Mason Alexander Park Talks THE PANSY CRAZE Coming to Audible's Minetta Lane Theatre

Who needs a podcast when you can have theatre in your ear? Since 2021, Mason Alexander Park — who has recently taken the West End stage in Jamie Lloyd’s The Tempest  and Much Ado About Nothing, as well as the current revival of Cabaret — has worked with their writing partner Hunter Bird on a series called The Pansy Craze. Now, the show will be produced as a six-part series on Audible — and you can catch the first three episodes live from June 26 to 28 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre in New York.

The show breaks down moments in queer history that you didn’t get in school. Part cabaret, part piano bar vibe, part love letter to Queer icons, Alexander Park and a special guest each night will take audiences on a trip through time. They’ll perform songs, sketches, and storytelling, spilling the tea your textbook missed.  

Theatrely sat down with Alexander Park on the phone while they were on their Amtrak ride up to New York City from visiting Virginia. Check out what they had to say about how the audio element impacts the show, performing during Pride Month, and why they hope the show will resonate with Gen. Z.  

So you're coming up to New York right now. Walk me through what's going through your head as you're getting ready to do the show.

I'm really excited. You know, my writing partner, Hunter, and I first did an iteration of the show in 2021 sort of in the midst of the pandemic. It’s been so much fun to revisit it every couple of years and just watch it evolve based on whatever the current political climate is, whatever the restraints of the actual performance itself is. With this iteration, we’re doing six shows over the course of the year, which will all be completely unique episodes of a long form audio series. It’s a completely different experience than anything that we've done with The Pansy Craze before, so there's a lot of excitement, but also, a healthy dose of wearing a lot more hats this time around with writing about, you know, five times the amount of material than we used to.

I'm really curious about the audio element of this. Is that impacting your process?

We’ve had to think about this iteration a lot more as a big radio play because of the audio aspect. We're quite aware of it, and we want to be in dialogue with it so that the people who get to be present for the live experience have something special that can only occur if you come to see the shows in person, but that also the people who experience it in audio format are also getting something that is tailored to their experience. It’s been this fun challenge of trying to balance how are we in dialogue with both the current audience that's in front of us in real time, and the future audience that's going to be listening to those down the line.

I guess. How do you sort of go about striking that balance, like, for lack of a better way to put it like, how are you thinking about how this will resonate in the future?

When you're thinking about both this having sort of resonance now and the fact that this is being recorded and resonant in the future, how do you balance that?

The thesis of the show is sort of focusing on the cyclical nature of history. That's where the idea for The Pansy Craze was birthed; we return to every time that we look at expanding what the show is. It’s taking moments, disparate moments throughout history, in which queerness was celebrated, modified and then criminalized, and following this trajectory of history, and just constantly repeating that cycle throughout different decades, different centuries. In a weird way, we're experiencing this at this point in time, and we kind of have to be in dialogue with the fact that a year from now, we don't necessarily know what point the cycle will be at. We don't really know what's going to happen. Unfortunately, for lack of a better word, it's a bit bleak. The show is trying to engage with the tougher reality of what the Queer community and what Trans people are experiencing at this boiling point, and find the best way to remind the — both the future tense and the present tense — audience that we will hopefully get through this and come out the other end.

To that end, how does it feel to be doing a show like this in New York during Pride? What does that mean to you?

It’s incredibly special. It feels almost like we;re doing a ghost play, in a way. We’re engaging with stories about performers from the 1920s to the 1970s in these first three episodes, and a lot of these performers made their living as queer people in the village, where we’ll be performing the show. There’s something really cool about being in that space, doing a show that is taking place, you know, in a specific moment of queer expression and artistic explosion in one of the most incredible places in the world for the queer culture on such a great weekend. It’s just incredibly special. It’s not lost on any of us involved, and we're very fortunate to get to be one of the many offerings of New York City on that weekend.

What do you hope that young people who come see the show might take away from it?

I hope that they will feel more connected to a sense of belonging throughout time. I think that young people are incredibly hip, have access to information that my generation kind of had to go digging for a little bit more so. So I think that young people just naturally are already far more aware of a lot of historical goodies that maybe were lost to time, because you have such incredible access on apps like TikTok or where you see these Queer content creators that are focusing on these really bite sized nuggets as historical information. I think it’s really special, and it didn't necessarily exist in that way when I was a kid. I think that maybe they’ll be excited to hear something or experience something in a much more drawn out format, rather than a two or three minute long video on Instagram. It's a really cool way to engage with history and experience it in a kind of fun and chaotic and silly way. I hope that as many young people as possible do show up, because it’s really important to know where you came from in a way. 

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The Pansy Craze runs at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City from June 26 to 28. Three additional performance dates and special guests will be announced at a later date. For tickets and more information, visit here.