Blood: A post about blood.

            Blood’s pretty gross when it’s not inside a person. And even then it has to be inside them in the right way, because if it’s inside someone’s stomach or throat, that’s still pretty gross. Blood is only acceptable to me when it’s inside veins.

            Blood serves many purposes in theatre. It helps audiences and actors to get oxygen to their various muscles, so that they can stay alive during a five hour-long performance of Romeo and Juliet. It helps maintain body heat during summer performances of The Importance of Being Ernest where the air conditioning in the renovated church you’re sitting in has broken down. It helps get CO2 out of the body, which helps the tree grow in that new play that some college freshman wrote where the stage directions ask for an oak tree to grow in the middle of the stage for no reason. It is an essential component to sexual stimulation, which is helpful during Applied Mathmatica Comedia Del Farte Theatre Company’s fringe production: Doll’s Broken Home: A Postmodern Deconstruction of A Doll House, which contains no fewer than 27 gratuitous sex scenes. It could be said that without blood, there could be no theatre.

            What’s great about blood is that it’s universal. Everyone has it pulsing inside them. Right now as you read this, there are millions of little red inner tubes sloshing around your body. And that’s happening in everyone. So when you meet the king of Sweden, and he’s acting all hoity toity and shit, you can sit back and smile to yourself, because you know his secret: he’s full of blood. Or when you’re up on stage, and your blood decides that now is the time to see if it can go fast enough to break the sound barrier, remember that everyone in the audience has that same red goop in them. Theatre is one of the best times for the blood in you to talk to the blood in everyone else. Maybe that’s why we do theatre: so we can attain some sort of universal blood recognition.

            In old-school religious sacrifices, God told the Levites that they can keep the meat of the sacrificial lambs, but the blood and fat belongs to him. This little factoid is not only the entire basis of the theological treatise I am currently writing entitled God’s Just A Big Fat Vampire, but it is also a neat reminder of what was considered sacred in old school metaphysical rituals. Blood mattered when trying to interact with whatever it is that exists outside of the physical world. I will pose the following to you, dear sweet beautiful reader: theatre is an attempt to interact with that stuff that ain’t physical. Theatre is one of many rituals in which we tie God to a post and say, “Just because you don’t want to talk to us, doesn’t mean we aren’t going to listen!” That may sound sacrilegious, but think about it: there’s only one God and there’s like thousands of us! We should team up and make him tell us his secrets! Let’s pool our blood together (not literally because I think that’s how people get diseases) and water-board God on stage with it!

            Anyway, my real point in all this is: the next time you see a play where blood is put in the wrong place, or blood is treated in a less than sacred manner, please take a moment to think about how that makes you feel. Blood’s an important tool, so let’s treat it with the respect it deserves.