Exquisite Corpse
Exquisite Corpse (2018)
Created by: Abby Pierce and Cassidy Slaughter-Mason
We often think of New York or perhaps San Francisco as big cities with high proportions of funky artist co-ops but this dynamic is very Chicago as well. Though housing is cheaper here, it is still cost effective to live in large groups. It enables truly experimental and noncommercial artists to develop their crafts.
This is the setup for The Exquisite Corpse, its name derived from a surrealist game of creating words and images from random rules as opposed to inherent meaning.
The pilot for the series has that feeling of randomness, joy, and play. The narrative focuses on the emergence of bed bugs in the co-op, prompting chaos as they try to make rent by the end of the week. But it begins with a couple, Sam (Cassidy Slaughter-Mason) and Tre (Tosin Morohunfola), painter and muse, just trying to create art.
But then we’re off to new characters introducing themselves and the whole narrative unspools as the house goes to greater and greater lengths to both get rid of the bedbugs and find the source of the infestation.
The boys blame Sam, to which Dusty retorts“I know that it’s easy to blame the bohemian tramp with hygiene problems, but…really?”
But then Sam’s bed is revealed to be truly infested.
“You are special. And things love you. All things,” Dusty relents. “You’re your own ecosystem and that is so beautiful. Your’e just going to be your own little planet, over there.”
The idea that people and groups are ecosystems are reflected not only in the pilot, but also in the production. Each actor informed the script and their character.
“It’s really important for us to actually get their perspective, the actor's perspective, because we were using them. So we started a workshop process with them. So they were actually instrumental in the development of the script,” Cassidy told me. “We had these characters in mind as we were writing and they were loosely based on people from our own lives and the way our own lives look.”
With this situation comedy set up, Exquisite Corpse poses a more meaningful question: how can we share space and resources in ways that feel equitable, despite many differences and entanglements? It doesn’t approach an answer, it just shares the drama. And that may be the point.