poolboy: don’t pick up
March 21-23, 2024 at 8pm
The Museum of Human Achievement
By Sam Mayer
Installation by Anderson Funk
Additional material by Julia Mounsey
Sound by Bryan Dalle Molle
Produced by Christine Gwillim
with help from Jay Roff-Garcia and Leah Yacknin-Dawson
poolboy: don’t pick up is an immersive party and performance about submissiveness, friendship, and failure. Your computer is whitehot in your lap. What happens next is entirely in your control.
poolboy is trying to write a murder mystery. His best friend, momgrab (artist Julia Mounsey), is ghosting him. To avoid writing, poolboy will do anything you say. Anything. don’t pick up seems simple, an excavation of 20 years of writing: from School of Rock fanfic to failed plays to abandoned journals. The audience freely interrupts with questions, new conversation topics, or by giving poolboy tasks to complete on the spot. Reality and fiction intertwine. All is not what it seems. poolboy: don’t pick up is pure chaos: a participatory, living, white-knuckle document of poolboy’s very real life.
Tickets are sliding scale, with no minimum. Get them here!
about poolboy00
This is the fifth iteration of poolboy00. Since 2020, Houston-born, Austin-based artist Sam Mayer has chronicled his life on-and-offline as his alter ego: poolboy00. This documentation became poolboy00 (2020-present) an experimental reality show/participatory memoir/talk show for the streaming platform Twitch and irl. Initially inspired by The Real Housewives franchise, it has since morphed into long-term performance about friendship, public intimacy, partying, surveillance, and control. Previous iterations have been presented at Beaubourg, Co-Lab Projects, Crashbox, and UT Austin.
This project is supported in part by the City of Austin Economic Development Department.