Jessica Brater, A Thousand Thousand Slimy Things
Howard Wallach
This unlikely amalgamation feels perfectly in sync with the conceptual nature of the company, which draws from the poetic tradition of Gertrude Stein to "invent our own ways of inviting a connection." Slimy Things, which opens this Friday, will use the Waterfront Museum and Showboat Barge in Red Hook as their stage. Gently bobbing in the Buttermilk Channel, the watery backdrop will be coupled with a set of entirely reclaimed objects and mermaid-inspired performers for what will undoubtedly be a complete aquatic experience (short of jumping in the East River). The run starts tomorrow night and continues through May 9th. Tickets $18
So Polybe was the name of Gertrude Stein’s dog. How much does Stein’s poetry influence Polybe + Seat’s plays? And Slimy Things? We are inspired by Stein’s challenge to find new ways to connect the audience to the action onstage. Our answer to this challenge is to make work that embraces multiple points of view, inviting the audience to find individual places for connection. Slimy Things was developed on this principle; even our seating arrangement ensures that the view of the stage from one end of the audience is very different from the view at the other end.
Slimy Things combines mermaids with the ecological dangers of plasticization. What brought these two things together for you? How does the show weave together the fantasy component with the environmental awareness component? When I first read about Weeki Wachee's "Save Our Tails" campaign to prevent the park from closing, I knew I had to make a theater piece inspired by this campaign. It all clicked together for me as I read about the changing ocean environment, and the North Central Pacific "garbage gyre" in particular—a swirling mass of plastic twice the size of the state of Texas. Weeki Wachee is a parallel conservation story. We discovered that we could create a structure of the play based on the way ecosystems overlap and interact, and this principle has continued to guide us as we have developed the script.
This production is three years in the making. What took so long? Climate change has been going on for 4.6 billion years—we had a lot of research to do! In our collaborative development process, a number of writers, actors, and designers contribute to the stories and the ideas of the piece. We do several public showings to gather feedback. When we zero in on a collection of images, characters, parts of stories, and bits of language that can provide a kind of spine for the piece we know we are nearing readiness. We wanted to open the show around the time of Earth Day, so when we arrived at the final stage of the process, we set the dates.
Slimy Things is inspired by the Weeki Wachee mermaids in Florida. How did this roadside oddity spawn a dramatic production? Was going to see the mermaids part of the research? We visited Weeki Wachee last winter to watch the shows and interview the mermaids. They even invited us to swim in the spring! Several of the people we talked to have made their way into the play, though in each case we have taken a great deal of artistic license with their characters. From the beginning, Robyn Anderson, who is the mayor of the town, manager of the park, and a former mermaid, has been a major character, and since visiting the park we have added Mermaid Marcy and Mermaid Lauryn, both of whom are named after women we met on our visit. We have also incorporated transcripts of our interviews into the text.
The Barge seems to fit so perfectly with the aquatic concept of Slimy Things, because it's literally bobbing in the water. Did you write the play specifically for a production on a barge? And how will the location affect the audience’s experience of the play? My hope for the space is for us to be able to gather together with our audience, and spend some time on the water surrounded by both nature and art. The harbor, and the barge itself, is really a perfect background for this piece since you can see the natural harbor and human-made additions to the landscape, like the Statue of Liberty. Early on we made the decision to make our set out of reused plastic material and the juxtaposition between the inorganic plastic and the homey, earthy feeling inside the barge will be a big part of the performance experience.
Slimy Things seems like a pretty significant departure from Granada, Polybe + Seat’s last play in 2009 which dealt with the 15th century expulsion of the Jews from Spain with a bit of time travel and talking bears. How did Polybe transition from historical-fantasy to ecological theater? Where to next? We are committed to making work that asks us to educate ourselves about subjects with which we were not previously familiar. I see this as my civic and artistic responsibility. That was the case with Granada; we knew very little about Sephardic traditions, which are not heavily represented in North American art. With Slimy Things, we wanted to be better informed about climate change. Now we are inviting our audiences to come spend some time thinking about the climate with us; what it is, what it could be, and what our place is in it. Next up is a project related to the history of medical experimentation combined with a melodrama about body snatching from 1829.
