On the last Monday of every month, in the narrow, reddish,
antique-looking theater of the Rendezvous, a performance happens that
you aren’t supposed to watch. On those Mondays, host Korby
Sears, wearing a navy blue suit with a shimmery white scarf, invites
that month’s performer into an enormous box on the small stage, leaves
the theater, and hopes nobody shows up.
Strikethrough reverse-advertises itself each month with
posters and print ads listing the date and location, who will perform,
and a notice in bold: “NO ONE ADMITTED. No public. No press. No
family. No friends.“
But last Monday at the Rendezvous, I followed Sears up a ladder to
the light booth and asked if my friend and I could go inside the
theater. “Um,” he paused. “Yes.” (“Nobody had asked to go in before,”
Sears said the next day, sounding exasperated that somebody had pierced
the veil. “When you asked, I gave you the wrong answer.”)
My friend and I were the only people there. The theater was dark,
with one red light shining directly above the enormous box. Three
electronic tones—one short like a piano note, the other two
droning, like sitars—played over and over and over again. Inside
the box, allegedly, was dk pan, a performance artist affiliated
with Degenerate Art Ensemble, Infernal Noise Brigade, and the Motel
Project, doing… something. Strikethrough demands
secrecy: Performers are not allowed to talk about their
performances, not even with Sears. (A week before his Strikethrough
debut, pan confessed he felt nervous about performing for
an audience of none, more nervous than he’d felt in a long time. “I
don’t have to impress an audience,” he said. “I have to impress
myself.”)
And that was it, for an hour and a half—the box, the red
light, the electronic tones. “It’s Schrödinger’s Cat: the
Musical,” my friend whispered. Four more people arrived about
halfway through, then left, then returned with fresh drinks. Inside the
box, dk (or whomever) jumped (it sounded like jumping) for a few
seconds. Then more nothing.
Life’s too short for this kind of nonsense, I thought and
then stayed for the whole thing. Watching the box, with the electronic
tones playing, in a dark theater, was oddly relaxing. “It’s sad,”
someone whispered, “but this is better than most theater I’ve seen
lately.” There’s something admirably—and
grotesquely—decadent about a performance that doesn’t want your
attention, love, or money. (Sears pays $75 to rent the theater; the
artists don’t get paid.) People won’t clamor (or pay) to watch
Strikethrough, but people would clamor (or pay) to do it.
Sears may have invented a new kind of therapy.
“This whole series is about the artists, not the audience,” Sears
said the next day. “It’s for their own goddamned selves.” He
insists there’s no irony to Strikethrough, no punch line. “It’s
hard to talk about it without sounding cryptic, like I’m trying to play
you. But I’m not. Really, I should just keep quiet.” 
