Review: There's Absurdism, and Then There's "piss.jpg (Working Title)"

piss.jpg (Working Title)

Written and performed by Justin Jager and Michael Gardiner

Directed by Daniel Yaiullo

Presented by Diamond Mesh Inc. at the Paradise Factory

64 E 4th St., Manhattan, NYC

July 16-August 9, 2026

Justin Jager and Michael Gardiner. Photo courtesy of Strange Garden Productions

Two brothers, one kitchen, and seventy minutes of absurdism taken to hilariously absurd lengths: the endlessly unpredictable piss.jpg (Working Title) showcases a pair of writer-performers firing on all comedic cylinders. Written by Justin Jager and Michael Gardiner and directed by Daniel Yaiullo, multi-hyphenate theater artists all, the eye-catchingly titled production is making its New York City premiere as a flagship production of Diamond Mesh Inc.'s new summer festival, The Manifestival, running from July 16th to August 9th at the Paradise Factory Theater. piss.jpg (Working Title) plucks fragments from the sort of plots and dialogue that might be found in midcentury drama, adds them to its postmodern comic blender, and comes out with a superb show that's as hard to sum up as it is easy to recommend.

The show begins in meta fashion, with a voiceover (Alexandra Brokowski) reciting the sort of opening stage direction describing characters and set(ting) that one would find in a playtext. The first of those characters is Martin (Justin Jager), dressed in khakis and a button down and reading the paper at the kitchen table. The kitchen, where the entirety of the play takes place, holds a small table and a pair of chairs, a cabinet, and, of course, a kitchen sink–all made to look as if constructed from cardboard (an additional layer of unreality on what is always already a simulacrum of a real-world space). Whatever sense of normality there is in this opening tableau quickly evaporates with the appearance–in both the sense of his entrance and of how he looks–of the play's second character, Martin's brother, Roger (Michael Gardiner). Roger generally keeps a smile on his face, whether appropriate or not, and wants his brother to love him, while Martin is the peevish one of the pair and gaslights Roger whenever it serves his own self-interest. To begin with, Roger asks Martin to remind him to make a phone call, and Martin starts to tell Roger about something he read in the paper, but, however mundane the topic in piss.jpg, lines of conversation are prone to veering off in wildly unanticipated directions, stumbling over semantic misunderstandings, and undergoing breakdowns in meaning, as in a bravura rant by Jager's Martin that starts as about who thinks whom is "hot shit" (math is subjected to a similar and similarly funny breakdown in a sequence about how old the brothers are). On multiple occasions, characters' intended action or speech is interrupted or, in some cases, dies out suddenly, and this frustration of expectation extends to the play's conclusion, when spectators are set up to think that they are going to get one of those jokes where the characters say the name of the show in the show.

Not unrelated to the show's uninhibited play with language and intertextuality–there are allusions not only to, for example, Albee's Zoo Story, Pinter's The Birthday Party, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot but also to The Wizard of Oz and The Blair Witch Project–the brothers' very reality can be viewed as open to interpretation. Are events like a visit from an unexpected guest actually happening, are the brothers playacting with one another (killing time, perhaps, like Vladimir and Estragon), or, to borrow a motif from their exchanges, some third thing? Jager and Gardiner make for a fantastic duo, propelled by unerring comedic chemistry but also able to anchor the general comic insanity in isolated moments of pathos that reveal a need to exercise and have witnessed one's personhood, an anxiety that one's "soul" or indeed very existence might dissolve without anyone to notice to remember. Even these themes of the self, though, are unsettled in the end, when the play throws the characters' identities into question (not that the brothers haven't confused them themselves at previous points) and suggests a cycle of repetition with a difference. In all, very few shows take the piss quite like piss.jpg (Working Title).

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards