“Crazier than a fish with titties”

Writers on closet drama generally understand it as a genre of subtraction that removes or mutes features of full-blown stage drama. But formally, it makes better sense to consider Trapped in the Closet as a study in the hybrid, the commingled, the uneasily juxtaposed. Thematically, the film is obsessed with crossed boundaries, weak and troubled distinctions—doors that are louvered, an author who is also narrator and character(s). This dizzying conjunction of formal innovation and thematic development explores the ontological ambiguity of drama and of everyday life itself as at once free and scripted, natural and artificial.