1. Theatre Vertigo's entry into this year's Fertile Ground festival is the world premiere of Rob Handel's I Want to Destroy You, which is basically about performance artist Chris Burden, who famously had a friend shoot him in the arm for the 1971 performance piece "Shoot."

2. When I taught a writing-intensive first-year seminar to art school freshmen, I included "Shoot" on the syllabus. I saw "Shoot" for the first time in college, in a lecture course on art after the '60s. We were always a little behind on the syllabus, and the hour of The Cremaster Cycle our professor subjected us to would do me a lot of favors at future art school parties when I went to grad school, even though I thought at the time—and still do—that The Cremaster Cycle is a bloated mess of experimental filmmaking, kind of like a David Lynch movie with none of Lynch's sense of narrative or humor. But I paid attention to "Shoot."

3. The question that playwright Rob Handel is working with in I Want to Destroy You: What would it be like for an artist who's built a career on a violent performance—and now is a tenure-seeking art school professor—to encounter a student who brings a gun to class?

4. This seems to draw a false equivalence: "Shoot" is arguably a bad idea, but no one was hurt by it but Burden himself. It was a controlled experiment in a gallery. Conversely, carrying a gun into a classroom has an entirely different connotation in a country where mass shootings have become an epidemic.

5. In other words, I'm not convinced that the central tension Handel draws is really a source of tension at all.

6. The prospect of eternal adjuncting without benefits, reliable employment, or a living wage is one of the reasons I left academia. Ask any MFA-carrying one-time freshman comp instructor, and I'd put money on them telling you the same thing. I Want To Destroy You does not address the problem of adjuncting, and while it does take into account the monstrous situation that is going into debt for an arts degree, and nods at institutional sexism, it doesn't acknowledge that MFA programs have also been roundly criticized for being overwhelmingly white, or the disconnect that often lies between art schools' allegedly progressive values and enacted conservatism, not to mention mazes of bureaucratic red tape.

7. This being the case, I can't help but think that the plight of a highly idealized, middle-aged, straight, white, male, TENURED professor is really the most urgent or interesting story to tell about academia in this particular moment.

8. So we're clear, the always-excellent Duffy Epstein plays Harold, thus transforming what could have been an onerous meditation on the masculine swagger aesthetic into something much more nuanced, and with more human warmth. Holly Wigmore and Shawna Nordman also turn in strong performances as Harold's daughter and one of his graduate advisees, respectively.

9. Still, Harold represents a character type that's deservedly lampooned in Terry Zwigoff's satirical film, Art School Confidential, which I Want To Destroy You could be compared to unfavorably.

10. I should really rewatch Art School Confidential.

11. Corollary: Maybe using an old white dude as a vehicle to discuss what's wrong with academia and the tenure system will get more people to acknowledge it? Maybe a man discussing sexism in the workplace will be taken more seriously than a woman doing the same thing?

12. Does it matter that this play misgenders installation artist Yayoi Kusama? Will anyone notice but me? Maybe not.

13. But maybe.

14. Similarly, a segment on conceptual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres got laughs during the performance I attended. I have a hard time seeing Gonzalez-Torres' work as anything but a deeply poignant, cleverly constructed performance of mourning. The script mentions the AIDS crisis, but I don't think it does enough to contextualize Gonzalez-Torres and his work for an audience of people who aren't art majors. It makes it much too easy to laugh at what's basically a funeral. And that's a depressing experience if you know Gonzalez-Torres' work at all.

15. The same goes for a monologue about durational performance artist On Kawara. I mean, sure, durational performance art is weird, but Kawara is a touchstone of contemporary art. In Handel's wimpy gloss, Kawara's significance is transformed into a joke, which would be fine, except I can't tell if it's on purpose.

16. At first I thought that Jessica Zodrow was miscast here, as Flamia, a Marina Abramović type. But actually, the problem is Handel's characterization, which is simply much too close to the real Abramović, a choice that does a huge disservice to whoever's tasked with playing Flamia. It's kind of like telling someone to play Meryl Streep. There is no way to do it well, unless Streep herself is available. While Harold is clearly based on Chris Burden, he reads strongly as a character outside of Burden's mythos. But Flamia is merely Abramović with a different name. This is a mistake.

17. Anyone else think Abramović's partnership with Adidas is weird?

18. Because you'd have no way of knowing this, I enjoyed I Want to Destroy You. Despite its flaws, it had a lot of smart things to say about how hard it is to make it as an artist, the mindfuck of trying to learn how to be a better artist by going to class, and how challenging teaching can be when you care about doing it well.

19. Still, as I drove away from the Shoe Box Theatre, listening to Twin Shadow, because emotive lyrics and earnest synthesizers are a pleasant antithesis to art-school posturing, I tried to figure out what I was going to write about I Want To Destroy You. I found myself left with only one clear conviction, and it wasn't any high-minded critique at all—just a sense of relief that I'm not in art school anymore.