I’m a lifelong fan of chaos. As the youngest of seven kids, I grew up in a particular kind of mayhem and noise. When I first started doing theatre in New York, I gravitated towards work that was frantic, noisy and larger than life. As I’ve gotten older, my tastes have changed a bit but I’ll never lose my propensity for watching madness unfold. I really enjoyed getting to play in the subconscious mind of Richard Foreman, for he is truly the Master of Controlled Chaos. His baroque non-linear freak shows changed my life.

I’ve been to the Chuck E. Cheese’s in Burbank several times, only for birthday parties for friends of my kids (do people go there for any other reason? The food?). We got an invitation to a party that was this past weekend, for a friend of my five-year old son. My seven-year old daughter and I both groaned when we heard it was there. She really didn’t want to go. “It’ll be fun!”, I said. I’m an all-right actor but even she didn’t buy that line of crap. It’s a horrible place, for all the reasons that you can imagine, or have experienced. So, we all went.

You are yelled at from the second you walk through the door. The absolute and unbroken cacophony persists without abate the entire time. Kids scream, music blares, videos play, announcements are shouted in that high-pitched “Are you guys excited?!!” tone that grates. It all mixes together into a soup that utterly fills your skull.

And the wonder of it all, the precise audio valley that they achieve is this: There is not one thing that can be clearly heard. What would take an experienced sound designer and audio engineer weeks to figure out, Chuck E. Cheese’s achieves by utter neglect. In all of that sound, you can’t hear one thing. Kind of amazing.

The poor employees have to yell in order to be heard, so let’s call them “Yellers.” Because that’s pretty much all they do. They positively scream into a microphone near the bathrooms. Clearly something is about to happen. What that was, I’ll never know. There were no words in those announcements.

In the arcade area, the games are so close together, they appear to have been shoved from a military aircraft about a thousand feet above the ground. I stepped on things. Was that a piece of pizza or a child’s forearm? No screams of pain? O.K., push forward, kids.  Is that a game where you try to get the thing in the thing? One where you hit the thing a lot? Or one where you punch a thing? Or where you throw a thing at a thing? Who cares?! Just play it!

Skee-ball is the oasis. Bright. Tactile. But most importantly, timeless. To commit to Chuck E. Cheese’s experience is to commit to all the sads of 1990s entertainment. I could play Skee-ball all day long. Apparently, so could the unsupervised three-year old next to us, who chucked the wooden balls overhand, slamming them over and over into Plexiglass. We laughed.

A Yeller screams over the mic and people gravitate to the far end of the place — the Pizza Time Theatre.

Now, I’ve seen shows in storefronts, garages, hotel rooms, gymnasiums, warehouses, people houses, you name it. Lemme tell you: The Pizza Time Theatre is no theatre. I’ve seen pictures of other Chuck E. Cheese’s where there’s a stage and a number of animatronic animals. Not at this one in Burbank.

At the far end of very long tables there’s a set, or stuff on a wall that provides background. There are three different areas. On the far right is what looks like a miniature talk show set. Maybe. A fake window with a drab skyline behind it, a globular TV with nothing playing, a parrot statue, a clock that doesn’t tell the right time, a pizza-shaped old phone on the wall. Because, you know, what kid doesn’t love a vaguely 1950s TV studio set? Standing in this set is Chuck E. Cheese — the most depressing animatronic figure I’ve ever seen. If you have kids and you’ve ever animated a toy that isn’t intended to be animated, that’s what this is. A blink. A head turn. Another blink.

APPLAUSE and ON THE AIR signs hang above. They don’t do anything.

In the center area is a drab projection screen, tucked into a design that I think is supposed to be an old TV (but it just isn’t). What played on the screen—and there was always something playing—kept me absolutely riveted in its utter failure. Cheery kid hosts with mics, a funky rapper character, puppets that look exactly like Muppets but much worse, and a person in a Chuck E. Cheese suit and M.C. Hammer pants doing an endless dance routine to “Hammer Time.”

The videos have largely been shot as “interactive” scenes. The funky rapper says things like, “How are you all doing?” then waits for a response. There was none, because, well, you barely hear him. Because at the same time there are multiple birthday parties going on, each being led by Yellers. They stand at the head of the long tables and scream, “I say Happy! You say Birthday!” and stuff like that. So, now the Yellers yell their calls-and-responses, the partiers scream and clap, the videos play, and Chuck E. jerks back and forth. The funky rapper counts down from ten. No one hears.

Then a real Chuck E. Cheese enters. Or is it? He looks slightly different from his animatronic counterpart. Is this a brother?  A cousin? A friend? When he (she? it?) walks over and stands in front of the animatronic, well, let me just say this: Reality bends.

The third area is “Studio C.” There’s a blue video screen on the wall. and what I can only imagine is a dance floor. I only know that because Chuck E. Cheese gathered up a bunch of kids, taught them a little dance then threw a bunch of prize tickets into the air for them to grab at like a bunch of chickens.

And then there’s this console:

I have no idea what that is but it sure takes up a shitload of space in the Pizza Time Theatre.

The festivities ended. Some people returned to the arcade. Others went home.

We stayed. The next thing I knew, we were the last ones from our party who were still there. We played more games and Skee-ball, got a lot of tickets, got a couple straight-to-garbage prizes, then left. It had been three hours.

We walk out and my daughter goes, “That was actually fun!” Without a moment’s hesitation, I replied, “It was!” And I meant it. It was fun. Then she remembered that she needed to go to the bathroom, so we went back in. And I discovered my favorite gesture of absurdity at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

There are speakers in the bathroom that play the audio from the videos. The sound is crystal clear: no music, no Yellers. The actors in the video actually sound like they are talking to you, asking questions like, “Are you ready to meet Chuck E.?” As I stood there at the urinal, I almost said, “Yes!” It was the only moment of clarity, of individuality. It almost achieved the magic elixir that happens at Disneyland thousands of times a day: You feel like it was all created just for you.

Several days later, I woke up with that inexplicable thought that the Chuck E. Cheese experience is a little like the Richard Foreman experience. He liked to describe his plays as spinning tops, where you look at all the pictures on the top itself, then crank it up and those images all blend together into a blur. And isn’t this what life is? An ever-increasing blur of sound, images and emotions that we work desperately to give shape and narrative to?

Life is a chaotic dream. It takes energy and training to organize disparate elements into a story. Sometimes, you just have to let the vermin run wild. And laugh at the three-year old throwing wooden balls at Plexiglass.

No matter how much self-esteem you acquire over the years, you never fully heal from being bullied.

When you’re 45 years old, there’s no other way for lessons like that to come than the hard way — like storm fronts that have been gathering for years. The clouds look innocuous to start, then all of a sudden — BAM! — there’s a monster of a hurricane in your midst. It’s unavoidable and unchangeable, even when you saw it coming (sometimes especially). I long for the days when a thing happens, a lesson is learned, and change happens. Like with my daughter, who’s seven. If you hang around with kids who get in trouble, you may get into trouble. Lesson learned; behavior changed.

I first became aware of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the current animated series, through her about a year ago. I was working on a revision of my Miss Julieadaptation, Cattywampus, weaving into it some dominant symbolism of the phoenix, the mythological bird whose life cycle involves bursting into flames and being reborn. She was in the same room with me one day as I wrote, watching an episode. My ears prickled when I heard one of the ponies say “phoenix,” so I joined her.

What I experienced was a revelation.

The ponies weren’t talking about the city in Arizona. One of the ponies, Fluttershy, noticed that Princess Celestia’s pet bird, Philomena, was sick so she took her away and tried to cure her. Turns out that Philomena wasn’t sick at all, she was actually a phoenix. She burst into flames and was reborn. The lesson in this episode — and there’s always a lesson — is that, no matter how good your intentions may be, you should ask before taking matters into your own hands.

On a deeper level, the lesson is this: In order for change to happen, things have to die. This is a major theme in most traditional storytelling and, well, in life.

I’ve watched many more episodes since then. Sometimes they’re fluffy, sometimes they’re dark. They are always masterfully constructed stories, sophisticated vocal performances that often involve well-written Broadway-style musical numbers, andwell-executed comedy bits. So, you know, it appeals to this guy.

The animation is top-notch. There’s some magic visual elixir in the way that the ponies trot. The animators exploit the mind-blowing reality that Muybridge discovered in his birth-of-film photographs – that horses leave the ground with all four hooves every time they trot. They levitate, over and over and over again. It’s downright rhapsodic.

But the show goes even deeper. In the theatre and film work that I create, I’m interested in developing worlds-within-themselves. Well, lemme tell ya, Lauren Faust, the creator of the show, has created a goddamn universe from within which these stories come. The layers seem endless and yet are so elegantly articulated that my daughter can hold the entire world in her head.

From the wikipedia page:
This incarnation was created by Lauren Faust, who was a fan of the property in her youth but eventually grew dissatisfied with its poor writing that she felt pandered to sexist stereotypes. Thus Faust endeavored to design her own version of the property to address those concerns and created a series acclaimed for its sophisticated writing and nuanced characters. 

Equestria, the world which she created, is predominately female, ruled by Princess Celestia. But the show only pushes gender politics in that it acts as an equalizer. The six main characters — Twilight Sparkle, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and Applejack — all possess their own individual strengths and weaknesses. The problems that they encounter are sometimes caused by male characters but the solutions that they come up with are most often found within themselves and their inner circle of female friends. Male characters are present but have a limited role and impact in this world. Friendship holds the power in Equestria.

As the title states, friendship is magic. Since Faust and her team have done exceptional dramaturgy, research and creative planning, every story that I’ve seen falls from that principle.

With the give-and-take of friendship, anything is possible.

At 45, I need to hear lessons like that. So simple, so true.

And P.S. Yes, I know what a Brony is. And if there was such a thing as the internet when I was bullied, I would have no doubt found some friends in a group such as that. But that’s a whole other story…