Bronx-bred playwright and actor Adrian Costa’s second act of business on stage is to let off a chorus of farts on a set toilet. The brazen act is only preceded by the actor’s surprise emergence from an amorphous pile of dirty clothes on the floor and a preparatory plop onto the toilet.
It’s clear, only minutes into the play premiered June 13 at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, that Costa’s performance skips over the glossy theatrics of making oneself up in the bathroom. (Even a gym class scene during which Costa sweats through his clothing and a bus scene for the entirety of which the actor sucks in his stomach are performed toilet-wise). Instead, Costa works to unravel himself for the audience, etching the body in the grossest, gawkiest lights. In the next 45 minutes, Costa will weigh himself, choke on phantom snot, recite a eulogy for the burp and get half-naked.
This is Adrian Costa’s “The Bathroom Play,” a one-act, one-man play set almost entirely in that awkward, insular space of the bathroom. But even zipped into this narrow format — one act, one man, one setting — “The Bathroom Play” gets thornier than the comedic display of bodily grossness that dominates the first scene. Those crude moments are implements used to move along Costa’s larger project: part COVID diary and part body liberation manifesto.
The 24-year-old playwright and Bard College theater program grad was at the edge of college and already mid-pandemic when he decided to undergo gastric sleeve surgery. Costa was previously wedged between dueling expectations of somatic performance: risk the judgment of taking up space in the initial body or the guilt of abandoning the previous body. But shaded by the social isolation of the pandemic, Costa had mulled over his 406-pound existence and wanted change. And the stomach was cut down from its melon size to a tubular fragment.
Off the heels of the invasive surgery, the healing process brought alternate pains. There were the injections – 16 needles of blood thinners a month — then, for the stomach’s thinning to take, there were the diet restrictions:
“You couldn’t eat more than a teaspoon of eggs for weeks. I didn’t eat solid food for three months. I didn’t eat carbs for five months.”
“Going through such a transition especially in such a solitary moment in history frankly, my own body became a performance. It became a ritual of noticing the ways that I was changing,” he said, adding, “I just needed to put that onto paper.”

But how do you translate the body on stage? There’s the way “Fun Home” goes about it: protagonist and daughter of a funeral director father, Alison Bechdel ages through three actresses. There’s the haggard witch in “Into the Woods” who returns to her youthful, more potent self with bosomy attire and chirpy makeup.
But Costa prefers poetry. The play’s plot, documenting the thinning and thinned body, spools out in vignettes of free poetic verse. Costa’s poems, written at Brooklyn’s Target Margin Theater in 2022 for his first post-college residency, alternately tally Costa’s thinning in pounds and bare the social misgivings of Costa’s previously larger size— without, that is, glorifying any of his bodies. There’s “406,” a conversation with the scale that first flashed his pre-op weight. There’s “The Chair,” which captures Costa’s adversarial relationship with furniture. In “Burlington Coat Factory” the playwright chastises commercial obsession with thin bodies.
Costa gradually releases an extended critique of the social rites made more difficult for larger-bodied people. Hollow body compliments, the algorithmic appeal and economic reinforcements of thinness, and social silo-ing all bear Costa’s sharp critical gaze in turn.
Then comes the final exhale in poem “The Bathroom Play.” Costa eulogizes cleaning himself and the bathroom — not without the intimate bodily language of previous poems. “Scrubbing / UNDER THE PITS / Right, no right at the rim / Around the seat / BETWEEN THE CHEEKS / Up the chutes and down the spine,” Costa speaks. “It’s a labor of love even if nobody asked you / Cleaning the bathroom. / Cleaning the bathroom.”
The disinfectant does away with dirt, grease, sweat, snot and more — everything excreted or processed in previous scenes. This is symbolic housework. As Costa cleans, we can’t help but think he’s ridding himself of all his pre-performance corporal guilt, diluting it finally with Clorox and verse.
Any new performance dates will be posted on Adrian Costa’s website.
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