THE GATOR digs into how people turn real-life violence into entertainment and conspiracy, and I sat down with its writer Brennan Sauer to preview the show at the ESL Rochester Fringe Festival.

Check out the episode on Just Can't Not wherever you get your podcasts or on Lunchador.org!

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/b7a19023-1fc0-4eb4-beb4-83d26ca079d8/

THE GATOR follows a group of young men obsessed with chronicling mass tragedies who get hooked on a pirate radio host called the Gator, and it centers on Harris as he scrambles to protect his daughter Annie while trying to unmask the broadcast prophet. We break down what “making entertainment out of tragedy” actually looks like — from true‑crime binges to livestreamed police scanners and niche forums that treat horror like fandom — and why that cultural machinery matters. Brennan walked me through the play’s origins (pandemic-era thinking, weird YouTube communities, and research into online subcultures) and how he uses sharp, conversational drama to expose those dynamics. Catch THE GATOR at The Muck on September 20 and September 26 at 4:30 p.m.; tickets are just $8 at rochesterfringe.com, so go snag one before they snap up. I had a great chat (Brennan was a trooper despite the flu), so swing by the Fringe, support local theatre, and follow Brennan on Instagram @brennansauer for updates.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Well, that music means it's time for another episode of Just Can't Not.

I'm your host, Chris Lindstrom from the Lunchadore Podcast Network, and we're here doing previews for Fringe, going from September 15th to the 26th in scenic downtown Rochester, New York.

That's the ESL Rochester Fringe Festival.

Go to rochesterfringe.com to get your tickets for as many events as you possibly can, including the one we're about to talk about and guest.

Why don't you introduce yourself?

Hi, my name is Brennan Sauer.

I am the writer of the new play the Gator, which is going up at the Muck as part of this year's Rochester Fringe Festival.

Yeah.

And the Gator is going to be held on September 20th, Sunday at 4:30 and the 26th, a Saturday at 4:30.

Tickets are a wildly reasonable $8 at Rochester Fringe dot com.

So why don't you go ahead and tell me a little bit about what roughly the show is about.

Yeah, so this is, and you'll have to forgive me, I have come down with the flu at maybe the most inopportune time.

I was going to say just about.

Yeah, yeah.

No, it's, it's, it's a little bit rough right now, but so the bear with me, this might not make for the best sounding podcast, but I'll try to sound as intelligent as I can.

Have a nice mic, though, and I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's an okay mic, but not the point.

So the Gator is a play, roughly.

You know, I mean, I think sometimes writers like to, you know, talk about thematically what it's about versus what the plot is.

So we'll say the plot first.

And the plot is that it's about a group of young men who are sort of obsessed with chronicling, listening to, making entertainment out of the mass tragedy event.

And you know, that's kind of more the, the nice term for it, but I'm talking like mass shootings, terrorist attacks, things like that.

You know, they're the guys, you know, on online message boards that are sort of, you know, making a fandom out of, you know, real life tragedies like Columbine or Sandy Hook or in the case of this play, they are all kind, or at least one of them are all kind of artists that sort of take these transcripts from these tragedies and make them into their own works of art.

But sort of they start to find that, you know, these real life tragedies, listening to them in the, listening to Them afterwards is not quite as exciting as they would like it to be.

So they sort of get hooked on this pirate radio band which predicts tragedies before they ever happen.

And that's called the Gator is the name of the radio host.

He speaks to a prophet.

And one day the prophet sort of predicts that there is going to be a mass shooting involving one of these men's young daughter named Annie.

And that's, you know, our main character Harris sort of gets involved in like a web of conspiracy trying to figure out who is the gator, while also trying to keep, you know, track, keep a hold on his daughter Annie.

And then, you know, thematically, it's about like how we sort of make entertainment out of real life violence.

I mean, you can go on Netflix and watch any number of, you know, true crime documentaries that people will talk about on Facebook as if they were like fictional TV shows.

I mean, there's also, like, there's whole industries around that.

I mean, look at.

I mean, again, this isn't castigating these guys, but like when you're thinking about like last podcast on the Left, for example, right.

Like these people have made a career on going through these fundamental tragedies.

I think they're doing it in many ways in a. I'd say an entertaining way, but it's genuinely a comedic way.

But there's so many.

There's so many versions of that that are, you know, in varying levels of taste.

Yeah.

At best.

And we'll dive into this more.

But why, why was this so one, why now?

Was this something you thought was, you know, something, you know, either important or, you know, poignant or, you know, that now was the time to do something like this.

Yeah.

So.

So this idea is actually kind of evolved a bit over.

It started as sort as a like deep pandemic idea and that the main metaphor of the Gator was initially I had read a news article about Adolf Hitler was, you know, fond of alligators and had his own, you know, personal alligator that he liked to visit at the Berlin Zoo.

Once, you know, he was, you know, once, you know, that was all over.

Yeah.

It was shipped off to the USSR and kind of chipped off to, you know, various places in Eastern Europe.

So I kind of had this idea of the original concept for the Gator was more of like a insidious sort of like he was like a Joe Rogan esque radio figure where he had this past, where he had this sort of Nazi past, but he was like an entertainer and he was like Broadcasting himself out to, like, massive popularity.

Yeah.

But also spreading these insidious ideas.

And sort of the whole point was like, when you hear someone's voice on the radio, you don't know who they could be.

They could be a fascist alligator who was friends with Adolf Hitler.

Yeah.

But that kind of has changed a little bit.

That was certainly an element at some point in the script, but we've kind of lost it.

And now I wanted.

I, I think there has been a lot, you know, culturally written about this sort of idea of, you know, violence being taken as entertainment.

Like, look back at like, Natural Born Killers or something like that.

Even something like 35 years ago like that.

But I was a little more inspired by this.

I found out that there are whole communities of, like, guys on YouTube that will live stream police radio feeds.

Oh, yeah.

And, you know, people come in and out of it.

But there was one that, like, I found there's, you know, guys that stream the news.

Some guy was streaming the news, and the news at that moment was a mass shooting.

I think it had happened in Maine.

Yeah.

And he was like, had the police radio scanner pulled up and there were like probably 8,000 people in this guy's comments.

And that was sort of what I stuck on to create this version of the Gator that's going to be premiering at the Fringe.

Yeah.

And it's, it's.

This is a fascinating, It's a fascinating topic because the industry around these things is so vast.

It's not one thing.

And I think that's why I'm find.

I find this a fascinating topic because you have, you have the people who are, I don't know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use my words so people can take it for however they feel about it.

You have these people who are, I think, fundamentally disrespecting the.

The memory of what has happened by you.

You know, basically taking advantage of people that want to believe conspiracy theories.

Right.

That's your Alex Joneses of the world who have, who I think are, you know, ghouls and are just, you know, people who are causing these families amazing stress and you know, putting, you know, subjecting them to people who now believe some of these crazy ideas.

Then you also have, you know, what is now become a thing is, you know, media people, you know, they call themselves media or independent journalists that will now start going to people's houses and, you know, inciting people into, you know, causing violent acts, not necessarily mass casualty events, but you Know, going and attacking people and being, you know, causing these things and saying, this is journalism.

And then there's, you know, the standard stuff, which is recycling these things every day.

And, you know, then there's the people who will honor the, honor the perpetrators of these mass casualty events.

You know, whether it's, you know, people who start to admire, you know, somebody who did these things.

And it's just, you know, the worship of some of these things as well.

It's, it's a very, there's so many layers of insidious communication that occurs around these kind of events.

I have to imagine it was interesting to wade through all of the different angles that you might take on this because it's, it's just this, I don't know, you know, you know, filthy, stinky swamp of, of, you know, at best, you know, bad actors.

Yeah.

And I think there, there was a certain type of guy that I wanted to portray in this because I, like you said that there are a lot of people that do this kind of thing.

You know, there's kind of the true crime junkie that sees it just as pure entertainment has basically removed it from sort of, you know, any other, you know, real life consequence.

There's, I think, like the fetishist, you know, the someone that's going to be, you know, making collages of the Columbine shooters are like writing to, you know, Dylan Roof while he's in jail.

But I, I.

So in part of my research, I went on to like a Reddit thread about mass killers.

Yeah.

And that's a place populated by people who say that they are there just for, like, purely anthropological reasons.

And obviously some of them might be because it is sort of like a darkly fascinating topic.

Sure.

But you could tell that under, like, a lot of the people commenting on there, there is like something a little more insidious, even if it would never really come out.

And I think something that also set these guys apart is that they truly believe that, you know, I mean, they're not fetishizing it in the same way that again, someone that's making, like, collages to the Columbine killers are.

But there is a.

Sorry, hold on.

The flu kind of is catching up.

To me for a second because it's.

Yeah, this, you know, there's this.

No, go ahead and finish.

I have a thought that's probably dovetailing, so I want to make sure you get your thought.

There are arguments in these forms where people are like, is it disrespectful to even present this information in this way, even if it's in like the most, like, standard, this is what happened way.

And a lot of people will twist themselves into the argument that what they're doing is actually right.

And it's actually the people that don't look at these things, that don't look at the darkness within humanity that are wrong, that the best thing is to be aware.

And on one level, I think that's correct.

But also on another level, I think it's like the guys in this play where that is like a morally justifiable excuse.

Yeah.

I think, like, there's elements of that I do agree with.

Right.

It's.

I think it's important to understand.

I mean, I'll.

I'll speak for myself as somebody who is like, I'm an obsessive person when it comes to just understanding how, you know, understanding how things work.

So I'm not surprised when things happen, like understanding that, you know, these perspectives exist, that there are people that, you know, make these choices and typically how it presents during those times.

Right.

It's those, those things, you know, understanding it and also seeing the prevalence of it in our society right now, you know, it's not surprising anymore.

Which is, I think one of the most depressing things that we can say is at this point, it's never, it's not a surprise anymore when it happens.

And if people are surprised, that's the thing that's almost as disconcerting as anything else is like, why are you surprised?

Why are you surprised anymore?

Every choice we have made as a society has led us to where we are today.

And then none of these things should be a surprise anymore.

So what I was kind of dovetailing to is we're talking about people who are talking about these things.

We're talking about the people who are doing media around it.

We're talking about all those things.

But there's also all the cultural things that I think funnel people who may be more predisposed to this kind of action, that there's this honoring of the bitterness that comes with many of these people in a lot of the communities, because you don't see a lot of these, you know, a lot of the mass casualty event perpetrators coming from well balanced, well balanced households with a wide variety of friends that are engaged in all different activities that have lots of great things going on.

You see, there's a lot of bitterness and a lot of loneliness and a lot of obviously mental health issues that are exacerbated by all these things and the separation from Society.

And then there's these groups that, you know, play into those intense feelings of desperation and loneliness.

And I'll use.

I'll use one of the communities as an example.

I forget the guy's name and also, who cares what his name was?

But he was one of the.

One of the prominent, you know, incel ones that, you know, did, you know, did some killings in.

In California out of college.

And you wrote his manifesto about how, you know, nobody in my position would ever be able to be happy or have you have the girls that you wanted to have.

It was.

It's so interesting because I remember at.

When I was in college, you saw the start of that, right.

I remember, you know, seeing the popularity of some of the early discussions around that start during that time frame, right?

This was the, you know, you saw the.

The people who wrote about that.

You saw like, you know, Tucker, Max, you saw the, you know, he's like an early.

It's like a bellwether for where this all went.

You saw the.

Yeah, I remember the very early men's rights blogs and at the time before it was labeled as such.

Oh, this seems super reasonable.

And I think about those times with a little bit of.

With hindsight to see where I was at the time mentally.

And that, man, if I wasn't around the right people, I was very bitter, I was very angry.

I was, you know, in many ways I was, you know, the audience that was would, in theory be very receptive to that.

And I'm so.

I'm so glad that I had people around me who were just good people that wanted to be around and be positive that, you know, even though I was lonely and I was angry and I had access to all of these things, I'm so thankful that I had a family that was supportive and that you had friends who were bust your balls, but in the best possible way that make you feel like you're part of something.

And that I think about what if there was the wrong person at that time, I don't think I would have gotten there.

But how many people in that position go in that direction because they feel like there's family for them there?

Right?

And I'm being very vulnerable here because I've thought about this a lot, is how many levers or of different version of myself that wasn't, you know, wasn't, you know, going for their education and wasn't driving towards all these other things?

What.

What about the alternate version of me that did that was more susceptible to These things.

It's.

Yeah, it's a very.

It's a very sad thing to think about.

Right.

And how many people are, due to circumstances and then mental health issues on top of that, are more susceptible to these kind of giant.

Everybody else is to blame for my spot, and they all deserve pain.

And I think a big thing that I wanted to get into with this play is that these men, you know, are not disaffected to the point where they will commit an act like this.

Yeah.

Would probably never think of committing an act like this.

But they also all exhibit the sort of violent, antisocial tendencies when they're put in a corner that lead a person to these kinds of things.

Like, we have a character that carries around a gun and seems like, you know, he's sort of just egging someone to get into a fight with him.

Sure.

We have another character, our primary character, Harris, trying to exert control over his daughter Annie, in a way that, you know, maybe starts like strict father, but at a certain point sort of becomes unreasonable.

And that's, you know, the conflict that drives the play.

Yeah.

So I kind of want to dive into.

So we've talked a lot about, you know, the topic of the play, but let's talk about actually creating, you know, creating a place.

This is a full hour.

You know, is this something you've been doing or been around for a long time, being around theater and writing?

Or how.

Where.

Yeah, where in your process is this right now?

So my first play was at GA as a part of Young Writers when I was 15.

And that kind of got me kickstarted on it.

That's kind of where I began.

I studied dramatic writing at SUNY Purchase.

I almost said the full State University of New York because I'm so used to having to tell people that.

But then I'm like, no, I'm in Rochester now.

You all know what SUNY means.

And then I lived in New York.

I was working, obviously, but also would, you know, put on plays sort of in the underground for a little bit, sparsely attended.

And that.

That's New York was something I burned.

Yeah.

It's not.

It's.

I burned out of everybody's fault because there's just so much going on at any given time.

No, it's like.

I mean, the sad thing was, like, if you wanted to, like, raise your fist at the world and be like, why does no one care?

I'm like, I don't know.

There's a million other struggling artists like me that I didn't physically could not you know, conceive of at the time, but that kind of burned me out for a little bit.

And then I went back.

I went to grad school for a Master of Nonprofit Administration.

So I was kind of.

I wanted to work in the arts, but more on the administration side.

Yeah, but this is a play that I was kind of working on in the background that kind of came together, and I realized, oh, once I graduate, I'll be in Rochester, at least for a little bit.

So why don't I, you know, put up something at Rochester Fringe?

And this was, you know, at the perfect place.

Like I said, I'd sort of had the idea for it a long time ago.

I pitched it for an artist grant that I did not get a couple of years ago, But I sort of had stuff laying around, so I'm like, all right, let's take another crack at it.

Especially with all these things that are now sort of swirling in my head.

Yeah.

So what is it about.

What is about writing that.

That grabbed you at such a young age?

I mean, to, you know, to write, you know, a longer piece at 15 is.

You have to be kind of a specific kid for that.

So what about writing grabbed you at that age?

Because I think a lot of, you know, a lot of precocious writers, you know, will be writing something that they care about at that age.

But what about it grabbed you?

I.

Yes.

I mean, I'd been writing since, like, even before that.

Like, I was the kid that kind of be like, drawing and, like, making up stories in the corner and, like, kindergarten.

So that was kind of sort of a reasonable place to have ended up.

Why I end up in drama most of all.

And it's not just because, you know, I got stuck in the drama club when I was a teenager, is because.

And I've, like.

I've written poetry as well, and I've tried working on, like, prose and things like that.

Is.

I find the sort of impreciseness of language that you can use in drama to be very helpful to me because I. I believe that I'm a relatively intelligent person, but also I am a person that speaks in half sentences, that sort of starts an idea, has another idea, gloms onto that, and, you know, changes mid sentence.

And that's not really something.

I mean, if you want to be postmodern, you can do it in prose or poetry, but that's something that you don't really get in any of the sort of forms of writing other than drama.

And in this play especially, you know, characters will start A sentence, have an aside to a character, have an aside to another character, finally finish the sentence, start a sentence and go nowhere with it.

So I think it's that aspect especially that draws me to dramatic writing.

Do you also find that writing is a clear way for you to express yourself like that?

The ability to have a thought and add it and work through it.

Is that something you find appealing?

Yeah, I mean, definitely.

I'd say that.

I think it was more of.

And another thing, why I don't write as much and I've started writing more, but I kind of had a lull for a couple of years was, I think as a teenager that was my outlet.

But now I'm a little bit older and I know how to, I guess, handle myself a little bit better.

I don't need that outlet as much as I needed it back then.

Yeah, I think it's, it's such an interesting balance.

Right.

Because there's, you know, it's filling a different kind of void in your life.

Right.

It's hard to even call it a void as a full ass adult.

Right.

Is, yeah.

Then it's a, then it's a, oh, what do I care about?

You know, what do I care about now?

And you know, is there, is there a driving reason to create something new, to, to write something to get your thoughts out or, hey, this thing's been sitting in the back of my head for, you know, a decade and you know, hey, I have the skills now to do this.

Do you think at this point, like, do you have something that's sitting in your head that you want to start like creating again, or are you feeling like, oh, this is going to happen when it happens for something else?

I mean, there's definitely things that I'm working on still sort of in the background, something that I've been having trouble with.

Again, like I said, you know, it sort of was an outlet at the beginning so much of like my, like teenage writing was like, I don't know how to express my personal feelings.

So let me just write a 90 minute play about those instead of actually telling anyone how I feel.

Yeah.

But now as an adult, I think sort of my plays like this one have become more political and more of like, all right, I'm going to say something about the world and about society because, you know, as one person, I can't really say all that much that will change anything.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think that's, I think it's a great point.

It's something I've thought a lot about over the last few years is, you know, there's so many reasons to be, to be cynical, to feel bad about where things are right now and justifiably so.

And then it's the.

What is the difference I can actually make as an individual?

And for me like I've ended up working just with a lot of people trying to help get their voices out right Then, you know, making your circle and maybe a circle beyond that and if you're lucky, a circle beyond that better in some tangible way is the kind of thing you can actually stand behind.

But I think that's the other thing is that creative person like you're talking about, you have the ability to make a piece of creative piece of work that you might, you might catch.

You never know.

You never know the thing that's going to catch and be seen by way more people than you think it will be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is really do never know.

Yeah.

So yeah, let's, let's put the plugs out again.

So again the Gator is show happening over at the Muck.

Great venue for this kind of show.

Shows are on September 20th and the Sunday the 20th, Saturday the 26th, both at 4:30.

And get your [email protected] $8 tickets.

And why don't you tell me where else people can follow you if they want to check out your work or see what else is coming up.

Yeah, so I'm easy to find.

My Instagram, my socials are just Brennan Sauer.

That's B R E N N A N S A U R. Very nice.

Well, I appreciate you working through being sick and being on the podcast tonight.

Appreciate you not coming over and getting me sick.

I got a lot more interviews to do but good luck.

Hopefully you feel better and that everything's going to come up Gator when it comes to a great show.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Thanks for having me again.

Yeah.

And make sure everybody.

If you want to check out other shows on the Lunchador podcast network, go to lunchadore.org and we'll see you out on the fringe.

This has been a presentation of the Lunchador podcast network.

Also if you want to see another movie about gators, you can watch Gator with Burt Reynolds or you can watch Alligator starring Rochester's own why am I forgetting his name?

Robert Forster.

Robert Forster.

A fine gator themed movie.