can be
as immediate as watching a video on
YouTube,” Santos Schaffer said after
the hour-long show. “So far, I have plays
for living rooms, closets, and bathrooms,
and, ultimately, I want to write a play
for every room of a house.” The script
for the bathtub play is nineteen pages,
but Santos Schaffer uses it as scaffold-
ing on which to improvise. “I try to lis-
ten to what type of experience the au-
dience wants to have,” he said. “Some
nights, people really want to talk. Some
people want to laugh. Some people
want to be scared.” A week earlier, he’d
performed at 9 a.m. for a couple who’d
flown in from San Francisco the night
before and requested that he come to
their tiny room at the Standard Hotel.
Another theatregoer had booked the
play as a surprise for her partner, who
turned out to be un-delighted by it.Before each performance, Audrey
Frischman, the play’s director, gives a
curtain speech in which she advises the
audience to use the rest room before it
turns into the theatre.
Santos Schaffer and Frischman
formed their first theatre company
during their senior year at an arts-ori-
ented public high school in Los An-
geles. Santos Schaffer later received a
B.F.A. in directing from Hofstra and
an M.F.A. in dramaturgy from Co-
lumbia. In 2014, the pair founded
WalkUpArts. “All of the plays are built
around pushing audiences to experi-
ence empathy in a new way,” Santos
Schaffer said. “And all of them are
solo performances in which audience
interaction is slowly scaled up until,
by the end, the audience is asked to
make a big action or choice, such as
whether or not to survive the end of
the world.”
In addition to the bathtub play,
WalkUpArts’s upcoming projects in-
clude Santos Schaffer’s “Baby Jessica’s
Well-Made Play” and a revival of his
“A Play About Drew Carey.” In the
latter, a fictionalized version of Drew
Carey believes that, if everyone in the
world could laugh together at the same
joke, killing would cease. The Baby Jes-
sica piece was inspired by the little girl
who fell down a well in Midland, Texas,
in 1987. In the first act, one audience
member privately listens to an audio
track. In the second act, that same per-
son sits in a closet while an actor talks
to her over a baby monitor. There are
two more acts, but let’s keep a few plot
twists untold.
As the play wound down, Santos
Schaffer grabbed a notebook and a
pencil. “Before you go, if there’s any-
thing you could leave me with,” he said,
“something to ponder when I’m run-
ning out of thoughts, or something to
laugh about, I would appreciate that.”
After some consideration, Thomas
said, “I would make a list of all the
things that could kill me even if I stay
in the bathtub, and then put the list on
my wall.”
Santos Schaffer scribbled.
Stern asked him, “Do you have a
phone in here?” He did not. “Then,
maybe write your mother a letter while
you wait before the world ends.”
—Patricia MarxTalk 05_13_19.L [Print]_9508479.indd 17 5/3/19 8:26 PM