Sunday night’s wake for Defiant Theatre had all the trappings. The guests wore black, the bar was open, and the buffet was pot luck. There were tears and toasts. There was also quite a bit of gunfire. Multiple stage pistols loaded with blanks were on hand, and every time a company member wanted to make a toast, he or she just fired a shot in the air to get the room’s attention.
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Although critical reaction to their work was often mixed, their bombastic and gory low-budget stagings of work like Albert Camus’ Caligula and Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, became yardsticks for the fuck-you theater of the 90s, when companies like the Factory secured their potty-mouthed reps with spoofs like White Trash Wedding and a Funeral and the Hypocrites were starting to mount wild-eyed shows like Marat/Sade.
There was a montage of video clips from past productions that included a never-aired music video the company made with the Smoking Popes at Metro in 2001. (Lead singer Josh Caterer’s wife, Stephanie, appeared in several Defiant shows.) Offerman, whose career kept him away, contributed a profane eulogy that was given a dramatic reading by several company members. (“You can all probably still smell my urine,” he wrote of the Strawdog space.)
“I’ve gotten a lot of perspective on people in low-wage jobs,” she said. “A lot of people have three roommates and no money and are really happy.”
