Joseph Keckler: Train With No Midnight @ On the Boards

 🎟 This article was written on special assignment for The Ticket through the TeenTix Press Corps, a teen arts journalism program run by TeenTix, a youth empowerment and arts access nonprofit organization. 🎟

Runs December 1 – 4

On the Boards is one of Seattle’s most underrated arts venues. It produces brilliant and often incredibly weird shows—the kind of stuff that makes Donnie Darko look like Top Gun. The theater serves as a vessel for experimental contemporary artists to distribute their work in a supportive, accessible environment. Aaaand each show has only a few performances, allowing for a broader range of artistic voices and styles to be shared. They produced my favorite theatre piece from the pandemic, 600 HIGHWAYMEN’s A Thousand Ways, a trio of staged social interactions that invited audience members to respond to prompts and complete tasks that revealed our innate human connection.

Train With No Midnight is a new performance piece from Joseph Keckler, a musician and storyteller known for his operatic musical style and darkly poignant humor. According to the official description, the show “dances between comedy, commentary, and communion.” Through these mediums, Keckler claims to deliver “a trip to Paris, Hamburg, Michigan, and Manhattan, all in one night.” 

One of Keckler’s most famous works is Shroom Aria, a seven-minute opera that portrays the true story of a hallucinogen overdose. If that sounds like the kind of thing you’d see on Adult Swim, you’re right—in the past, he performed at the Adult Swim Festival. Regardless of whether you’re familiar with Keckler’s work, Train With No Midnight is bound to be a breath of fresh air from this season’s flashy mainstream concerts.