Genish*ts: How Sh*tty Deal Came to Be

Mr. Doper and his sidekick Burp

Before it was a lo-fi, potty-mouthed, touring anti-theatre experience, Sh*tty Deal Puppet Theatre was just a weird kid with a clown puppet and a dream.

Growing up, my dad, Ric Averill, ran a children’s theatre company. He'd go off on tour to bring wonder to young audiences across the country and would come back bearing the spoils of theatrical war — mostly felt hand puppets from truck stop gift shops. One of those puppets was a floppy red-nosed clown who would later become Mr. Doper, the only original cast member still on the roster. I was maybe seven. I performed little puppet shows at house parties full of my parent's theatre friends, a haze of laughter and patchouli hanging in the air. I thought I was killing it. Truly, a comedy genius.

Only years later did I realize they were all high.

Flash forward to college. I teamed up with Jeremy Auman — a man of great theatrical taste, questionable judgment, and the kind of creative mischief I couldn’t resist. We were both drawn to weird theatre pieces, and I had just completed a masterwork of poetic percussion called plastic epiphanies. It was exactly as pretentious as it sounds. So, in an act of self-awareness (or maybe self-sabotage), we decided to undercut its art-school seriousness by staging it with — you guessed it — puppets. Sarcastic, cynical, hilarious puppets.

Thus, Sh*tty Deal Puppet Theatre was born.

The first official show was The Complete History of Western Civilization, performed in 1998. It was fast, messy, historically inaccurate, and surprisingly effective at making drunk people laugh. It snowballed from there. Over the years, SDPT has played bars, black boxes, music venues, punk rock weddings, and fringe festivals. We’ve screamed about the fall of Rome in a Lawrence dive bar, sang showtunes about capitalism in London, and made dark jokes about American imperialism in Finland.

The puppets are worn down, the jokes are sharper, and the message is somehow still the same: the world is absurd, the system is broken, and if we don’t laugh about it, we’ll cry.

So we built a puppet theatre out of cardboard, duct tape, and righteous indignation. And we never looked back.