Imagine an essay on camp and performance disguised as a play. No, don't imagine that – the play is too entertaining. Imagine instead a theatrical commentary on camp, with two drag performers enacting numerous roles as observers and actors. No, don’t imagine that, imagine a Socratic dialogue on camp and drag with theatrical frills. Actually, it's impossible to imagine What A World! What a World!, written by Eric Marlin and directed by Ilana Khanin, because it's a little bit of all those things. And if the show resists easy description, that's only fitting: its central argument is that we are what we imagine ourselves to be.

The show begins with an actress (Annie Hoeg) entering in street clothes and speaking heightened, romantic dialogue (the first line is: “You’ll never take my heart from me, you scamp!”) while punctuating each line with an over-the-top, inappropriate movement, like a lunge or a squat. She’s joined by another actress (Queen-Tiye Akamefula), who plays her romantic interest (“Now you listen here, and listen good. There are two kinds of dames in this godforsaken world”). 

The dialogue is from a fictional 1940s movie called The Pearl of My Oyster, which, we infer, is a ridiculous, campy melodrama about a young woman from high society, Charlotte, who falls in love with a rough but roguishly handsome fisherman named Keith. The show has just begun and there are already four characters on a stage occupied by two people, two of whom are fictional inside the show’s framework. Before What A World is over, the two performers, will portray four sets of characters – 1) the actors from The Pearl of My Oyster; 2) two drag performers playing those characters, 3) a couple watching the movie itself, and 4) a couple watching a recording of the drag performance of the movie. So, to recap, two scenes show the reactions of two characters watching two other characters play two scenes, which we, the audience, have already seen. And all eight of those characters are played by the same actors. Got all that? 

Clearly, Marlin is interested in theories of performance and expression, and how we observe and judge ourselves, even while we’re performing. The only people in What a World who can just be themselves, without having to think about performance, are the fictional characters from The Pearl of My Oyster – i.e., the original Keith and Charlotte, who don’t actually exist. (They think their lives are difficult because their love is being dashed upon the rocks of class conflict, but they don’t realize that they’re being spared from having to worry about theoretical concepts of performance and identity.) In Marlin’s script and on the show’s program, the characters are named “Not Keith” and “Not Charlotte” –  nothing is to be taken too seriously, including identity. 

What a World is an investigation of camp – i.e. the quality of something being so affected (intentionally or unintentionally) and so heightened, that it becomes endearing and funny. The Pearl of My Oyster is camp: its actors say things that are so melodramatic that the dialogue becomes laughable. Its setting is camp – its protestations of hatred and confessions of love are set at a rocky cliff’s edge – because it’s cartoonishly on the nose. You can tell that Marlin loves the heightened, ridiculous dialogue of period romances – threats to throw oneself into the ocean; professions of love, lines like, “I don’t care if everyone else despises us, as long as we have each other!” The Pearl of My Oyster, which is modeled off of 1940s romantic melodramas also clearly has very rigidly gendered performances: the ingenue and the gruff scamp,  Rhett and Scarlett, and so it’s a perfect sandcastle of antiquated, inflexible, gendered rigidity for Marlin to have his performers gleefully tear down. What a World, itself, is meta-camp: its performers do some campy things, but within Marlin’s theatrical playground, which is like a free zone for camp expression.

This might all feel like a little inside baseball from the world of performance theory, but Marlin is actually very expansive in his definition of camp, and some of the play’s most passionate and compelling moments come when he lets his characters drop their meta-ironic pretenses and argue with each other about what camp is and should be. During the show’s second setting, where Not Keith and Not Charlotte are playing drag performers who are performing in The Pearl of My Oyster, Not Charlotte and Not Keith fight about whether they have to say some of the antiquated, clunky dialogue from the film in their restaging. Not Charlotte wants Not Keith to keep the hokey Pearl lines and get off his moral high horse about what’s good for humanity: “I’m just trying to figure out how to land a gag and give the audience a good fucking time.” Not Keith fires back: that “what we do here has an actual effect beyond these walls.” 

In What a World, Marlin is trying to do both: make us laugh and have an effect. The Pearl of My Oyster has absolutely no moral value, but Marlin is putting forth the argument that, if you re-stage an antiquated work of art, you’re beholden to use your brain and your own progressive values when you do so, as opposed to just laughing at everything. Later in the show – and I’ve lost track of who the characters are supposed to be when they said this, so please don’t ask me – Not Keith, in a powerful and authoritative monologue from Queen-Tiye Akamefula, says, “Drag is not about opposites…it is not about making hot be cold or cold be hot. It is about saying, all that matters is you notice how it is the thermostat, not nature, that controls the temperature, and that I control the thermostat!” The point of drag performance isn’t about being a man, if you’re a woman, or vice versa; it’s about proving to the audience and to yourself that you have the power to portray your gender as whatever you want it to be.

Does What a World work as a play? There isn’t really a set; there aren’t really characters; there isn’t really a plot. What a World is asking its audience to suspend their expectation that they’re going to see a conventional narrative, or even an unconventional one. Annie Hoeg and Queen Tiye-Akamefula, regardless of whether they’re ironic or real, from 1943 or 2026, are very entertaining to watch, and that helps give color and flesh to Marlin’s theoretical world. I found What a World almost more fun to think about than to watch. The play feels a little clubby, and may be inaccessible to some people. But ironically – if I dare to use that word – Marlin’s impassioned proclamations about what camp is, and what it can be, are compelling and refreshingly humanistic. Even camp needs something to believe in.