BBW (Brooklyn Backyard Wrestling) T-Shirt

Brooklyn Backyard Wrestling is a performance based theatre piece which utilizes classic tropes of the ‘professional wrestling’ genre to create new avant garde work. In many ways Vince McMahon’s WWE is the national theatre of America, and BBW aspires to bring a garage band approach to this highly visible form. Starring such heroes and villains as G.I. Bro, the “American Luchador” U.S. Essa and “The First, The Last, the Greatest” Frank Lee Fabulous, BBW is a makeshift federation, a wrestling empire in microcosm where the characters, though lacking perhaps the intimidating bodies of real professional wrestlers, enact all the same high stakes drama as their nationally broadcasted fellows with the fervent passion of the DIY-ers they are. The wrestlers do promos where they hype this week’s match, talking expert trash in high rhetorical fashion before making good on their promises as they fight a match, executing a somewhat preplanned narrative choreography, not dissimilar to dance in its utilization of the human form.

Like all elemental theatre, it is a finely reduced morality play, expressing greater truths using simplified archetypes, and because it’s physical, anyone can understand it. Having been raised in the form, practicing backyard wrestling as teenagers in Columbus, Ohio, the BBW performers know full well the gaudy tropes of the genre, and subvert them accordingly. Gone are the cold war stereotypes of champions Nikolai Volkoff and The Iron Sheik and in their place is the Trump lampooning Most-Americanism of Frank Lee Fabulous. Wrestling can be funny, dramatic, surreal, and unlike many forms of avant garde theatre, can connect with its audience in a legible way. It has all of the stakes of Greek Drama, and twice as many chair shots.

Watch BBW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku3VT5ZPsMA