‘The Writing on the Stall’ returns to Soho Playhouse

After a successful off-Broadway debut run in 2023, musical comedian and artist Caitlin Cook is back with “The Writing on the Stall,” her one-woman musical comedy at the Soho Playhouse this spring.

The off-Broadway performance captures the theme of what it is like to converse and connect with strangers in a dive-bar bathroom.

“The vibe is like when you meet someone in a bathroom, and they sort of become your best friend that night. You end up dishing details about what’s going on in your life, knowing you’ll probably never see each other again,” Cook, a Brooklyn resident, explained. “There’s a confessional, intimate feeling about it, and I wanted to recreate that onstage.”

With guitar in hand, she bonds with the audience in true dive-bar bathroom fashion, telling her story of what is going on during her experience in and out of the “bar” that night.

Bathroom graffiti: ‘The purest form of art’

Graffiti in bathroom stalls can range from the innocuous to the most graphic, to sad and heartfelt, to just plain funny. In “The Writing on the Stall,” Cook performs nine songs from her album of the same name, capturing all the emotions that bathroom graffiti can evoke.

As a student of art history in both undergraduate and graduate school, Cook speaks highly of graffiti as an art form. She recalled from her past, one message that inspired her to eventually write “The Writing on the Stall.”

“I was playing a set at a dive bar,” she shared. “And in the bathroom I saw a piece of graffiti that said, ‘since writing on toilet walls is done neither for critical acclaim or financial reward, it is the purest form of art.’”

Since then, she started photographing bathroom graffiti around the world and even boasts an extensive collection of photo messages that would become a big part of her songs.

“About five or six years ago, I had these folders and folders of bathroom graffiti, and I just thought for a moment, ‘these are lyrics,’” Cook said. “‘These are beautiful, obscene, hilarious human lyrics.’”

But of course, as a musician and writer, Cook does not rely on bathroom graffiti alone for her song lyrics. Some of her own words are woven into each song.

“I do try to make it a found art piece, and I want it to feel legitimately like I found these pieces across the world in bathrooms,” she said. “But the truth is I’m a writer and sometimes someone has written something on a wall that I have a really good response to.”