Somewhere in the back of your closet gathering dust and turning yellow with age is comedic gold: those old journals, poems, and essays you wrote as a teenager when you thought you could do no wrong. If you were to read them today you’d probably cringe at your former feelings . Now, imagine sharing them in front of an audience (or live streamed to the Internet). That’s exactly what happens at Teen Angst Night.
Teen Angst Night is a comedic reading series. Readers can share anything (poetry, songs, letters, journals, diaries, essays, stories, plays, lists, etc) so long as it follows these rules:
1- The work must be your own. 2- You must have written it between the ages of 10-19. 3- You cannot be proud of the work you share. It’s best if you’re super embarrassed.
PRAISE FOR TEEN ANGST NIGHT
“But is it real comedy? It most certainly is. People love to laugh and there are many routes to arrive at that destination. Is it traditional? It most certainly is not. It’s not what the average person envisions when they think of comedy. But regular shows would kill for these kinds of laughs.” Georgia Straight
“I like it when the definition of “theatre” gets stretched. That’s what Sara Bynoe’s doing.” … “I gut laughed the whole evening. So did the rest of the audience. It was a full house. It always is. – TJ Dawe in the Charlebois Post
A BRIEF HISTORY
Teen Angst Night started in Calgary in 2000 with a live event series and a website, the event has been running in Vancouver since late 2001. The website was probably one of the first blogs-to-books, published by St. Martin’s Press in April 2005 with a book launch event at the KGB Bar in NYC. In 2006 the book was turned into a stage show for the High Performance Rodeo in Calgary (and sold out!). Then Sara created a solo show of her own horrible Teen Angst Poetry which she performed at the Toronto Fringe in 2007, Bumbershoot in 2008, the Edinburgh Free Fringe in 2011. In 2008 Sara was on the poetry stage at a massive festival in the UK called Latitude, and the live show happens whenever Sara can squeeze it into her schedule usually 3-5 times a year.
TeenAngstPoetry.com was/is a satirical website contributed by people 18 and over who have overcome their angst and are able to laugh at their past. People were highly encouraged to send in your own poetry for the site. Unfortunately the site is no longer active. It had its heyday from 2000-2007.
In 2007 the server crashed and hundreds of poems were lost, because the website was created in 2000 by my bother and his friend and it ran on a Linux box in my father’s house. This is back in the time before Blogger existed. Can you remember those days? I barely can. Anyway, when it crashed I was very sad.
Luckily there’s this thing called The Wayback Machine on archive.org and you can see the old site. Here’s a screengrab of its glory circa 2000.
THE SOLO SHOW
Yes there’s a solo show of my own awful adolescent writing.
The show is called Fuck Off and Die: Tales in Teen Angst Poetry, it played at the Toronto Fringe in 2007, Bumbershoot Arts and Music Festival in Seattle in 2008 and partially in at London Spoken Space, Royal Festival Hall in 2009.
“But is it real comedy? It most certainly is. People love to laugh and there are many routes to arrive at that destination. Is it traditional? It most certainly is not. It’s not what the average person envisions when they think of comedy. But regular shows would kill for these kinds of laughs.” Georgia Straight
“It’s high time the rhyme-crazy juveniles of the world are celebrated as the poetic prodigies we truly were.” Nylon Magazine
“I like it when the definition of “theatre” gets stretched. That’s what Sara Bynoe’s doing.” … “I gut laughed the whole evening. So did the rest of the audience. It was a full house. It always is. – TJ Dawe in the Charlebois Post
“Teen Angst: A Celebration of REALLY BAD Poetry probably contains some of the very worst poetry in print today.” FFWD, Calgary
“It’s bad. But in a good way of course.” The WestEnder, Vancouver
“A highlight [of the Teen Angst Night] was the felt board presentation by Sara. The former library worker read an old high school poem based on the Night Before Christmas that told about the gang in her neighborhood, The Flava. Even if you couldn’t see the felt board cutouts of trucks with “the Flava” symbol on them, it was bloody hilarious”- ION magazine
“Who knew bad poetry could be so good. Funny and poignant, but mostly funny.”-Canadian Actor Review
Cleveland Plain Dealer Top 20 Summer Must Reads
New York Library Association’s nominated book for Books of Summer, 2005
THE ART SHOW
See the results of my dream come true gallery show HERE
[…] a lot of bad poetry out there, and it’s easy to hate. I’ve written some, you’ve written some. It’s a fact. Every would-be writer has, at some point, jotted down their inner most […]
Sara Bynoe 
[…] a lot of bad poetry out there, and it’s easy to hate. I’ve written some, you’ve written some. It’s a fact. Every would-be writer has, at some point, jotted down their inner most […]