Shenoah Allen at Soho Theatre: Walking Into the Fire Pit

“I spin my life in character voices. That goes far beyond the edge of the stage.”

It is a grey January morning when I speak to Shenoah Allen, but his mind is firmly back in the heat and dust of Albuquerque, New Mexico. For fifteen years, Allen has been a fixture of the alternative comedy scene, most notably as one half of the shapeshifting, velvet-clad duo The Pajama Men. Together with Mark Chavez, he built a reputation on absurdity, inhabiting a kaleidoscope of grotesques to avoid the mundane. But at the Soho Theatre this February, the velvet is coming off.

“This is the first time that I’ve come out on stage as myself and been like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna tell you about myself,'” Allen tells me, reflecting on the genesis of his solo show, Bloodlust Summertime. “There’s a lot of characterization throughout it, but this is a stripping back. Peeling back the layers and uncovering the guy underneath all of the masks.”

For a performer defined by his ability to be anyone but himself, this pivot to the personal is no small feat. It is, he admits, the dismantling of a lifelong survival mechanism.

“I’ve spent a lot of time, rather than being my neutral normal self, I’ve spent my time in character voices,” he explains. “That helps me feel more fluid and blend. In a light example, if you have a flatmate and they’re never doing the dishes and you go to them in a Spanish accent and go, ‘Why you never do the dishes?’ it’s gonna be easier than a confrontation. If there’s a playful voice in there, then it’s okay. For me, it hasn’t always been about conflict, but it’s been about like, ‘I don’t know how I can fit into this dinner party conversation when so many of the things that are brought up trigger things that don’t feel like they’re for common consumption.’ So I found at a very young age, starting to make kind of alternate worlds for myself and being different personalities. I became over the years a chameleon of sorts.”

Confronting the Unnamed Dread

The “things not for common consumption” are the bedrock of Bloodlust Summertime. While the press materials promise a “dramatic comedy hour about drugs, murder and family”,, the reality is a complex excavation of a chaotic youth. Allen grew up in the shadow of the Sandia Mountains, the grandson of an Apollo mission rocket engineer and the son of an openly gay father living under the roof of a disapproving Colonel grandfather. It was a world of “acid-fuelled tales,” teenage suspension, and skirting the edges of gun violence.

“This is the first time that I’ve come out on stage as myself and been like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna tell you about myself…”

“I wanted to explore this notion of my ‘unnamed dread’,” Allen says, his tone shifting from reflective to frank. “I had a therapist tell me that I suffered from an unnamed dread that I was kind of wincing at all the time. And so I thought, okay, I’ll do this show as a quest searching for this unnamed dread. So the process started with me basically going through every terrible thing that’s ever happened.”

The development process was not for the faint of heart. Allen describes locking himself in a London comedy club, alone, to wrestle his history into a script.

“I was rehearsing at The Bill Murray comedy club. They gave me a key and let me go in and work in the morning. Go in and smell of beer—it’s a lovely place, but it’s a funny place to be alone in the morning, just talking to your phone. There were definitely days when I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing? Why am I opening the doors to all these skeleton closets? Letting bones fall out all over the place?’ But at the same time, it’s been really interesting talking to my family about different situations and getting their version of the memory of it versus mine. It’s ultimately made me less afraid of all of it. Saying some of these things out loud has gone, ‘Okay. Well, fine. It’s out. I don’t need to hide.'”

The Alchemy of Trauma and Comedy

The challenge, naturally, is turning “skeleton closets” into a night out at the theatre. How does one pivot from “unnamed dread” to a punchline without giving the audience emotional whiplash? For Allen, the tension is the point.

“It digs into some pretty hairy areas of life,” he acknowledges. “I don’t want it to come across as using the audience as a therapist, and I don’t want it to not be fun and not be funny, but I want to be able to also lean into the dramatic aspects of it—so it’s a dance, this one… There’s a real relationship between drama and comedy through that tension and suspense. And where the release point is; whether it’s a punchline or a change of tone, or a surprise that lets the audience breathe for a second and then you can kind of go back in and lead them down a different spooky path.”

When I press him on the specific tone of the show—how he settled on a comedy about such dark themes—he laughs.

“I don’t know. I guess it’s sort of like flying in the face of stuff and just going, ‘Yeah! Gun violence!’ [Laughs] ‘Let’s party.’ Maybe it has an inherent dichotomy in it as well. It has the two sides of the thing.”

He tested the waters in the most brutal environment possible: stand-up open mic nights.

“I started just doing new material nights in stand-up clubs and testing the waters like that. Going, ‘Can I talk about an armed pedophile in a comedy club?’ I guess I can. So it was like, okay, I can. Those are hot words. This isn’t a show about sexual abuse, but there is a story about a gun and a weirdo. So it was like, what of these can I say in this context and have people laugh and stay with me? So it was a lot of taking little bits and then finding where the comedy was in the stories in front of an audience… If you can do some alchemy and turn some of those things into something that is good for you and for the audience, then that’s a nice thing to do with that stuff.”

Collaborating with the Piranhas

While Bloodlust Summertime is a solo performance, it is not a solitary creation. The show was developed in collaboration with Kim Noble, a performance artist whose own work often obliterates the line between the personal and the profane. It is a pairing that makes a twisted sort of sense.

“It might surprise people that he’s such a loving, supportive and caring person,” Allen says of Noble. “I don’t know if it would surprise people because his work is emotionally always really deep, but his edge is a lot further down the road than most people. It’s fun to be around that. It’s liberating to be around that also. What I really love about his shows is he shows parts of himself that are so ugly that it makes you feel okay about your own ugliness.”

Noble’s influence pushed Allen to confront his family directly, adding a documentary layer to the theatrical proceedings.

“Kim brought a lot to it and he added a whole new element to it where he got me interviewing family members. So there’s an audio backdrop to the show that is me interviewing various members of my family and sometimes asking some pretty tough questions. That’s exciting. He really pushed me to just go, ‘Well, why don’t you call him on Zoom? Talk to him about this.’ Go, ‘Oh, shit. Okay. Wow. Yeah. Let’s step into with the piranhas and see what happens.'”

He is blunt about the necessity of this investigation: “One might think that their stories are like, ‘I need to protect the audience,’ or something. But really, that’s wrong. People want the gore. And they don’t bring to it the emotional weight that I have because it’s my personal experience. So if I’m talking about something and I go, ‘Oh, I can’t do this. This is too heavy. I don’t want to lay this on them,’ having an outside person go ‘Actually, you can. Because they didn’t go through it like you did. So as long as you’re safe, it’s fine.’ And they should feel like I am. And I am.”

This spirit of collaboration extends to his recent film work, Sunlight, co-written with and directed by his partner in life and art, Nina Conti. “Working with Nina is fantastic ’cause she’s got an editor in her mind that is different than mine,” Allen notes. “It’s refreshing to kind of cut big things away. I always love cutting stuff. It’s always like taking the weights off.”

It was a project that required a physical return to Albuquerque, a confrontation with the ghosts of the past that proved unexpectedly regenerative.

“I got to put a new coat of paint on that place, sort of through Nina’s eyes, and rediscover it through the eyes of somebody that had never spent any time there,” he says. It raises the inevitable question: if his life is now cinema, who plays the lead in the biopic? “Dream world? Like a young Iggy Pop,” he muses. “Or somebody cooler than I am.”

The Safety of Connection

Despite the heavy subject matter, Allen is clearly energized. He describes the show as a “wild, cathartic ride”, and there is a palpable sense that stepping out from behind the mask has been as good for the performer as it is for the art.

“It’s been nice to figure out that I can do it,” he says. “That I can get up there and do stand-up and that that’s okay. That it’s not maybe as scary as I thought it was. That I can let the characters fall away and tell stories, and people will find them interesting.”

Crucially, the show relies on the muscle memory of his improv background to keep that connection alive. Bloodlust Summertime is not a recited monologue, but a living thing.

“…if you can do some alchemy and turn some of those things into something that is good for you and for the audience, then that’s a nice thing to do with that stuff.”

“The script is written as a list of beats. Points to hit. Not sentence after sentence,” he explains. “To have it be not word-for-word written allows me to get from one point to another in a way that’s alive and fresh and a real conversation rather than, ‘I’m going to stand up here and deliver lines.’ I like the freedom of being able to choose my words as I go.”

Ultimately, for a man who spent his life hiding in voices to avoid conflict, the stage has become one of the safer places to be.

“The first moment that you break the seal of being off-stage to on-stage is the most critical one. Because it goes from fear to being all right. As soon as you connect with them, you’re safe. So wherever it happens in the show, there’s a point of connection. You feel like you’ve got ’em with you. Then you have freedom. Once they trust you, then you can sort of drive ’em anywhere. And they’re up for the ride.”

As we wrap up, discussing the state of the arts and the strange, perilous times we find ourselves in, Allen offers a final thought on why he continues to dig into the darkness to find the light.

“We gotta keep creating. The world’s a fire pit of fucking disaster right now. So I think it’s important to keep making work and communicating with people.”

Featured Image: Shenoah Allen – Bloodlust Summertime Poster