Are you familiar with the infamous fanfiction, My Immortal?
If you aren’t, you should be. Seriously, type the words “My Immortal fanfiction” into google and read it. You will not be disappointed.
My Immortal is terrible. It’s unbelievably awful. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it degenerates the very concepts of art and creativity.
And it’s wonderful.
My Immortal is a Harry Potter fanfiction which contains: lots of weird sex written by someone who’s clearly never had it, all of the main characters being emo and goth, a Peeping Tom Dumbledore, the line “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUCKERS?”, an ungodly amount of typos, the strangest and most perplexing author asides I’ve ever seen, and time travel. Because of course there is time travel.
My friends, Adam Cash and Brandon Karsh, approached me one day with this idea they had. They were thinking it would be fun to use My Immortal as a springboard for a play akin to a Disaster Artist style retelling and asked me if I wanted to co-write it.
Of course I said yes. What kind of a guy do you think I am?
We wanted the play to be a speculation on what sort of person would create something so relentlessly terrible. Because the authorship of My Immortal is shrouded in secrecy, we felt uncomfortable trying to come up with “the real story” on our own, so we came up with our own brand new fanfiction and situation surrounding its creation, namely that said bad fanfiction was written that way on purpose. There are clues that My Immortal was meant to be purposely terrible, but there is no way to know for certain.
And thus, Sunbathe in Darkness was born.
And it’s coming to the 2019 Hollywood Fringe Festival at the Broadwater Second Stage (6320 Santa Monica Blvd)! Tickets are $15, preview is pay-what-you-can and… and…
…and what’s this little slip of paper sticking out of my pocket. huh, how did that get there? I guess I’ll just take a look at it, what’s it say… what’s it…?
Oh! “Get $13 tickets for Sunbathe in Darkness using the code ‘ohmystan’ when you purchase through the Fringe website!”
What a handy message, little slip o’ paper! Thank you!
The website link is this: hff19.org/5914 - like with Anna St. Hesia Dreams, I ask you to please share that link far and wide. We’ve got a lot of badass people in the cast - Sarah Richards plays Casey, the lead (she was also the lead in my Fringe show from last year, How to Be Lazy and Not Feel Guilty), Mitchell Pratt plays Isaac (Casey’s nerdy nerd best friend), and Juliana Labarbiera plays Tatumn (Casey’s emo and overbearing older sister), and so many more talented folks.
Sunbathe in Darkness is a comedy that is one half teen drama, one half ridiculous fanfiction. This is a period piece set in 2007. Casey writes a shitty Alfie Wonderkid fanifction for fun one day, and then it blows up online, becoming hugely popular. As she struggles with the fanfiction’s popularity, she also has to deal with good ol’ real life stuff. Her one and only friend is kinda mean to her and her older sister is really freaking annoying because she “knows what’s best for Casey” or whatever.
Get to the theatre early - the show WILL START RIGHT ON TIME ON THESE DATES:
June 9 (Sunday) - 9:00 PM (pay-what-you-can preview)
June 16 (Sunday) - 6:00 PM
June 21 (Friday) - 10:00 PM
June 23 (Sunday) - 11:30 AM
June 30 (Sunday) - 3:00 PM
Parking sucks. The Plunge is a bar attached to the Broadwater and a great place to hang out if you’ve got time to kill. That, and Sunbathe in Darkness is probably best viewed a little sauced.
Hope to see you there!