Tristan Tzara Was My Best Friend in Junior High

A dinner party ritual.

A dinner party/ritual as designed by the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. Although takes the form of a Passover Seder, this ritual commemorates the time that all the other Dadaists decided to stop doing Dada and go and invent Surrealism, and Tristan Tzara was not invited. The audience is invited to sit around the dinner table, drink four glasses of wine, and be a part of this immersive meditation on community, friendship and loss.

Created in collaboration with Jon Cole and Lauren Anderson, our dinner party toured the East Coast and Midwest for a month in November 2015, and returned to Minneapolis and Chicago for week long runs in the summer and fall of 2016. The latest run was in 2023 at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, starring Jon Cole and Mr Stine, where it won an honorable mention for the Audience Choice Award.

Jon Cole and Mr Stine in Philadelphia, 2023.

Reviews.

From an article by Michelle Embree:

We became a community of witnesses to this event. We invested our trust and something special happened. We were entertained. We laughed. We sang. We vented. We socialized, we were fed. There was a sense of something being completed. I know I won’t forget it. I learned something and I can’t exactly explain it, but I know I’ll think of it again and again.

From a review by Blake Weil in No Proscenium:

Being in a relationship, or a friendship, or a community is hard. We cling and demand, or we’re clung to and demanded of and grow resentful. We hurt each other, steal each other’s girlfriends, force people into our projects and then get angry when they’re not enthusiastic. It’s tempting to throw your hands up, but we’re social creatures. We need this, however ugly it is. Tristan Tzara Was My Best Friend in Junior High illustrates this need, and then skillfully argues that need alone makes us a community, a people, despite the inevitability of our failure.

And finally, live drawings of the show by The Sketchbook Reporter: