1
Floor, a small box, a giant hand. The hand slowly pulls the box toward the audience, Maru looks at the audience through the box, crawls into the box. Curtain.
Floor, a small box, no hand. Maru runs and slides into the box, the box slides with Maru inside. The box with Maru inside hits a table leg, which the audience only now notices. Curtain.
Floor, two small boxes lined up one next to the other. Maru runs, slides into both boxes. The boxes stay put, Maru stays put, tail twitching. Curtain.
Floor, Maru lying down, his torso contained within a small box that is open on both ends. His front and back legs extend from either end of the box. Maru stands up, wearing the box, exits. Curtain.
2
Bright lights, the sound of purring. A figure comes into focus. It is Max-Arthur dressed as a Great
White Shark. Lights out.
Lights up on Max-Arthur in his shark costume. He is sitting on a Roomba, which describes
fragmentary circles across the stage. From stage left, a Baby Duck enters. The Baby Duck scampers
across the stage, pursued by Max-Arthur on the Roomba. The Baby Duck pauses at the center of
the stage. Looks out at the audience with black, inscrutable eyes. Beat.
The Baby Duck turns and pursues Max-Arthur on the Roomba. Max-Arthur rides into the horizon,
collides with the back wall. Enter Sharkey, from stage right. He is dressed as a Hammerhead
Shark. Max-Arthur, the Baby Duck, and Sharkey begin an oblique trio. Then, the Roomba stops.
Silence. Max-Arthur, Sharkey, and the Baby Duck all turn and gaze out into the audience. Beat.
Max-Arthur licks his lips. Sharkey licks his lips. The Baby Duck stares. Beat. Curtain.
3
Lights up on Goo and Yat Jai, upstage, facing each other in profile to the audience. Behind them,
two large computer screens. From the rear, light floods the stage.
Goo and Yat Jai each raise their front paws. They reach out and their paws meet, first Goo’s left
paw and Yat Jai’s right paw, then Goo’s right paw with Yat Jai’s left paw.
VOICE FROM ABOVE: Patty Cake, Patty Cake, Baker’s Man, Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
VOICE FROM ABOVE: Patty Cake, Patty Cake, Baker’s Man, Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
Goo and Yat Jai play patty cake. They stop, then begin again. They stop, then begin again. They stop, then begin again. They stop. Curtain.
What accounts for the astonishing proliferation of “performing cats” on the Internet? The current consensus, according to Bryan Lufkin in Gizmodo, is that cats don’t seems to be performing. Whereas dogs are like shabby vaudeville front-cloth comedians, constantly looking at the audience and begging for approval, cats are the Naturalistic, fourth-wall ideal actor in furry form. Dogs are Seth Rogen, cats are Heath Ledger. Cats simply behave: they don’t seem aware of whether this behavior is “twice-behaved” or not.
Minou Arjomand’s Animal Friendship: A Docudrama presents three of the Internet’s most popular cat videos live onstage. The subtitle, “a docudrama,” provokes us to consider the relation of documentary theatre, and by extension, the theatre itself, to reality. it is, of course, an impossible piece. Watching cats on the Internet is pleasurable specifically because the minute-long YouTube clip reframes “natural” behavior as performance: Maru playing with a box becomes a spectacular circus act. But the animal onstage becomes a theatrical problem. As Nicholas Ridout writes: “the impropriety of the animal on the theatre stage is experienced very precisely as a sense of the animal being in the wrong place” (2006: 98). It is in the wrong place because it cannot have intended to be part of the dramatic fiction, and thus troubles the “psychological illusionism” of the stage. For Ridout, these moments point back to the economic conditions of the actor’s labor, for the animal does not participate in these conditions. More accurately, it has different economic conditions – a treat upon completion of a trick – an economic model that in some ways seems far preferable to profit-share.
Despite their troubling nature, this hasn’t stopped theatre makers from putting animals onstage. Horses, cats, dogs, and other nonhuman animals have appeared in the theatre of Romeo Castellucci. In 2010, French theatre company Footsbarn presented Sorry!, which featured, intriguingly, a “Dressage of Cats” by Marie Werdyn. When I quizzed producer Leanne Cosby at the Barbican (who co-produced the London presentation of the piece) about this aspect of the performance she was rather more circumspect: “the cats just walked across the stage … Some nights they did, some nights they didn’t.” The Belvoir Theatre’s stunning adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, played within a plexiglass box, featured a live duck that flapped its wings at inopportune moments, interrupting monologues by splashing water over the actors.
However, Animal Friendship, by re-presenting celebrated instances of cat performance, goes beyond these examples of the animal onstage. It raises issues of acting in documentary theatre: if these cat videos are taken to be documentaries akin to nature programs, would different cat-actors be performing in the staged piece? And if cat-actors are acting in Animal Friendship, what do we value in their performance? Is it simply that they go through the motions of riding a Roomba or jumping in a box, or that they create the psychological illusion of this act taking place for the first time and its associated emotions; joy, terror, pleasure? This impossible piece, then, makes us question what it is we desire and value from the actor in the theatre. Is it that they simply represent “reality”? Or that they betray some excess, some remainder of intention and will-to-please – what we might call “theatricality”?