The Collapse of the Institute of Absurdity

 

After the enormous success of Uncle Tad Baker’s Loon Show, the Institute wanted to continue our audience-participation plays but realized we needed to take a break form the rigors of putting the Loon Show together for 16 straight weeks. We decided to do a ‘reinterpretation’ of Toteras’ work from the 50’s, ‘The Execution of Abe Goldstein, a Depraved Homosexual’, which was banned in San Francisco before it ever got to be performed! The idea was to introduce tomato-throwing audience members to the Gas Chamber and attempt to provoke the Jewish Homosexual community of San Francisco, who had been increasingly raising concerns about the themes of the Institute. Instead of cowering, we decided to turn up the heat; this was, afterall, experimental theater.

 

Once again using the Rose and Thistle’s upstairs performance room, cloaked again in black plastic, we ‘rang the bell’ across the city in hopes of firing up interest, outrage and a public eager to participate in something new and dangerous. We had no expectations going into Even the Score/Uncle Tad Baker’s Loon Show but success had gone to our heads and we were convinced the city would beat down our doors to get a glimpse of what we were doing. We were met, however, with an almost dumbfounding silence: for the first three weeks after the opening, the crowds never appeared, word got around that the play was confusing, too dialogue-driven and again resorting to violence while offering little of theatrical interest.

 

We were stumped: what now? The stage was amazing, our Loon Show performers now cast in ‘Abe’ were excellent, Uncle Tad the MC was electric, but the play was going nowhere. One Monday evening at our weekly session at Toteras’, I hit upon the idea of stripping aside the polite title of the play and really giving the city something to react to. “Let’s change the title to ‘Gas a Jew Queer’, that should get things going!” Toteras said nothing, though, but the rest of the crew thought it was a great idea, as we had to do something or the play was dead so a new poster was drawn up and the following day it was plastered across San Francisco. We went to bed that night figuring we had revived interest in our play and the crowds would come running; what we were met with that morning, however…

 

I was sitting at breakfast that Wednesday morning when I got an astonishing call from Jack Smith, the owner of the Rose and Thistle. “Tad, you’re play is canceled and I am throwing you out of the building for good! All morning I am getting death threats and people calling for the closing of my bar! You come NOW and pack up your shit!”

 

I was stunned. Sheepishly I went down to California and Polk Streets and faced Smith like a child who’d gotten caught red-handed. He walloped me with abuse, rightfully I suppose, and with my head hanging, I tore down the set and left the building -and our play- behind, hoping things would quickly die down and we could move on.

 

Unfortunately, San Francisco was not finished with us, and there would be no ‘moving on’. On our Institute phone line for the next couple days, so many calls came in claiming they would destroy us if we ever set foot in the city again that every one of us became spooked, death threats were common and an article in the Chronicle appeared that weekend attacking us for anti-Semitism and telling the world to boycott our plays and blackball us from ever performing in the city again!

 

That next Monday at Toteras’, we reviewed the carnage, realizing we had over-played our hand. We were crushed, and to add insult to injury, Toteras attacked me for making such a huge mistake and told me to shift gears into our next play, going from Loon Show-type audience-participation events to more intellectual endeavors like poetry readings where we could discuss Cuckoldry, his favorite theme. In retrospect, could Toteras have said something before we changed the name of the Abe play? Should he have, stopping us and saving us complete disgrace? What might have happened if he had? Alas, we shall never know, Toteras said nothing when we proposed the change but was brutal after it happened. This was, however, his style: to lay back and see what might happen. We dutifully tucked our tails between our legs and set out to find appropriate venues but our effervescent energy was now gone, replaced by a grudging determination to keep going. Our expertise was in wild reality events, not staid, quiet coffee shops and distracted poets reading shitty poetry.

 

It didn’t help that several papers wanted interviews with Uncle Tad on what really happened, so I did my best to paint a picture of sabotage, a ‘disgruntled employee’ altering posters and phone messages, a story nobody bought, of course. I even did a television interview holding up a ‘disfigured’ poster and lying through my nervous teeth, again something nobody bought. I was ashamed.

 

Our Poetry readings, try as we might, never went anywhere, fizzling out time after time and never creating any sort of buzz, hell, they were tepid and boring, and within six months, everyone was exhausted and disheartened. A boisterous Toteras would take the stage and often use the ‘N’ word before the public, something the Institute would never do but with Toteras, racism was part of his culture, he knew no boundaries and enjoyed shocking people. His racism, however, did not go unnoticed and people began drifting away. I hated these events, I longed for our Loon Show fame and was just exhausted, so I finally took time off to go to Brasil with my wife and newborn, a trip which changed my life and changed me: when I came back, I had completely lost the fire to continue as we had been going, the poetry readings had morphed into ‘Anti-Feminist Meetings’ and though they were lively and the crew of the Institute enjoyed them and did their best to keep things rolling while I was gone, and we did manage a short tour of university fraternities with Toteras, my heart was not in it and the end was in sight. By June of 1991, Toteras suddenly forced me to make a decision: disband the Institute and focus all my energy on his career, or stop working altogether. I decided to honor Toteras and keep working with him, painfully telling my friends one day that the Institute was over and that I’d be working with Toteras, essentially betraying and crushing my friends who had stood by me for years and put their hearts, minds and bodies into our every effort.

 

Toteras, for all his great intellectual qualities, could be an absolute prick at times, an unrelenting taskmaster who demanded I sacrifice everything to publicize his work. Oh did I give it my best, I bought expensive digital recording equipment, trekked to his house several times a week to make tapes on his experiences and thoughts and did everything I could. Then in August, SF Weekly, an entertainment paper in the city, sought out Uncle Tad for a full-length feature of our work, but as things would happen, they couldn’t reach me but they did reach Toteras, who took the opportunity to promote himself in a shameless sequence of events:

 

At an interview for the paper, Toteras absolutely buried me and the Institute with sharp criticism for our amateurishness and stupidity, essentially stepping on my throat while elevating himself. I did my best to smile through the abuse; there’s a picture of the two of us for the front of the paper with me smiling sheepishly and him being outrageous. Later, they wanted my side of the story and during that subsequent interview, I failed miserably at reconciling the abuse Toteras had thrown at me, again lying through my teeth and claiming it was all meant as theater, no harm done to me at all, while inside, I was destroyed, confidence in Toteras gone.

 

Within days, the SF Weekly article appeared. What should have been our triumphant moment, something that should have catapulted us to the next level, became instead our headstone; confusion reigned, the writer of the article essentially saying Toteras was set for an explosion in his upcoming debut performance at the Rumors Cafe, and the Institute was a failure, one to be ignored. Then, when the day of his grand performance came, a day we had planned to shock the city with the appearance of the legendary Demetrius Toteras, something the Institute crew gamely came back together to help perform, he flopped badly, unable to take the stage or get to the microphone, preferring to sit in the audience while we floundered about on stage. His mother had died that very day from a long illness and I tried to get him to cancel the event but he was determined to go on anyway. It was a nightmare performance, he sat at the back of the room talking while I tried to get the energy going, people walking out midway, wondering why Toteras would not speak; try as I might, I could never engage Toteras or get him to come to the stage.

 

But the final nail in the coffin was later outside after the event, when Toteras absolutely excoriated me for failing him at every level, “You fucked up severely, there was no energy, a terrible audience, shitty venue, now go find me better gigs and a better crowd, now!” I smiled through my agony and promised I’d do my best, but in those moments outside, I left him for good. I could no longer take his abuse, his demands nor his inability to take a practical approach to anything or responsibility for what took place; everything was my fault.

 

It all ended for me that night, and for the next few weeks, I made excuses for not showing up and not doing what he demanded. No, I did not have the courage to confront him or even speak my mind; instead, I slithered away, I retreated and licked my wounds, and I never returned to Toteras. I saw him a few months later at one of the crews’ weddings, where he tried to pump me up on getting back to work for him, but I was gone by then. It was time I struck out on my own.

 

Years later, in 2007, 8 years after I became paralyzed in a dirt bike race out in Nevada, I had an epiphany when I was in Brasil: I needed to go see him again and bury the hatchet. We met at his house and though we had a pleasant afternoon, there was no energy, he had become stricken with Parkinson’s and I had no desire to enact any of the ideas he threw my way. He died in 2009, and I went on to fight several battles of paralysis-related complications along with editing the Institute material and my own work.

 

But what could have been and what never was is no longer relevant, for the Institute burned like a meteor across the San Francisco skyline, dying out before anyone could really appreciate what we had done. The members of the Institute have gone our separate ways, no more group projects were ever attempted, and our work lives on only here in the Archives and in the memories of those few who saw something unlike anything before or since: the shocking, enormously enjoyable plays of The Institute of Absurdity, the first audience-participation reality shows in history!

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Leslie Hale Roberts 2025