Philly Fringe 2025: Rushmore Labs Presents The Waterfront Journals by David Wojnarowicz

Wojnarowicz began writing The Waterfront Journals in 1976 and spent the next 13 years working on the manuscript. As his career developed through the 1980s, he emerged as a leading queer artistic voice in downtown New York, creating visual art, performance works, and bodies of creative writing that confronted the lived realities of queerness, poverty, and marginalization with a raw and unflinching honesty. By the time of his death in 1992, following the government’s neglect of the AIDS crisis, he had established himself as one of the era’s leading queer artistic figures. Tender and furious, his oeuvre still resonates with an urgency that feels contemporary.

The Waterfront Journals, which he described in a 1989 letter to his editor as “all true,” sits queerly between fact and fiction; the publisher, after all, calls it “fictionalized.” His insistence on its truth at the time of his recently discovered sero-positive status carries added gravity in hindsight: diagnosed with HIV the year before, Wojnarowicz was living with the knowledge of a shortened future, and his words read less as embellishment than testimony of a life lived. Whether or not these stories are “real” or “fictional” isn’t the point. The truth is likely somewhere between the two.

Complex, transient, and subtle

Rushmore Labs, founded by writer/curator duo Rachel and RJ Rushmore, adapts The Waterfront Journals into two hours of stand-alone monologues (split with a much-needed intermission) presenting the painful, traumatic, and complex qualities of street and nightlife personalities sourced, written, and imagined by Wojnarowicz. The scenes range from a few to several minutes long and namelessly introduce Wojnarowicz’s characters, like “Boy in YMCA,” “Man on Christmas Eve Along the Rainy Hudson River,” and “Twenty-year old Woman in Times Square.” The effect is cumulative: just as we begin to glimpse the contours of their life, they slip away, replaced by another, creating the sensation of watching strangers pass by on the sidewalk.

Within the rotating cast of six monologists, Amy Webeloff, Angel Sigala, and Ethan Jovanovic stand out for their range, emotional depth, and humane connection with the audience. They each embody the beauty and power of Wojnarowicz’s writing, achieving the “incredible subtlety” Tony Kushner praises in his 1996 introduction to the text.

A theatrical challenge

While respectful of Wojnarowicz’s text, the staged adaptation of The Waterfront Journals begins to work against itself over theatrical time. Two hours of back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back intense monologues inevitably dulls emotional impact and flattens moments that might otherwise cut deeper.

The stripped-down set design is a smart choice: milk crates carried on and off serve as seats, and a simple card table slides in and out between a handful of scenes, keeping the focus firmly on the narratives. The dramatic stakes, however, atrophy—not as a reflection of Rushmore Productions, but due to the theatrical challenge of presenting a two-hour salvo of expository trauma narratives. What begins as piercing and raw slowly becomes numbing simply by accumulation, a testament to the difficulty of sustaining intensity in a format that resists traditional arcs of tension and release.