By LUKE TAYLOR | March 1, 2024
CHAMPAIGN — The inside of Fat City Bar may look like it’s been set up for a concert this weekend, but something is missing: guitars.
The colorful lights and speakers all suggest a rock show underway, but the stars are playing their hearts out on air.
University of Illinois students starring in the Illinois Theatre production of “Airness,” a comedy about competitive air-guitar players, only had a few days to rehearse at Fat City before Thursday’s opening night, but to director Jordan Coughtry, it was totally worth it.
For a play about traveling the country and performing in bars, what better performance venue than a real-life bar?
“We wanted it to be immersive, like being in the same room together,” Coughtry said. “Our time has been limited, we didn’t get the usual amount of tech time, so we’re making it work. It’s really thrilling and really exciting.”
“Airness” follows Nina, a “real” guitarist played by Jazmin Ciara Wilkins, as she delves into the world of air guitar and the people who take it seriously.
After bombing her first performance, she takes up on an offer from “Shreddy Eddy,” played by Jonathan Kaplan, to tutor her in the three tenets of air guitar: technical skill, stage presence and “airness,” the extent to which a performance transcends imitation of real guitar and becomes its own art form.
“Air guitar is awesome and stupid at the exact same time,” Coughtry said.
He said the show was relatable in that way for the actors because any kind of performance art creates those same feelings.
“You’re going to hit this moment where it’s like, ‘I’m afraid of looking stupid. … I’m afraid that I’m not enough or I’m going to be embarrassed or I will fail,’ or something like that,” he said. “Sometimes people hit that wall and they stop.
“For some people, it’s meditation or yoga or therapy. For other people, they take a sledgehammer to it and knock it down.”
That’s the method the characters in “Airness” use, pushing straight past any feelings of shame to earn a place at nationals. Characters go by their stage personas throughout the show.
- Golden Thunder (Noah Smith) performs political statements that are as sincere as they are questionable (“Was he signing the Emancipation Proclamation in the middle of that?” Nina asks).
- Facebender (Patrick Jackson) often cries as he performs, finding his place baring his soul to the audience.
- Cannibal Queen (Mary Jane Oken) performs as perfectly technically as she can, taking on a villain persona.
It’s a bit like professional wrestling, riding a thin line between pure performance and real competition — “It’s pretend but it’s serious,” Coughtry said, referencing a line from the show.
For D Vicious (David Sommer), air guitar means real money after his winnings earned him a role in a Sprite commercial. For all of the characters, for different reasons revealed throughout the play, air guitar means everything. That’s airness.
“It’s this almost undefinable thing because it speaks to that freedom and play, harking back to a time before you cared about looking cool, when you could just flip out to a song and you were amazing and it didn’t matter what someone else thought about it,” Coughtry said.
While plenty of individual lines had Wednesday night’s dress-rehearsal audience laughing out loud, a lot of the show’s comedy comes from the endearing way the characters are committed to their craft, Coughtry said — “like being true to your own weird.”
Air-guitar competitions and judging standards in the show, including airness, are based on real life.
People compete for the Air Guitar World Championships held in Finland each year, donning costumes and personas just like in “Airness.”
The philosophy of the international competition — that “wars will end, climate change will stop and all bad things will vanish when all the people in the world play the air guitar” — is silly, Coughtry said, but also inspiring.
“I feel like this art form — sure, it’s a joke, but it also has all the ingredients for coming together and unity and laughing together and being willing to look stupid in front of one another,” Coughtry said. “No one’s trying to be above anybody. We’re all in it together.”
