On September 21, Daly Barnett’s JEF+KEV//SIM infiltrated the ranks of this year’s United Solo Theatre Festival and inoculated its lineup of “straight” theater with the virus of queer performance art. Solo performance and performance art share a symbiotic genesis, solo performance being fundamentally based in storytelling that often features the absence of a “fourth wall” and performance art seeking to eradicate this distinction entirely, its vital action grafted to an everyday ontology. Thrust forth from this lineage, JEF+KEV//SIM is inescapably live. It is a performative testament to such everyday experience, specifically the gritty, hopeless mundanity of bearing the load of queer cultural trauma.

Daly Barnett. JEF+KEV//SIM, 2014 (still); performance; 40:00. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Joelle Ballam-Schwan.

In JEF+KEV//SIM, Barnett conjures three personas: Jeff, a saltwater aquarium enthusiast (who may also be Jeffrey Dahmer); Simon, a meth-addict soothsayer wired into the cybernetic subconscious; and Kevin, an overgrown child of privilege leeching a living in the empty mansion of his dead family. Kevin is also the only victim that serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer let go free. Barnett’s Kevin is actually based on the true story of one of Dahmer’s first abductions, and it evokes the oft-hushed queer aspects of the Dahmer narrative. The horror of Kevin’s near miss plays on cultural fears about the dangers of cruising, and Barnett’s Kevin lives under the thumb of this trauma, laughing it off even as it seeps into the texture of his other sexual encounters, festering like the described rotting fruit on the kitchen counter of his dead parents’ mansion.

Barnett’s performance successfully implements the refined tools of traditional theater (including the power of camp, of character, and the allure of a compelling story), but the most significant aspect of her “play” from a theoretical standpoint lies within two particular actions that fissure the fiction of his storytelling. “Simon,” the meth prophet, looms atop a red square sigil, terrifyingly obscured behind a cloth gimp mask, delivering diatribes about the blazing, apocalyptic landscape of a queer dystopia. During one such tirade, Barnett forces a viewer to stand on his sigil and charge an unlit match with energy and “an intention.” During a commercial for Barnett’s premiere performance staged at The Bureau for General Services Queer Division in August, the participant lights the match and Barnett—we are suddenly snapped into awareness that it is Barnett herself who performs the action—stubs it out on her own flesh. At the performance’s full premiere at United Solo Theatre Festival, the participant’s match remains unlit and Barnett eats it. The next move is gross, fetishistic shock value: as Simon offers up a prayer in ritualistic homage to self-destruction and the ingestion of one’s own filth, one’s own trauma, the character pisses in a glass and drinks his own urine.

Curtain call from JEF+KEV//SIM, 2014; Left: performer Daly Barnett, Right: sound designer Mehron Abdollmohammadi. Courtesy of the Artist and Mehron Abdollmohammadi. Photo: Joelle Ballam-Schwan.

By forcing us to uncomfortably witness these abject affronts to the performer’s body, Barnett transfers the trauma of her characters onto her own flesh. These actions, surrounded on either side by Kevin’s self-deprecating admissions and his humorously recounted tale of Dahmer’s attempt to pick him up at a gay bar, shocks us out of the alternate reality of fiction. Faced with the abjection of Barnett’s appetite for destruction, what she willfully does to his own body to upend her narrative, we are forced to know that the fantasy lives in the present tense. The trauma to which Barnett alludes—one of secrecy, depravity, mortality, and the complicated and terrifying search for desire with little more than a match in the dark—takes place not in an adjacent fiction but rather happens in our world, right now, as we watch it.

JEF+KEV//SIM was performed on Sunday, September 21, 2014, at United Solo Theatre Festival in New York, NY.