Onstage in front of a crowd of some 200 people, performance artist Clayton Lee lays out his thesis: All of his artistic and sexual fantasies have to do with professional wrestler Bill Goldberg.
Lee cues up a pre-game video of Goldberg—a beefy man who looks to be in his late 50s—promising to pummel his opponent. On his forehead, there is an enormous, sweaty-looking bandage. Lee explains that Goldberg likes to slam his head into a wall before a match to rile himself up.
“As a Chinese immigrant,” Lee says to the audience, coolly, “I imagine eating his asshole with the voracious enthusiasm of a miner looking for gold.”
The original Goldberg Variations are an aria, and a set of 30 variations on that aria, written in the 1700s by Johann Sebastian Bach. Taking their name from that set, Lee’s aria is his obsession with a certain type of guy, which he describes as: bald, balding, muscular, muscular-adjacent, aggressive, toxic.
In a variation on that obsession, Lee explains his practice of stalking his Goldberg exes online. He scrolls through the accounts of balding, muscular (or muscular-adjacent) men. “You’ll notice I had to change browsers for this,” he says, as the private profile of one flashes up on the screen. “He blocked me on all social media platforms.”
Lee stops, “Does anyone want to volunteer to be my Goldberg variation for the night?” There are no volunteers. Then, a group in the back forcibly nominates their friend to join Lee onstage—a muscular guy with salt and pepper hair, wearing a red and blue star-patterned tracksuit—and the next variation begins.
Lee flirts with the guy, who plays along gamely, until Lee begins to ask questions that imply he’s confused the audience member with his first boyfriend. “Did you not tell your co-workers about me because you were ashamed to be gay, but ashamed of me?” Lee asks. The stranger stares back, concerned. “I’m not ashamed of you,” he says.
Suddenly, off to the side of the audience, a curtain opens to reveal a boxing ring. Lee takes off his clothes, revealing a sequined jockstrap. The next variation is on.
Inside the ring, two huge chiseled men intermittently shout at the crowd and performatively slam Lee into the ring’s springy floor. The sound of their hard blows upon his body creates wincing looks in the crowd. “You think you’re a wrestler?” demands the one with the words “Hot Sauce” emblazoned on his rear. Then, for a few gleeful minutes around 10 or more wrestlers—we later learn they are students at Oregon Pro Wrestling School—storm the ring and perform various flexes and falls.
Throughout the evening, Lee has come across as a profoundly vulnerable person who is still completely in control of his own environment, but it’s hard to look self-possessed when you’re being hurled through the air like a rag doll. At the end, Lee is trussed up like a turkey at the corner of the ring and drizzled with lube as a mustachioed man in full leathers reads aloud from a stack of printouts detailing a long series of heartfelt, utterly banal email and text exchanges between Lee and an ex.
It is after this final variation, that someone cuts Lee free. Tracy Cameron Francis, executive artistic director of Boom Arts, appears with two conference chairs, which she shimmies through the ropes of the ring before crawling in after them. Within the ring, Francis and a still lube-soaked Lee arrange their chairs next to each other talk-show style, and take questions from the audience.
The Goldberg Variations are different every time, says Lee. A version in Philly were mixed with “Nobody Does It Better” by Carly Simon. At one performance, he hired his ex to read the old emails—this time, he hired one of his favorite porn stars, who happens to live in Portland.
The last time The Goldberg Variations had a wrestling ring was in 2023, in a performance where he also got married. Lee says his partner is “somewhere in the audience, but doesn’t point him out. This version, says Lee, is “a WWE ladder match meets bukkake meets Raft of the Medusa.” Outside the ring, in the shadows, I see one of the wrestlers walking around with an enormous tray of corn dogs, offering them to the audience like they are canapes.
Does it hurt to be thrown around in the ring like that, someone from the audience asks.
Lee thinks for a minute. When it sounds like he’s being hurt he’s actually being hurt, he says, he’s not faking it. “It should be kind of scary. You should feel scared for me. Hopefully, some of you are aroused.”
The Goldberg Variations will play at On the Boards in Seattle Sept 17-19. It will be a different variation than the one described here, but contain similarities. At the 2026 TBA performance, Lee promised that “a very famous wrestler” would appear in his On the Boards shows, but declined to elaborate further.
