Carl Holder's New Solo Show OUT OF ORDER Brings New Form To East Village Basement

Carl Holder really wasn’t sure whether or not he could do this anymore. 

‍This is write plays, work in theatre, and live in New York doing it. It was late 2023 — a teaching job was about to end, and had they kept him on any longer, he would have qualified for insurance. A friend from graduate school was opening up her family home in Los Angeles for artists to come in and do a residency, but none of his ideas were really clicking with him. 

Except one. 

“The only thing I knew about the idea was, ‘what if there was something that you made that was pulled out of a bowl, and every time you did it, it was different?’” Holder told Theatrely. 

The result? His play Out of Order is now running at East Village Basement through July 22. In the play, Holder picks index cards out of a bowl with tasks varying from random acts of kindness and audience participation, to discussions about the realities of art making, to narratives about farm animals from a childhood story. If he fails to complete every card, he vows to quit theatre forever. 

The stakes are high — and for Holder, confronting. He’s been doing theatre since he was five years old. He holds a BFA in Acting from SUNY Purchase, an MFA Dramatic Writing from NYU/Tisch, and won the Goldberg Play Prize in 2020 and was a Finalist for the 2019 Neukom Literary Arts Playwriting Award. 

“I've been doing this in some ways for a long time, and by certain conventional standards, there are benchmarks I have not achieved,” Holder said. “A lot of those are financial and then there are these other things that have happened. In some ways, yes, I really am doing the thing I've always wanted to do, but in some ways, I feel so far from actually being where I wanted to be.” 

This is the longest period Holder is performing the marathon of a show, but it is far from the first. After the first iteration at his friend’s Los Angeles residency, he did the show in 16 living rooms in nine states. 

“I was interested in the contrast of ambition and intimacy,” Holder said. “Like, I'm gonna go to all these states, but it’s always gonna be a max of 20 people. The sort of playful questioning of, ‘why can't that be a tour? Why can't the tour be me going to all these places to perform for, you know, eight to 15 people.’” 

The index card form style presented Holder with a creative challenge that was exciting to him. He knew he had to be precise enough in the structure and story that if he showed audiences the piece in any order at all, it would somehow land. It bonds the small audience; they’re the only people who have seen this particular show in this particular order, and have gone on this ride together.  

At East Village Basement, he’s collaborating with director and writer Skylar Fox, which he said has made the theme feel sharper and clearer. He hopes to “see how long [he] can keep this up,” after the East Village run, but he isn’t sure what form, exactly, the future of the show will take. 

In asking himself the central question — does he really want to do this theatre thing? — every night, he’s learned a lot about himself. Key among the lessons: he can’t pretend he doesn’t love making art. 

“I love this to a degree that is comedic and tragic,” Holder said. “Doing this through all the different iterations and all the different challenges each iteration threw at me also gave me a bit of pep in my step, with regard to what I had left in me, what I what I was still capable of, It gave me a new trust in what's possible for me.” 

Out of Order is running at East Village Basement on East 9th Street in New York City through July 22. For tickets and more information, visit here. 

Editor’s note: Editor-in-Chief Kobi Kassal serves as a consulting producer on Out of Order. He was not involved in the reporting, writing, or editing of this article.