After I somehow became a meme last year, I learned of an adorable young fellow who was going to dress as me for Halloween. Long story short, I now find myself hagging one of Provincetown’s most up-and-coming comics/theatermakers. We had a cute little chat about his career, the state of performance in P-town, and the gay generation gap.
Okay, Peter Toto, who the hell are you?
Um, I’m a Virgo.
(Gasp!)
Are you, too?
I have a lot of planets in Virgo. I’m right on the cusp of Leo and Virgo and I have Virgo Moon.
Oh my god, I’m on the cusp of Virgo and Libra. If I was born four hours later, I would have been a Virgo.
Oh my god, if I was born three hours later, I would be a Virgo!
Wait, that’s really funny! Oh my gosh! But I’m a comic and a performer and a singer, I suppose, that lives in Provincetown.
Tell me about your journey to Provincetown. You’re a Jersey boy, am I correct?
I am. I very much am.
So, how did you get to Provincetown?
I went to the Boston Conservatory. My sophomore year of college is when COVID hit, and that kind of threw all my plans for a loop. It kind of just derailed what I was imagining my career would be, so by the time senior year came around I knew I didn’t want to move to New York. That’s what all my friends were doing. It was either New York or LA. I didn’t know where I wanted to go at all, and I randomly got this interview for the Provincetown Theater in March of my senior year. They hired me and I’ve been in Provincetown ever since. I was only supposed to be in Provincetown for a summer, and it has been—now this is my third season.
Tell me about the Provincetown scene. What’s theater like there? What’s performance like there?
It’s so interesting, because it is such a small town. It’s only like three miles wide. But it’s a very lively art scene, as it’s always been. It’s always been a haven for creatives. There’s a lot of people who discover that they are performers in this town when they move here, or a lot of people revive those parts of themselves. It’s a really beautiful thing that there’s so much opportunity for people in such a small town. In the other sense, it’s inherently limited because there’s only however many venues and you can’t, like, hop over to Brooklyn like if you’re in Manhattan, you know? It has the feel of a city, but is in nature very small. Something I love about Provincetown is that it feels very classic. Like, if you’re seeing a drag show, you’re seeing a true drag show. I love drag queens. I love all types of drag, but we don’t have the types of, like, “windmill-windmill-kick-split” type of drag. We have, like, the camp, the fun.
Do you feel like it’s really seasonal? Or what’s the art scene like there on the off-season? Because the summertime almost feels like a fringe festival where performers kind of descend, and it’s chaos. Fun chaos! But what happens for the people who actually live there?
I think it’s so funny. Once mid-June hits you’ll say to your friends, “okay, I’ll see you in September.” ‘Cause it’s like, everyone has their own gigs or their jobs, or whatever, so once you’re performing in season it is for tourists and it is for any non-townie. But the second October/November rolls around, it’s quiet for sure, but there’s a lot going on. When people ask me, “oh, what’s it like in the winter,” I’m like, “it’s a lot of fun!” I had, as you know, my reading series was over the winter and it was very successful. It was a fun thing to do on a Wednesday night once a month. I think that the off-season is really great, because it gives people the opportunity to try new things and they don’t have to be polished like they would be in the summer. So, I am of the belief that we are a very active year-round community even if people don’t think that.
I would assume that just given who the population is. It’s not like that population is gonna be like, “forget theater over the winter.” It seems like that might be when your most interesting stuff happens.
Yeah, that’s what I think. There’s two performers who I love in town who make most of their money in the off-season. They have their off-season schedule, and it’s so fun to go to their events. And people that live here want to be doing things, they come here for that reason.
Do you feel like there’s a kind of old guard/new guard happening in Provincetown?
You know, it’s so funny, I really only was realizing that recently. I don’t know if it’s old guard/new guard, but I do think that when I moved here was the first summer that wasn’t extremely affected by COVID. There was way less regulations, and it feels to me like this summer things are really back now. A lot of people moved here in 2020/2021, and I’ve noticed that the community of new performers—we all know each other really well, and we’re all very supportive of each other—and it feels like there’s this new era of P-town that is coming in. And I know that there’s gonna be some old townies who are like, “you’re gonna be gone in a year and a half,” you know what I mean? And it’s like, whatever. But it does feel like there’s this new energy, and there’s people that want to be making new things that haven’t been seen here, which is really exciting. But I do think that it’s supportive through it all, so even these people that have been here since, like, the ‘60s and ‘70s are very excited to see what’s going on.
That’s always the best, when generations mingle. That’s when the really good stuff happens.
Yes, that is one of the biggest things. One of my favorite things about living here is that there’s so many people my age, I think Millennials and Gen Z, that really don’t have queer elders as much and I have a lot now, because it’s just the nature of the town. It’s really great. That’s something that I truly never take for granted, that I can talk to people about—I mean, not to get dark, but talking about the AIDS crisis in a way that’s not, like, in a text book. Like, someone’s real experience of “this is what was happening” and “what the government was doing and not doing” truly has been very important to me.
I love to hear that. I was a kid during the AIDS crisis, so of course I remember it, but I wasn’t in it the way people maybe ten years older than me were. And I wonder if people who are younger than me understand what a gift it is to have these elders.
I think a lot of people don’t. And I think a lot of people my age don’t really understand the scope of the AIDS crisis. I think they understand that it happened and that it was horrible, but like, contextualizing that all your friends are dying every day? I don’t think that really hits them. And I’ve also noticed—and this is such a side track—a lot of Gen Z gay men are becoming HIV positive.
Oh my god, that’s like a knife in the heart.
I know. But I think it’s an example of how sex ed and how generations not mingl[ing] has really failed us.
I took a class with Karen Finley, who’s incredible, and she talked about her work in ACT UP. And it hit me during class, “oh my god, all your friends died, and all my friends are alive because you all did the work you did.”
I feel really lucky.
Moving on to something lighter, I know you have a monthly show this summer. Tell me all about it.
So, I have a weekly.
A weekly show!
I might be a little green and biting off more than I can chew.
Bite it!
That’s how I feel. I’m like, I just gotta go for it. It’s called Wilde Card—Wilde with an ‘e’—and it’s in the Wilde Playhouse at Gifford House on Tuesday nights. It’s a variety show! It is, like, standup, sketch, musical comedy, improv—anything that will make people laugh. It’s like, the stupider the better. There’s not really a big comedy scene in town at all, really. The drag performers aren’t really—a lot of them are live singers and they’re incredible, but they’re not so much on a mic telling jokes as much. They are very funny, but it’s not a standup show or a comedy show. So, I’m trying to carve out an alt comedy scene in Provincetown. There’s one really big comic in town, my friend Kristen Becker, and she’s great and she’s kind of been, like, the scene for years. We’ve both been talking about how there should be more. Everyone likes to laugh! As the story goes, apparently, is that before Drag Race there was a pretty big comedy scene here, and once Drag Race fever hit everyone it was all about drag. Which is like, I’m not mad at that. That’s great, but let’s fill in that gap. Part of my show is that I’m trying to get people that—performers and town and elsewhere, but especially people that are here that have maybe not considered themselves funny people or comics—I’m trying to get them to do stupid things and realize that it’s easy to make people laugh, or easier than you think. And I’m excited to see how that turns out.
You also have a very funny Instagram where you invent corporate mascots with extremely detailed backstories. Can you tell me more about that?
I started making online content probably three years ago, which is crazy to think about. I was doing it on a private Instagram for my friends, so it was just moving it from an unlisted link to a public link. TikTok was the first thing for me where whatever was on my mind, I started posting. Specifically the corporate mascots. It’s so funny that that’s the one people really know. I was thinking about how there’s no female cereal mascots. And then my second thought was, “why are there cereal mascots?” And like, “why is there sexism in the cereal community?” It was so strange. So I started to do this thing of like, what would it be to girlboss The Cheesecake Factory? And I tried to make it so that the pinkwashing of like, “she slays and she’s bisexual.” And it’s ridiculous, because she’s bread.
She’s bread. It’s so good. It’s so funny. And knowing that you noticed this gender gap makes it even funnier to me. It literally never occurred to me that there are no female cereal mascots.
Isn’t that weird? I think that’s so bizarre.
The Wilde Card with Peter Toto plays every Tuesday night at 9:30 at Gifford House. Tickets are available at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-wilde-card-with-peter-toto-tickets-914582830867?utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&utm-medium=discovery&utm-term=listing&utm-source=cp&aff=ebdsshcopyurl.