Bill Talen, whose alter-ego Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping have been preaching the anti-corporatism gospel to New Yorkers for the past several years, recently launched an 'invisible comedy' invasion of local Starbucks shops to educate patrons about the social, environmental, and economic practices of the international coffee giant. This is his report.
--The Editors

On Saturday, April 6, we announced the NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL THEATER FESTIVAL INSIDE STARBUCKS. This was timed as a part of Citizenwork's 'National Big Business Day.' By 'We' I mean Reverend Billy, the character I inhabit, and The Church of Stop Shopping, a New York group opposed to neighborhood destruction by transnational chain stores. We performed in a number of Starbucks on Saturday, but as a public gesture, to kick off the festival, we invaded the devil's cafes in the Astor Place area, the historic intersection in downtown New York. A heated rally followed immediately by a march on the three Starbucks that sit there staring at each other across Lafayette Street -this was our afternoon's work. Meanwhile folks were downloading our 'invisible comedies' from REVBILLY.COM and performing, Augusto Boal style, in other cities as well. I hope the readers of this journal will consider using Starbucks as a theater and consider joining us inside Starbucks in Washington on the weekend of April 20-22.

The idea is to re-narrate these watering holes of low-level amphetamines, to introduce new rhetoric into the suffocating environment of 80 or 90 graphics/decorating decisions and appropriated Bob Marley muzak. Posing as customers, we are in fact actors who improvise along the plot lines of such classics as 'Starbucks Correctional Facility (a play about Starbucks' use of prison labor),' or 'Sex in the Bathroom (fake Bohemia),' or 'My Love is a Monsanto Product,' and so forth. We have called these short two-or-three actor comedies 'Spat Theater' because they come in the form of a high-volume argument.

New York police agencies have privatized our parks and sidewalks. We are forced into fake communities like $tarbucks, where our activities could never have political impact. Then, with the marketing plan of creating a romantic connection to the cafe culture of Paris in the '30s or Zurich or Vienna back at the birth of the avant garde, they let people just sit there. Well, OK, thanks, we'll hang out. But while I'm here you don't mind if I decline to buy that $5 latte with the bovine growth hormone in it, do you? And while I'm at it, let me find a way to get everyone to leave and re-create real public space again.