Jellical Cats Want A Corner

[georginasand]

I am slowly catching up after my super-busy-week-from-hell, so this essay is not even from last week, but the week before. It was written on 5 hours of sleep, in a coffee shop, the last day of super-busy-week-from-hell, so it's both goofier and more ranty than I might have hoped.

 

Jellical Cats Want a Corner

 

            “But frankly,” she confides in me, “I think musicals are a bit beyond them—and Robert Trussell agrees.” There she stands, seer-sucker suit and pumps, name-dropping our major local papers theater critics. Sometimes she calls him bob. The theater in question is brand new, six years old with a budget roughly a tenth of an average Broadway stage. They pay equity minimum, but they do the good stuff—Miller, Ibsen, Williams—so getting talent is never a problem. Their space is a renovated (and purged) Fundamentalist haunted house, their sets are equal parts garage-sale-finds and rescued from storage caves, and they light as if they have twice the patches reality says they have; OSHA would not approve. So despite the fact that I have never seen them do a musical, and the obvious conflict of interest that comes with working for them, I would have to agree: musicals—notoriously complex and expense—are probably a bit beyond them. But who cares? Bad theater never hurt anybody.

            Let’s be clear about our working definition of bad theater; some of it is very dangerous. Participating in a community theater production of Oklahoma! should get you put on the homeland security watch list. But in order to avoid season after season of Sweet Charity and The Drowsy Chaperone, we need real bad theater. Or bad real theater. And we need it really badly (I am done.) We need ambitious production that fall short. And theaters willing to do the occasional falling need other theaters willing to do the same in order to foster a community risk taking that is vital to a robust theater scene. Beginning theater students play a lot of silly games. A particularly uneventful one is “Cat Wants a Corner” which asks its participants to stand in a circle while one player moves around the circle demanding “Cat wants a corner” before being directed to the next player. The game only gets interesting when the members of the circles start switching places behind the cats back, hoping she won’t steal their empty spot while the switch is in process, leaving them the homeless cat. The lesson is simple: no risks, boring game. In that way we learn that risks make the theatrical world go ‘round. Somebody has to be the cat, but if the risk taking is shared so is that burden.

            Brilliant production are a thrill to see: “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” But unless there are theaters willing to strive to push themselves just past where they are confident, those miraculous productions will never happen. They will never happen because no one will dare produce that beautiful script that is also too complex or too controversial. They will never happen because no director will be willing to take a new interpretation of and old classic, because it challenges previous assumptions. And no one will ever produce Andrew Lloyd Webber again, because all six people who have the range to sing his compositions comfortably are already on Broadway. No audience will have to sit through a painfully abstract piece of absurdist theater, a chunkily updated Shakespeare, or a painfully off pitch (and badly choreographed) production of Cats ever again. But Waiting for Godot and anything by Paula Vogel never would have made it past their workshops, Shakespeare would have been obsolete after the French Revolution, and Phantom of the Opera…you know that’s too scary, I don’t think I want to go there.

            Ninety-five percent of theater people know this. There are fringe festivals, theaters like the one I described earlier, and some pretty miraculous productions happening every day that prove that these kinds of risks are happening. But the people taking them are getting no money and precious little admiration for the near misses. There will always be productions of the Music Man (many of them wonderfully, and fearfully made), not because the thespians have sold out, but because even theater people have to eat; plastic prop food has about as much nutritional value as it looks. The burden needs to be shared by ladies in seer-sucker suits, theater critics named Bob, and audiences in general. Even if it means sitting through the admiral, but over-ambitious; the enthusiastic, but off key.

I remain,
Georgie