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Pog sprawls on a couch. Gomey stands by a large globe. Pog sits at the counter. Gomey sits at a table. Two broken lawn chairs, center stage. Pog and Gomey listless in these chairs. Pog and Gomey seated, next to each other, but at different tables. Pog dressed as Punch, or Judy. Gomey dressed as Judy, or Punch. Pog, you know. Gomey, too. In chairs, side by side: Pog and Gomey. Left of center, Pog at a lectern. Right of center, Gomey at a lectern. A post-apocalyptic place, no sign of anyone. Pog dressed in bird mask and long iron sheets. Gomey on stilts. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The audience almost gets up to leave. A smell of popcorn. Pog puts on a big floppy hat. Gomey is sniffling. Pog, a man, barely. Gomey, another man, also barely.
In their collection of collaborative short plays, poets Jon Cone and Rauan Klassnik introduce us to Pog & Gomey—a Waiting for Godot-esque pair for the new millennium. Except our friends aren't waiting for anyone in particular—they might not even be friends. They're just stuck with each other. But the globe keeps spinning. And an audience has come to watch.
“A feverish, glitchy, hysterical collection of short plays, An Ice Cream Truck Stalled at the Bottom of the World is uncannily familiar in its unfamiliarity. It's perverted and naïve. Where "the tone is unclear" we're suspended in the New. Theater-makers, rejoice—Cone and Klassnik's comedy of manners-hitherto-unexplored is unlike anything you've read, a gateway drug to a new theatrical idiom. There's no turning back.”— The Runaways Lab Theater, Chicago, IL
“Like Beckett with a particularly feverish bout of food poisoning. Or like a tea-time plague cartoon animated from the ashes of the last library. Or just like Cone and Klassnik, because there are two others who could write so giddily from the depths of our post-internet, pre-universal-Alzheimer's-like psychosis. Eat it.”— Blake Butler, Writer, Editor
“Pass me the papal horn and I'll put out the casting call. SEEKING: Pog and Gomey. Men, barely. Sewers for souls. Somewhere between—or far below—Statler & Waldorf and Deleuze & Guattari. Must physically resemble the skeletal remains of Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille. For the audition, please prepare a wordless interpretation of this stage direction: "We feel a new emoji should appear. It doesn't." Pog and Gomey will speak. The audience will look up Gomey's nose. Lemme in this show, please. I want to be in it and watch it every day.”— Darcie Dennigan, Poet, Playwright
Jon Cone is a Canadian poet, playwright, writer, and editor who lives in Iowa. He has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. His recent works include New Year Begun: Selected Poems (Subpress Editions: Brooklyn, NY, 2022); Liminal: Shadow Agent, pts 1 and 2 (Greying Ghost, Salem, MA, 2022); and Cold House (espresso, Toronto, Ont., 2017). With Rauan Klassnik, he wrote a collection of plays, An Ice Cream Truck Stalled at the Bottom of the World (Plays Inverse, Pittsburgh, PA 2020). For eight years he edited the literary review World Letter.
Rauan Klassnik is the author of the poetry collections Holy Land (Black Ocean, 2008) and The Moon’s Jaw (Black Ocean, 2013) as well as the collection A Slow Boiling Beach (Schism 2, 2019) and a collaborative book of plays with Jon Cone titled An Ice Cream Truck Stalled at the Bottom of the World (Plays Inverse, 2020).