BASEMENT
2013
Created for the 2013 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, BASEMENT was Gunnar Montana’s first independently produced work. The show came out of the end of a relationship and explored the irrational and disturbing emotions that can surface while trying to move through young heartbreak.
The production took place in a small room covered in ripped plastic and turned what was happening inside Montana’s head into something physical. A woman wrestled with a dark being on a mattress. Severed heads were smashed to the ground with a frying pan. In one of the show’s more absurd moments, a disemboweled Santa Claus appeared as a real voicemail from Montana’s ex boyfriend played through the room. The violence could be disturbing, but there was also humor inside the horror.
BASEMENT also introduced the image of a naked woman dancing in a bathtub. The bathtub would return in future productions and become a recurring motif in Montana’s work. Philadelphia Magazine singled out the bathtub sequence as the strongest moment in the production.
The poster for the show was the first image that really caught people’s attention. Montana appeared naked and covered in blood, standing with a chainsaw over a mangled body. It gave audiences an immediate sense of the world they were about to enter and became an important image at the beginning of his career. Before the show even opened, G Philly called the poster “disturbingly hot,” helping bring early attention to the production.
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The show also introduced Montana’s approach to theater in the round. Instead of sitting in rows facing a stage, the audience sat around the perimeter of the room and faced one another. The performance happened inside that circle. There was no traditional front or back of the theater.
Theater in the round became fundamental to Montana’s work. The productions that followed continued to surround the audience and place them inside the environment rather than outside of it. Phindie described the experience as “exquisitely uncomfortable,” noting that there was nowhere for the audience to hide from the performance or from one another.
At the time, Montana was working as a food runner at Philadelphia restaurants and putting much of what he earned into producing the show. He made BASEMENT with his friends and with the resources they had available.
BASEMENT became the beginning of Gunnar Montana Productions. Many of the ideas that would define the work in the years ahead started in that small room in 2013.
Six years later, Montana returned to BASEMENT in 2019. By then, he had more experience and a stronger infrastructure behind the work. With a larger budget, he was able to revisit the original idea on a much bigger scale and create the version of BASEMENT he had not been able to make the first time around.
FUN FACT
At the time of BASEMENT, Montana was working in Philadelphia restaurants that specialized in curing meats by hand. For the production, he asked the kitchen to prepare and preserve the skinned head of a pig using a process similar to curing prosciutto. The pig head took months to cure before eventually becoming a costume piece worn by one of the performers during the finale of the show.
