Come get tortured at Camp Freedom!
New play assures everyone it's still okay to be righteously indignant
Vance Smith
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Two years ago, Steve Spencer’s first play, Another Day In The Empire—a critically acclaimed and viciously funny satire about a real-estate agent who goes nearly insane—made it clear there was a new voice to be reckoned with on Chicago's stages. Spencer’s latest work, Camp Freedom!, is a similarly vicious satire. It's set in the not-too-distant future, when the economy has collapsed and debtors are sent to FEMA camps for relocation and processing… and possibly some torture. Plus: Dick Cheney. Though it begins with a failed suicide attempt, a talking television, and a government kidnapping, the play is ostensibly a comedy. Decider spoke to Spencer about his gloriously dark vision of things to come and the difficulty of trying to be angry and funny now that Bush is out of office.
Decider: What inspired you to write this play?
Steve Spencer: I wrote about 90 percent of it back in April. That was right before the wheels came off the entire country, and I knew something bad was going to happen. I think everybody was getting ready for something bad to happen. I lost a job and I got the flu, so for about two days I watched Dr. Strangelove and drank Nyquil and just kind of marinated in depression and Nyquil and Dr. Strangelove. So I was kind of hallucinating about satire, and I just kind of sat down and wrote the first scene, which hasn’t really changed at all since then. It’s basically that the main character has just lost his job and comes back to his apartment and so from there, I had an idea.
D: The Bush years were great for satire. How does your incredibly horrible vision of the future stand up in light of this new era of hope?
SS: Well unfortunately, I think it stands up fairly well. I’m in love with Obama. It’s really nice to have an adult who can speak English in charge. I’d love to have a poster of him, like, Farrah Fawcett-style on my wall. But unfortunately I just don’t see us coming out of this without a prolonged struggle, and what‘s going to happen on the other end is probably going to look like the former Soviet Union. Basically, I wish he would have a press conference and just be like, "Look, people, we’re fucked and we have to change our entire way of life." His inauguration speech made me cry a little bit, but the one thing I didn’t like is when he said we would not apologize for our way of life, and we certainly should. We should apologize to the entire world and future generations for our way of life and change it completely.
D: How can angry satire make a difference in people’s attitudes toward what’s going wrong in the world?
SS: First of all, it feels really good to be righteously pissed off. Righteous indignation feels really good. But ultimately I don’t know if it does anything. Obviously I can’t compare myself to Kubrick, and I can aspire to Dr. Strangelove of course, but I don’t know if it makes a difference. We had a reading at the [Department Of Cultural Affairs theater], and afterwards I asked the audience members: "What’s the play about? What’s the theme?" Somebody afterwards said, "Steve you shouldn’t care about any of that stuff. You should just care if they had a good time," and they did. I don’t know if it makes any difference. The only thing that would make a difference is, you know, violence, but that’s not an option.
Steve Spencer: I wrote about 90 percent of it back in April. That was right before the wheels came off the entire country, and I knew something bad was going to happen. I think everybody was getting ready for something bad to happen. I lost a job and I got the flu, so for about two days I watched Dr. Strangelove and drank Nyquil and just kind of marinated in depression and Nyquil and Dr. Strangelove. So I was kind of hallucinating about satire, and I just kind of sat down and wrote the first scene, which hasn’t really changed at all since then. It’s basically that the main character has just lost his job and comes back to his apartment and so from there, I had an idea.
D: The Bush years were great for satire. How does your incredibly horrible vision of the future stand up in light of this new era of hope?
SS: Well unfortunately, I think it stands up fairly well. I’m in love with Obama. It’s really nice to have an adult who can speak English in charge. I’d love to have a poster of him, like, Farrah Fawcett-style on my wall. But unfortunately I just don’t see us coming out of this without a prolonged struggle, and what‘s going to happen on the other end is probably going to look like the former Soviet Union. Basically, I wish he would have a press conference and just be like, "Look, people, we’re fucked and we have to change our entire way of life." His inauguration speech made me cry a little bit, but the one thing I didn’t like is when he said we would not apologize for our way of life, and we certainly should. We should apologize to the entire world and future generations for our way of life and change it completely.
D: How can angry satire make a difference in people’s attitudes toward what’s going wrong in the world?
SS: First of all, it feels really good to be righteously pissed off. Righteous indignation feels really good. But ultimately I don’t know if it does anything. Obviously I can’t compare myself to Kubrick, and I can aspire to Dr. Strangelove of course, but I don’t know if it makes a difference. We had a reading at the [Department Of Cultural Affairs theater], and afterwards I asked the audience members: "What’s the play about? What’s the theme?" Somebody afterwards said, "Steve you shouldn’t care about any of that stuff. You should just care if they had a good time," and they did. I don’t know if it makes any difference. The only thing that would make a difference is, you know, violence, but that’s not an option.
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