If any company in the Tampa Bay area deserves the title "Most Unusual," it would have to be the Alley Cat Players. This is a troupe that performs plays no one's ever heard of in venues few have ever been to for audiences smaller than anyone's dared imagine. Where else would you go to see Pablo Picasso's indecipherable Desire Caught by the Tail or Mac Wellman's bizarre riff on the Dracula theme, Swoop? What other troupe eschews conventional theater spaces to perform instead in art galleries, a Mexican restaurant or a "Music Garden" devoted to the self-esteem of young African-Americans? And then there are the audiences — only 12 spectators one night at Tom Stoppard's Artist Descending a Staircase, maybe 20 at a showing of Mollie Bailey's Traveling Circus, a hefty 75 — a record — to see a nearly all-female Macbeth. Can any theater company be truly satisfied with these numbers? Is Alley Cat a success so eccentric, it looks like a failure? I put these questions to Jo Averill-Snell, who might be called the company's co-artistic director if she and her two colleagues — her husband, Ned, and Teresa Gallar —didn't object to such labels. Sitting in her North Tampa house, we held an hour-long discussion about Alley Cat's mission and expectations, its history and identity. And she convinced me of some things: that there's a logic to the Cat's peregrinations; that the oddness of its offerings is entirely deliberate; and that audience size is about what she expects for a theater with this job description. In other words, the Cat is willfully peculiar, consciously idiosyncratic. Let other companies mount Our Town for a throng of 400; Alley Cat wants to show Sincerity Forever to a clump of 46.
Just this week there was an example of how unpredictable a small theater company's fortunes can be: due to illness on the production team, Alley Cat was forced to cancel its scheduled opening of the surrealistic play Apparitions. I asked Averill-Snell how the company, with its tiny audiences and $10 tickets, has survived for four years. Her answer was direct: "Preparation, dedication and a real commitment to it on the part of Ned, Teresa and myself." She noted that, before starting Alley Cat, both Gallar and she worked as production managers at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and the Gorilla Theatre, respectively, and therefore they had "not just the college education, but the working background in how you run a company." The theater's yearly budget is small — about $20,000, including in-kind contributions. This means that in order to make their presentations attractive — like the beautifully staged Mollie Bailey was earlier this year — special cleverness has to be used in the making of sets and costumes. Averill-Snell mentioned a few typical Alley Cat expedients: for example, the use of "found object art" in sets, or the borrowing of set pieces from construction sites, people's homes and Habitat for Humanity. Resident lighting designer Lloyd Pearson owns his own lighting system, and donates its use to the company in show after show. Costumes are sometimes constructed by Alley Cat, other times rented or borrowed from the University of South Florida, American Stage, Sarasota's Asolo Theatre, or people's private collections. Even so, Averill-Snell, her husband and Gallar regularly find themselves contributing a couple hundred dollars of their own funds for each show. And the theater also utilizes the contributions of a "Friends Committee," whose help is essential since, as Averill Snell modestly put it, the Alley Cat mission "is not inherently commercial."
And what is that mission? Averill-Snell said it has three "prongs": to produce notably literate scripts, scripts that highlight women's roles, and scripts that are "offbeat." The focus on language, she said, "leads us to shows like Mollie Bailey, that have wonderful moments in them, moments that, you read that or you imagine how that's going to look when you stage it, and you say, 'Oh, for that alone, I have to do this script.'" The search for plays with strong women's roles is just as important: "That's not to say that every show we do has to be all women. But that's to say that there's a lot of talent and a lot of audience out there that's female." Finally, the search for "offbeat" scripts means Mac Wellman or Theresa Rebeck, not Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller.
What about the Alley Cat's unusual spaces? Well, said Averill-Snell, there was a common theme in past houses like the Covivant Art Gallery and the ¡Viva La Frida! Café y Galeria: they were venues where paintings were prominently displayed. And it looked for a while as if music and dance would become part of the Alley Cat mix when the troupe moved a few months ago into the NT Village Music Garden in downtown Tampa. But the Music Garden turned out not to be the permanent home Alley Cat was looking for: just last month, an economic understanding with the space's owner changed, and Alley Cat was back out on the street. Now Averill-Snell and company are searching for an affordable building, and planning on reviving the theater/visual arts mix. "Our long-term goal, when we finally have a space of our own, is to stage full-gallery shows of works that complement the show we're doing. So you come in and it's not just the performance … When we have our own building … I'm going to find people whose life passion is the visual arts and approach them in a guest artist sort of arrangement."
Finally, I had to ask Averill-Snell about the tiny audiences I've often seen at Alley Cat productions. How many ticket-buyers does she really want on a given evening? "Fifty people would make me happy," she said. "Seventy people would make me ecstatic." She doesn't ask for more, she explained, because "We want to do stuff that is offbeat. That means that it has an appeal — that there are people out there who really want that, and are going to be entertained by it. … We're not trying to be the Performing Arts Center. We don't want to do the works that you would need to do in order to bring 300, 500 people in."
So that's it: this eccentric company has no desire to normalize. Continue to expect the unfamiliar, the outlandish, the peculiar. That's Alley Cat's special province, and it has no intention of changing.
Call it kooky or extraordinary. But give it respect. It's already lasted four years.
And that's about three-and-a-half years longer than most new companies ever manage.
mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or letters@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2004.