Spark Festival 2025
22 September 2025
This show is very clever. It takes something as simple and universal as milk and turns it into a symbol of life, power, strength, consumerism, and even the never ending cycle created by life and consumerism.
The set is very simple — consisting of a few chairs, one table, and a half gallon carton of organic whole milk.
The show opens with one man coming out, opening the milk carton, and he just starts chugging it. And as he does this, the rest of the cast comes out and dances around him.
The next scene is an interpretive dance showing the very first time a cow was milked. This beautifully, and without actually saying anything out loud, showed the absurdity of what that very first time could have looked like.
From there, the audience is treated to a variety of very different scenes: a 21st birthday party in which everyone ends up taking shots of milk, a children’s karate class covering serious topics like divorce, a son and father talking about the recent passing of the son’s grandmother (and the way that the grandmother has died gets more and more absurd as this scene unfolds) resulting in bringing attention to the concept of toxic masculinity (“don’t cry over spilled milk” is a saying for a reason) and even the effects that trauma can have on a person. There is a scene about addiction which reflects heavily on what it means to be a man and how every generation has a new idea of what that is. A woman going on a terrible first date with a man who has serious mother issues. Even children growing up and seeing the horrors in the world — this is an especially silly because the kids being depicted are ages 4 and 5, with the 5 years old suddenly being knowledgeable and all knowing of what life has in store for them (and us all) in the future. There’s a scene of a couple trying to role play in the bedroom only for the role play to suddenly became very real, and then there are multiple scenes portraying a milk mogul named Percival as he creates more and more new types of milk; making himself filthy rich, but losing the main ingredient of what makes up milk along the way — resulting in a hilarious confrontation between Percival and the thing that he neglected when building his empire.
And despite all of these scenes (and some more) seemingly being disjointed, the overreaching message was the same: Milk brings life — we see this everyday whether it is a parent breastfeeding their child or animals giving milk to their young. Milk is the universal nutrients for babies because it is what makes a person or an animal big and strong (or at least that’s what marketing would have you believe). Being big and strong gives you power, but we are only being fooled by the concept of this power. Because realistically, we are all stuck in a cycle of working to get the things that will make us big and strong (whether it be milk, an opportunity, making more money, etc.) which can only result in a never ending cycle of constantly working to be bigger and stronger. Eventually, we will run out of whatever ingredient we are using to get that power and the next generation will come up with something new. And the cycle will continue. Because it’s life. Milk is life — but should it be?
The cast is small consisting of just eight actors: Jake Griffith, Hannah Eisendrath, Cameron Cai, Andrew Shipman, Izzy Valdés, Micah Mabey, Paige Mesina, and Elissa Bartkowski. And honestly, every single one of them carriers their weight and has excellent stage presence. Some of the scenes that are being depicted could definitely be a hard sell for the typical theatre audience, but this crew is dynamic enough that it absolutely works!
If you’re looking for a really good laugh, an absurd premise, and a rather deep overarching message — then this is definitely the show to see!
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