Caitlin Cook Dreams of Chaos
On mixed media, bathroom graffiti, and how chaos can make magic.
Dreams of Chaos is a series of Q&As with folks who are engaging with chaos in their work. Sometimes that means they love the chaos and use it as an engine for creativity. Sometimes it means they struggle with the chaos and are trying to harness it in whatever way they can. I’m interested in the ways in which we, as people, acknowledge the messiness of living in the world. And I’m excited to share conversations with those are thinking about this as well.
Last August, I got a press release in my inbox, with the subject line “Invitation to ‘The Writing on the Stall’ at Soho Playhouse.” Although I don’t usually open most press releases, for some reason I clicked on this one. And boy, howdy, I’m glad I did. The email was an invitation to an incredibly innovative one-woman show, written and performed by the incomparable Caitlin Cook.
Caitlin is really something else, folks. She’s an inspired songwriter, a hilarious performer, and an insightful creative. She holds an undergraduate degree in art history from Kenyon College and a master’s in maritime archeology from the University of Oxford. She’s endlessly inventive, witty, and curious.
And, just like the rest of the folks on this publication, she dreams of chaos. Caitlin’s most recent work is ‘The Writing on the Stall,’ wherein she has taken a decade’s worth of photos documenting bathroom graffiti from around the world and written a musical. Wild as this sounds (and it is wild, with lyrics like “I called off my wedding today, so I think I’ll screw the boardwalk magician,’ and “Roses are tits, violets are tits, tits tits tits”) the show is both funny and insightful. She manages to take something so mundane and, sometimes, gross and turn it into a meditation on human connection and society.
We talked about working with multiple types of media. And about growing up as a Jewish atheist. And about how to invite chaos into one’s art. It was an incredible conversation, and I’m overjoyed to share it with you here.
How did you find your way to the specific intersection of music and comedy?
I really grew up as a songwriter in a musical family. Actually, my mom says I sang before I could talk, that I wrote my first song at age four, about cats. But I also just really always loved comedy. I noticed really early on that if I was singing at a bar where people were talking over the music, people would pay more attention if I sang funny lyrics. Then, towards the end of high school, I developed really debilitating stage fright and completely stopped performing. I just couldn’t. That led me to explore academia.
I went to a small college in Ohio to study art history and began getting interested in the weirdness of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. To be honest, I was a little tired of how elitist and bougie the art world can be. The whole time, I was thinking I’d just write songs for myself. I was really interested in bathroom graffiti, in particular. I saw this one piece of graffiti that said, ‘Since writing on bathroom walls is neither for critical acclaim nor financial reward, it is the purest form of art. Discuss.’ And that just like really up my alley. I did want to discuss that! I love art history, and I loved the way that graffiti broke it down. So, I started photographing bathroom graffiti all over the place.
Then I moved to Chicago, and that's where I started to get over my stage fright. I was doing ‘Teach for America’, and there's something about performing in a classroom that just pushes you. There's no room for stage fright there. It really made a difference. So much so that I started to perform again.
I still wasn’t sure how the pieces would fit together, though, so I went to Europe and began a masters program at the University of Oxford. And while I was there, I noticed all of my friends in my classes were spending their free time in the library, or going to lectures, while I was performing, and photographing bathroom graffiti, and writing illustrated dick jokes. There was something different happening there.
The summer after Oxford, I moved back to New York and I’ve been here ever since. You know, I've always really loved found art, and that’s really what graffiti is. I began to wonder what would happen if were to take these photographs of graffiti and turn them into lyrics. What if I could figure out a way to project the graffiti behind me as I'm singing? I though that'd be really cool. So, I tried it at a little bar called Cobra Club in Bushwick and it went so well. It just really hit upon this universal human experience. It actually did so well that I decided to try and write a whole musical of these.
And it worked! How did you take a pile of bathroom graffiti jokes and turn them into a show?
I wrote all the graffiti songs in March of 2020, but I didn’t totally know where to go from there, which led me to take part in a residency at the Moonlight Theater Company in Athens, Georgia, where my original director, Chase Brantley, helped me write the whole show in a week. Chase comes from the world of clowning, so he helped me build a show that was very outside my comfort zone. At that point, I had all the the songs and, but then the pandemic happened and I put the whole idea to bed.
Then, as the world was opening up again last year, I went to perform a different, more personal show at Edinburgh Fringe. That’s where I met my current director, A.J. Holmes; he was performing in a theater around the corner from where I was performing. Edinburgh Fringe is such a slog — you're doing your show every day for 30 days in the same place at the same time. It can be really crazy-making. And one day I just really needed to see some musical comedy, so I snuck in and saw A.J.’s show. And I sat and cried because I’d found someone doing what I want to do. It felt really powerful.
A.J. and I knew the structure of my show was really strong, but something about it felt not there yet. As I was going through all this graffiti and telling all these people's stories, I began to realize I needed to find where my story was in the narrative. The person I was playing on stage was a character, not me. We needed to make it clear why the audience is with this girl in the bathroom. Why should they care about her? So, I brought back all of this material from my first show, which was more personal, and started to Frankenstein it together. And then we brought Ali Gordon in to produce. Once the three of us were in a room together, everything really started to click.
Ok, wow. Can you tell me a little about the show itself?
Sure. It opens with a literal toilet on stage, and I’m in the stall, supposedly peeing. I suddenly realize that the audience is there with me and that there's no toilet paper. So, I ask the audience for toilet paper and wait for somebody to bring me something. I love that part; it’s a concept that’s been there from the first version of the show. Chase came up with it, and it’s really such a clowning thing to treat the audience as my scene partner. I'm relying on somebody to step up.
Once somebody gives me something — and they always do — I started bonding with them, thanking them and building the world of the show. We're in this bathroom, and there's a dive bar outside, with people drinking and talking. The I get really excited to show them bathroom graffiti, and I play the first bathroom graffiti song I ever wrote. The rest of the show sort of takes a journey through various kinds of graffiti. There’s confessional bathroom graffiti, for instance, and that’s where I start to confess some things about myself and get the audience to confess some secrets, too. We talk about how confessional and intimate bathrooms can be… that kind of stuff.
I sing ‘The Difference,’ which is a song about the graffiti in men's versus women's bathroom stalls. There's a whole art history section — which I think is so fun. That part is all about the historic reasoning behind why the penises on the ancient Greek sculpture are so small and the origins of bathroom graffiti, from cave paintings to carvings in churches and castles from the Victorian era. It’s really fun and silly, and I love that I've brought my useless degrees to this show. Eventually, the show takes a turn towards me actually getting more confessional, talking about my story and things I went through when I was younger.
In that moment, I'm able to play some more songs that are more personal. There are songs that are about the horrible, awful bullying kind of graffiti that we see all the time. But, there’s also a song that goes into the beautiful, poetic, sad, wonderful things that people have written. I think it’s important that I do reveal pretty personal things about myself, but that isn't the end of the show. It’s really a celebration of everybody's stories, of the things they've written on walls, of all these little personal moments of connection. You know, the show ends with a song called ‘Conversations With Strangers,’ which is when people reply to each other on bathroom walls. I just really love that I hopefully have created a space with the audience where I can share a little bit about me and they feel comfortable sharing afterwards, too.
Would you say the show is an exploration of what you believe in and how to find meaning in unexpected places?
Yeah, I think that's a good take. I mean, there are lots there are a lot of different threads running throughout the show, but certainly a large one is finding meaning in unexpected places, specifically bathroom graffiti. It's also about identity — not just who I am, but who we are to each other. It’s about sharing vulnerable stories and connecting with strangers unexpectedly, whether it's writing something in conversation on the wall of a bathroom, or meeting in a bathroom line, or just sharing a little bit about who you are with someone at a bar. It’s a show about shared humanity and universal experience.
It’s funny… growing up in LA as a Jewish atheist felt very normal. I didn't realize that I was different or weird at all. Both my grandparents were from very large families that escaped Poland and Belarus. They both grew up very poor in the Jewish tenements in the Bronx, then moved to LA to make something of themselves. My grandparents were really cool people and I was raised by them, along with my mom and dad. My grandma always said, “We're Jewish, it's very important for you to know that, but we don't believe in God because the Holocaust happened,” and I think that was very common for Jews in LA. I never went to Hebrew school, but we celebrated the holidays, learned about Jewish culture through food and singing. It's very interesting, because sometimes I fell that I am very Jewish, and sometimes I feel like I'm not Jewish enough to be Jewish. I don't always understand the history behind some of the holidays or a specific line of a prayer. But, at the same time, it feels like my culture, the way I was raised, the philosophy I come from.
You know, I come from a wonderfully creative family that also really prioritized education, and intellectualism, and thinking beyond the surface level of things. And that feels very inherent to the Jewish identity. That’s what allowed me to see the beauty in bathroom graffiti. And it’s also something I use in my search for meaning in unusual places. I saw this piece of graffiti that says, ‘Do what scares you, even if it's everything,’ and that’s a major part of my life philosophy. I’m always trying to do things that scare me, to put myself outside of my comfort zone.
You really are merging musical performance with stand-up and art history and philosophy in a fascinating way. Could you tell us about the importance of mixed media in your work?
I think a lot of people trying to pursue a certain kind of art look at the people who have found success and try to emulate them. I think I did that early on, and it was really hard for me. I’m not a pure stand up. I love writing music, I'm a songwriter, but I wasn't the best instrumentalist when I first started. And, even though I like writing sad girl rock songs, I wanted to do other things, too. Plus, I really enjoy using visual aspects in my work — I'm a designer by day. I really love combining lots of different media. It was hard for me to figure it all out.
Sometimes I would leave all the instruments at home and try and do pure standup, and I’m glad I can do that. But, at the end of the day, my instincts are telling me to bring all of the gear. I want a guitar, and a piano, and a looper. I want people to improvise with on stage, I want a projector behind me, I want dance and movement. I think when you're able to not stay in one box, that's when the best art is made. When you get a lot of different people's perspectives and have audience members relating to a lot of different parts of what you're doing out there, that’s where things get magical. My favorite artists are the people break outside the box of and really try to push the boundaries.
Yes! That’s exactly the kind of chaos I love to explore here at the Chaos Palace. The whole premise of this written experiment is that melting the lines of the boxes we exist in (like gender, or specific artistic media, or religion, or what Should and Should Not be done, or other identity things) creates chaos in the world — but is also a source of a lot of creativity and innovation.
How do you engage with chaos in your work, if at all? When you think about blurring lines, how do you feel that's reflected in your daily life / creative work?
More and more, I move towards chaos in my work. After I developed debilitating stage fright as a teenager, the only way I was able to continuously get back on stage was through (1) exposure therapy — getting on stage as often as possible, and (2) having some sense of control — meticulously practicing everything I was going to do and say on stage over and over and over again. If something chaotic happened, it was a mistake, and it truly threw me off. I remember a string breaking on my guitar at the start of a show, and in my mind, the entire show was completely ruined. Funnily enough, friends in the audience afterwards said while the guitar still sounded great, it was the tears in my eyes the whole show that "ruined" it for them. The idea that I would ever invite chaos into my work would've shocked me back then.
Now, I thrive on it. I mean, The Writing on the Stall starts with me asking the audience for toilet paper after I ‘realize’ there's none in the stall. Anyone can bring me anything, and they have! Strangers have brought me tissues, receipts, dollar bills, etc. And it always leads to a new start to my show. Exploring clowning, crowd-work, improv, and jamming have really allowed space for chaos, surprise, and one-of-a-kind moments in my work. These are now my favorite moments. Thank goodness for chaos. When you let go of how things are "supposed to be" and just let them be what they want to be, that is magic. You’re creating a totally new moment with the other performers and the audience that will never happen again.
Caitlin Cook is an LA-born, NYC-based, Oxford-educated, hyphen-addicted wearer-of-many-hats. She is a comedian, musician, artist, director, and producer. A fierce champion of mixed media and genre-bending works of art, Cook has carved out a space for herself smack-dab in the center of the Venn diagram between comedy, music, and visual art, she has taken the stage all across the world at top-tier theaters, comedy clubs, festivals, strangers' living rooms, and even a houseboat once.
Cook’s one-woman bathroom graffiti musical The Writing on the Stall sold out its off-Broadway debut at Soho Playhouse in the fall of 2023. She will be touring the show in 2024. Cook’s musical comedy albums include Zinger-Songwriter, Betty Pitch, and The Writing on the Stall. You can follow her work on Instagram, YouTube or Tik Tok.