Clubbed Thumb’s motto has long been “funny, strange, provocative.” 

This summer’s Titans adds another adjectival descriptor: “up-to-the-minute.” 

Given theater’s prolonged developmental gestation, years usually separate a play’s writing from its premiere production. While arrested reactivity can breed more thought-through consideration — which doesn’t negate timeliness, obviously — it’s still difficult for the form to present the “down-to-the-second” of our daily lives and concerns, especially regarding sociopolitics in our warp-speed news cycle.

Which is counterintuitive, because theater’s live-ness offers the opportunity to exist in the exact same time as the audience, allowing for the possibility to reflect what’s happening on the very day of the performance. Plus, the medium has always had a penchant for state-of-the-nation dirges that attempt to define epochs, and rooting these works in the specifics of our current states can open up new avenues of representation.  

Maybe that’s why Maria Striar — Clubbed Thumb’s artistic director — emphasized in her customary pre-show spiel for Titans that she commissioned Jesse Jae Hoon to scribe this new play mere months prior, mentioning the precise date. More than your average text, Titans feels of and about the now (it’s notable that projected surtitles label the location of each scene…until the last, when where becomes when with, “Here. Now.” — a phrase that also plays a pivotal role in Clubbed Thumb’s season-concluding The Family Dog).

Titans utilizes this topicality to litter civic-utility PSAs for anyone who wants to combat the issues depicted herein. When making art about today, for a live audience, why not educate them on their possible activism by spelling out the direct, productive actions available to all.