When I was twelve, before I was gay, before I was Latine, before I was anxious, before I claimed any of these labels, I was Lady Gaga’s friend. Learning the choreography to her songs, talking to her collaborators on Twitter, promoting her albums online like my life depended on it. Being a customer was easier than being myself, and in my childhood pessimism, Lady Gaga was all I could buy. 

How to make sense of an icon? As celebrities and online figures continue to inform our reality and the way we speak, my hope is for theater to do the same, to augment our relationship to the online world, which can be a “place” of great polarity, if a place at all. Copyrighted language and advertisements pepper our everyday speech. A word in the title of this play is trademarked! Don’t tell Taylor. Or please do. 

What we consume online and at stores like Target, the trademarked properties, the ensuing memes and mutations, the one-sided friendships with the avatars of strangers—by processing these cultural artifacts from another medium, a more tangible one, theater allows us to slow down and behold them. 

This play is for people who have bought things. Recklessly, painstakingly, regrettably. With or without money. Of course, we buy things long before we have wallets. To buy something is to believe in it. Do you remember the first thing you ever bought? Was it real? Was it yours? 

Thank you to my mom for buying me tickets to see Hannah Montana when I was eleven. And thank you to my father, my brothers, this creative team, and everyone else who bought that I was a playwright before I did. 

–Derick