The Case for Local Productions in Charlotte’s Theatre Scene – Charlotte Magazine

Theatre needs an audience, even if it’s one person. In a tiny room at Goodyear Arts, Matt Cosper is buried under latex balloons, holding a karaoke microphone, and illuminated by flashing colors. People can enter, one at a time, and ask a question of the “Idiot Oracle.” In return, they get a minute of free association about strands of light in the universe and the disquieting sense that truth can be delivered in an absurd package.

One woman steps in and quietly asks the Idiot Oracle, “Am I happy?”

“Hold your question in your heart,” Cosper tells her—but before he can say more, she flees the room. Theatre needs an audience, but it doesn’t always need an ending.

Cosper, 42, has directed theatre in Charlotte since 2003, everything from opera to Shakespeare to children’s shows, sometimes as many as a dozen plays in a single year. The core of his work, however, is the experimental theatre he does with the XOXO company, which he co-founded in 2009. XOXO, which currently has 13 members, has done more than 30 productions since then, including seven shows in seven different spaces in 2023. In a city where the theatrical landscape is dominated by touring companies of Wicked and Mamma Mia!, XOXO is the scrappy alternative. Although the XOXO shows vary wildly in scope and tone, they celebrate the absurd and make magic out of the mundane.

Widdershins (Carte Blanche), for example, took place on the lawn of the Mint Museum Randolph in 2021. The cast led the audience into an alternate dimension, an effect achieved by throwing confetti in front of a battery of leaf blowers.

After the show, a young boy came up to Cosper, looking for reassurance that the show had not actually altered the fabric of space-time. The director was reluctant to shatter the illusion: “I was like, ‘I don’t know, kiddo. Are you sure that’s still your mom?’”

XOXO careens between original material and classic texts; recently, Cosper has staged landmarks of 20th-century French surrealism like Jean Genet’s The Maids and Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs. (That production featured actors climbing over rows of seats in the audience and more than 100 miniature wooden chairs, free for the audience to take home.) 

On a Tuesday night, Cosper sits at a table in a back room at Goodyear Arts, a larger space than the one he filled with balloons. He’s joined by three young actresses, stage manager Amanda Labrie, and playwright Laura Scott Cary; they’re rehearsing a staged reading of her script Shotgun. The play, originally titled Girls Just Want to Do Domestic Terrorism, is the funny and provocative story of a group of college friends who road-trip to D.C. on spring break in the wake of the Dobbs decision and plan to take hostages at the Supreme Court.

Cary, who recently graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, is a member of the XOXO company and a former student of Cosper’s at Charlotte Latin School, where he works as the upper school theatre director. “There’s an element Matt brings to teaching—he doesn’t feel like a peer, but he’s not this foreboding authority,” she says. “He asks a lot of questions, and he’s really interested in finding out who you are and how you show up in your art.”

Before the read-through starts, Cosper slouches in his chair, joking with the cast about Instagram accounts for pets and telling them how bad he is at naps. Shifting gears without changing his body language, he declares, “I don’t know if we need to do this tonight, but we should be getting specific about the rhythmic stuff, the difference between a pause and a silence.”

The cast works through Cary’s latest draft, figuring out how the playwright’s revisions affect the structure of the drama. Cosper is wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the name “OLGA TOKARCZUK” (the Polish novelist); halfway through the play, he gets so absorbed that he pulls off his hat and chews on the brim. 

Cosper has an XOXO tattoo on his right hand. The company was originally called Machine Theater, but he hated the name because it felt cold and inorganic. When he was making a slideshow for a performance, he started writing “XOXO” as filler between slides of the German Dada collage artist Hannah Höch, and then he changed the name even though he knew he was sabotaging the recognition Machine Theater had worked for. “I liked it because it’s graphic,” he says. “It might be on a valentine or carved into a tree. The more I thought about it, there was something sweet and romantic and playful, but also mysterious and kind of dumb.”

Theatre is ephemeral. If you miss a show, it’s not generally available to stream. In case you never saw some of XOXO’s greatest hits, Cosper provides quick recaps:

Mum’s the Word: “It’s about a Myers Park couple. The wife wants to adopt an African baby, and her husband is a pillhead closet case. They’re asunder, and she’s trying to fill this void by doing a good deed, so she orders a mail-order baby. And what shows up at their door is a 17-year-old Somali pirate. Hijinks ensue, and then it gets really dark. We called it a postcolonial comedy—it’s about how guilt can twist us into shapes that don’t do anything to help the problem that we created.”

Bohemian Grove: “Thirteen people at a time could see it. You’re listening to audio on a 45-minute drive in a van to a South Carolina farm. It started as this ridiculous clown show about these bumbling sheriffs who are trying to find these missing kids, and then by the end we were taking people one at a time through this 18th-century cabin where they’d meet God. He’d give them a big hug and say, ‘I think you did a really good job, and I’m proud of you.’ Young people, you could tell they were feeling something, but people of a certain age and up, they would break down.”

All the Dogs and Horses: “Our Zen acid Western.”

The public reading of Shotgun happens in the crowded back room at VisArt Video. The play gets laughs and shocked silences in all the right places. Afterward, Cosper and Cary talk vaguely but enthusiastically about turning the play into a movie.

As ever, Cosper has an abundance of projects in the works. He’s adapting Melville’s The Confidence-Man. He’s collaborating on a sound-collage performance with Shannon Hager (aka Depression Quilt). He’s revising his first novel, Idle Hands. He’s trying to convince local actress Gina Stewart to play the title role in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. He’s working with Jon Prichard on Habsburg Jaw, a play about the catacomb saints of Rome. He’s directing the Mean Girls musical at Charlotte Latin—not to mention that he and his wife, Kadey Ballard, have their first child on the way. 

Perhaps most ambitiously, he’d like XOXO to be more than the brand name applied to his own projects. Cosper wants to put together a full season of theatre where he would serve as artistic director and provide the resources for other XOXO members to realize their own shows. Without speaking ill of the Blumenthal, he firmly believes that the Charlotte theatre scene should foster local productions rather than subsist on a steady diet of touring Broadway shows.

“I take the ritual roots of theatre really seriously,” he says. “Those shared moments in the dark are sacred.” He knows he can sound pretentious when he describes his work with words like “ritual” and “numinous”—“but whatever, I’m an experimental theatre director. Being pretentious comes with the territory.”

He grins. “Theatre doesn’t have to be nice. It can take your breath away. When I go to the theater, I want to get rocked.”

GAVIN EDWARDS, a contributing editor, is the author of 14 books, including the bestselling MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios.