On March 19, 1944, a very unusual play was given a staged reading in Nazi-occupied Paris. Desire Caught by the Tail, a surrealist farce featuring a nearly incomprehensible plot, bizarre juxtapositions, a slew of non sequiturs and puzzling characters named “Thin Anxiety,” “The Onion,” and “Big Foot,” was directed by Albert Camus, and featured, among other cast members, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Queneau and Dora Maar. Among the 120 people in the audience were Jean-Louis Barrault, Armand Salacrou, and the play’s author, painter Pablo Picasso. This first reading was a success; so impressive, in fact, that five or six more readings followed. According to one participant, the play gave everyone in that dark period the precious feeling that liberty was being affirmed.
Now, nearly 60 years later, Tampa Bay area audiences will have a chance to see this seldom-revived work of dramatic revolt as read by some of this region’s best actors. The Alley Cat Players, a company which only came into existence last year with a one-act about political radical Emma Goldman, is presenting Desire as a staged reading for one weekend only, on May 4 and 5 at the Silver Meteor Gallery in Ybor City. The cast includes Jim Wicker, Ned Snell, Scott Isert, Joanna Sycz, Maryann Bently and Teresa Gallar. The one-act will be directed by Jo Averill, co-founder, along with Gallar, of Alley Cat.
The task of this ensemble is to make a success of lines like “A purulent fistula in my heart, love is playing marbles between the feathers of its wings.” Or “The old sewing machine which turns the horses and the lions of the disheveled merry-go-round of my desires chops up my sausage flesh and offers it alive to the icy hands of the still-born stars which are rapping their wolfish hunger and their oceanic thirst at my window-panes.”
Why Desire? According to Averill, 31, she first became enamored of the play when she saw it staged in the early ’90s at Polk Community College; fellow-student and local theater personality “ranney” contributed to the direction. “It was through that production which I worked as a tech on that I became aware of the script, and loved it so much that I knew someday I’d have to do it myself,” she says. “(The script) is beautiful. It is very, very bizarre, yes, but it is beautiful. …”
Insofar as the play can be said to have a subject matter, she says, “it’s about the nature of unconventional love. To a certain extent, it is about the beauty of itself; it’s a piece of automatic writing; it is about juxtapositions being beautiful.” Some of her actors, she admits, were shocked by the script when they first read it, but “I explained to them that it was non-linear, that it was surreal, and that you should just experience it with the same beauty and clarity that you experience a dream, without trying to apply real world logic to it.”
She hopes that audiences too will be open to the work’s originality: “It’s a piece which you listen to, one, for the language, as you listen to poetry. And it’s a piece to look at visually in the same way you would look at a painting. It’s evocative more than it is descriptive. Your own mental images are another character in the play.”
The Silver Meteor reading, Averill says, will have minimal set, some costuming (based in part on Picasso paintings), and actors who perform with script in hand. Why not a full production of Desire? Averill explains that she and Gallar want to present not only easily produced plays but also works “outrageous enough or difficult enough” to make a full production unfeasible. “You can do with a staged reading a hit-and-run sort of thing,” she says. “You pick out something bizarre and wonderful and put it up in a couple of weeks, and have a lot of fun, and go on to the next thing.”
Averill and Gallar have day jobs that further limit their availability. She’s production manager at Gorilla Theatre and Gallar is production associate at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Because of these responsibilities, Averill says, “Alley Cat, at least for the first couple of years, is going to be primarily a summer company.”
Speaking of summer, how does she feel about the company’s first production last August, Emma Goldman: Love, Anarchy, and Other Affairs, also staged at the Silver Meteor? “On our last night we sold out, actually, which we were very enthused about,” she says. “And we broke even on the production, which on our first production, we had not expected to do. It was a very positive experience for us, and, we of course hope, for the audience. And we’re hoping to do much more of the same.”
More of the same means a June production of Theresa Rebeck’s Spike Heels, about the convoluted relationships of two men and two women. Further productions and readings for the next two years are already in mind, but “we’re going to be announcing our shows on a show-by-show basis, so that we’re not put in the position of having to change things publicly.” But don’t fret. Averill asserts: “We’re not going away.”
When I first wrote about Alley Cat 10 months ago, I noted that very few new theater companies manage to survive past their first production. Now it looks as if Averill and Gallar are serious about making their young company a keeper — one that might actually provide us with avant-garde work not being done elsewhere.
This article appears in May 3-9, 2001.
