Effy speaks about his creative process in the world of wrestling and how he feels that the business and the fandom have evolved over the years.
Once upon a time, professional wrestling was conducted as a pseudo sport. The athletes that competed inside the ring treated their public lives outside the ring as though they were completely in line with the persona they portrayed inside the ring, no matter how outlandish they needed to act in order to do so. In the many years since the death of the territories, professional wrestling has changed and is now understood to be the entertaining spectacle that it is.
Chris Jericho was once quoted as saying that he believed if William Shakespeare was still alive, he would be writing professional wrestling television due to the character-driven nature and storylines involved in weekly wrestling programming.
In that same vein, Effy, one of the top performers in the modern-day independent scene and a regular barrier-breaker in professional wrestling, recently compared the experience of performing in wrestling matches to co-writing one-act plays on the fly.
Explaining his analogy to WWE Hall of Famer Lita on a special episode of Renee Paquette’s Oral Sessions, Effy would say that while The Undertaker may not think about all the dramatic moments he's created as one-act plays, the mentality of the industry has changed as has the fandom that has come along for the ride as these different evolutions unfold.
“I'm pretty kinky, but I don't like leashes and there's a lot of cats who really like leashes. Like, they like to have exact directions and be told what to do and, ‘I just want to wrestle, I don't care if I'm thinking of it or not,’ and I couldn't do it. I just couldn't,” said Effy.
He continued, “This is going to get big-brain for a second. Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays, and I love Cirque du Soleil, and they've done a lot of different shows, and even Broadway theater. Like, there's something magic in [live performances], but they do the same thing every night. They practice a lot. In my situation and in your situation, we are a lot of times meeting up with people and coming up with things, and when you really look at it as what it is, which is stage acting, when we think about the prolific nature of the amount of, and people will hate this, the amount of one-act plays that you have co-written on the fly with people. We don't often think back and think, ‘Oh, I've written hundreds of plays.’
"You did though, and you wrote many different ones, and they have the same similar tropes. [But] you could tell that Amy wrote that play. You could tell that she was involved with that because your prints are all over it, but we don't often think, I'm sure The Undertaker is not like ‘Think of all the dramatic moments I've created,’ but maybe he is. Having that mindset of wrestling is not wrong anymore. We're not the underground, redneck trash sport. There's a higher level of fan and a higher level of expectation and we've attracted that by forcing it on the table and saying, ‘Here's what we think wrestling is if you'd like to come along,’ and [fans] go, ‘Damn, that's pretty fun.’”
Effy, who continues to try to break down different barriers and wrestling recently was the namesake of a no-ring deathmatch show called “Effy’s Fear The Gay Agenda.” You can check out the full results of that event at this link.
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