Inside piss.jpg (Working Title): Naughty Mystery
Written by and Starring Justin Jager and Michael Gardiner
The Paradise Factory Theater | 64 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003
July 16-August 9th, Thursdays-Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 7:30pm.
Did we only come to realize one day that something was missing? Or did we lose it somewhere along the way? Was there nothing we could have done? Those are the questions circling piss.jpg (Working Title), the absurdist two-hander from Justin Jager and Michael Gardiner arriving this summer as part of Diamond Mesh Inc.’s inaugural Manifestival at Paradise Factory Theater. Billed as “The Next Great American Drama,” the show promises a defiant collision of Gen Z angst, absurdist humor, and theatrical chaos set entirely in a kitchen.
Written by and starring Jager and Gardiner and directed by Dan Yaiullo, piss.jpg (Working Title) runs July 16 through August 9. It has also been described as “The Gen Z Waiting for Godot,” though the artists suggest that any tidy label only scratches the surface of a piece designed to be felt before it is fully explained. When this press release came across my virtual desk, I was immediately intrigued. This was not a run-of-the-mill announcement simply providing general information about a show. It was laden with questions and a swirl of ideas. I had to learn more.
Jager and Gardiner first connected in 2023 through a comedy project that turned out to be more ambitious than Jager expected. The collaboration quickly stuck.
“Little did I know it wasn’t a stage reading,” Jager said. “It was a full-on production, where I got connected with him working on the production side of things. And then we really hit it off and we’ve been working together ever since. And then one day he was like, we should write something together. So we did. And here we are.”
Their shared theatrical language grew out of comedy, then expanded through Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and alt-comedy strangeness.
“We were connected to the Edward Albee estate,” Gardiner said. “We were doing both performing and readings of a lot of his plays, and we just loved his rhythm so much. And we also worked together on some stranger Sam Shepard work, some of the one acts, the rock’n’roll plays as they’re known. So that’s totally the aesthetic that we love, as well as that improvisational, strange alt-comedy thing. We kind of hodgepodged it together, and what you have is piss.jpg (Working Title).”
The title began as a placeholder and refused to leave. “It started as just a Google Doc,” Jager said. “I sent you the doc, so I just wrote piss.jpg. It was like, working title. We’re going to change it. And then we just couldn’t think of anything better. It’s just so fun to refer to it as, ‘Oh, you going to see piss?’ ‘Oh, we have piss rehearsal later.’ It sticks.”
Gardiner became one of the title’s strongest defenders. “I was a champion of keeping that the title for a long time,” he said. “It’s very pure. That was the first thing that came out of your head. I think we should just keep it. And it maintains this air of naughty mystery. And that kind of naughty mystery, we hope, entices people to come and see some weird but fun theater.”
The show takes place entirely in a kitchen, though its press materials call it “a kitchen sink drama for the end of the world,” not old-fashioned realism. Jager said the first image came to him half-asleep: one character sitting there, the other arriving as if “everything’s exploded.”
“The initial concept was just, what if we wrote a play where every Chekhov’s gun we set up just doesn’t go off?” Jager said. “Can we make that engaging instead of frustrating?”
“There are these two guys in this kitchen and they’re close, they have a connection,” Gardiner said. “Maybe they’re brothers, maybe they’re not, maybe they’re the same person. We don’t really know. But they have this deep connection and conflict, and they’re really trying to make sense of both each other, themselves, and the strange world that they find themselves in.”
The artists describe the show as a collision of American dramatic tradition, internet absurdism, alt-comedy, and irreverence toward familiar narrative tropes—a combination that feels especially at home in indie theater, where risk is not only possible but necessary.
“The comedy is definitely born from the internet, absurdism, and irreverence for narrative structure,” Jager said. “A reverence for tropes. That sort of thing.”
“The important thing for me in making this and making sure that it’s engaging and not frustrating has been that emotional through line,” he said. “That core conflict between the characters is the one thing that kind of remains consistent throughout the whole thing. My goal, among many other things, is for people to walk out and be like, ‘I have no idea what I just saw, but I felt it.’”
That is exactly why this kind of work feels important in the indie theater scene. It demolishes the constructs we are told theater has to follow, while still embracing the very building blocks that make theater theatrical: stock characters, familiar tropes, heightened conflict, and the beautiful instability of the absurd. Instead of rejecting tradition outright, piss.jpg (Working Title) seems to take those inherited forms, shake them loose, and ask what they can become now.
At roughly an hour, piss.jpg (Working Title) is compact, volatile, and theatrical, navigating what its press materials call “the liminal space between existential dread and high-energy chaos.” Gardiner is also open to the idea of a longer life for the piece. “I would love to do this elsewhere too, or a different version of it in the future,” he said. “Initially I was like, no, 60 minutes is good. But now that we’ve really been digging our feet in and really working on it, I think there’s a way for this to be expanded into maybe a 90-minute or 85-minute, more robust evening on its own.”
The show is one of three mainstage productions in the inaugural Manifestival, presented by Diamond Mesh Inc. at Paradise Factory Theater. The festival also includes limited engagements, one-night events, performances, and screenings. The choice of Paradise Factory, located on East 4th Street near La MaMa, felt intentional to the artists. “That’s kind of why they chose that space,” Gardiner said of producers Matt Bader and Faith Pasch. “It’s just to build excitement, because it’s a new festival. This is the first year for it.”
For anyone worried that the play’s refusal of conventional structure might make it inaccessible, the creators offer reassurance: it is, above all, meant to be fun. The press release promises happiness and sadness, life-affirmation, laughs, audible gasps, spontaneous dancing, mysterious noises, “the Clap (the good kind),” and pure, unadulterated fun.
“It’s a really funny show,” Gardiner said. “You will feel some emotions. Certain things might strike you as funny. They might strike you as emotionally affecting, sometimes at the same time. So just expect to have fun and not worry about conventional things like plot and narrative. This is an experience. This is a theatrical experience.”
Jager put it more bluntly: “This ain’t your mama’s theater.”
“We built this with an audience our age and taste in mind,” he continued. “We want to push the medium in our direction, which is hopefully forward.”
Performance Information
piss.jpg (Working Title) runs July 16 through August 9 at Paradise Factory Theater, 64 East 4th Street, New York, NY. Performances are scheduled Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. The production is presented by Diamond Mesh Inc. as part of the Manifestival.
For Jager and Gardiner, the invitation is simple: come ready to laugh, feel, and surrender to the strangeness. Or, as Jager hopes audiences might say afterward: “I couldn’t tell you what I got, but I think I got it.”
Click HERE for tickets.
Editorial by Malini Singh McDonald.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on July 10, 2026. All rights reserved.