“Uh-oh,” the fear goes for those prone to such anxieties. “This isn’t paving the way for, uh, ‘Memories,’ is it?”
The short answer is no. Despite Trinity Repertory Company’s penchant for musicals in recent years, Indoor/Outdoor (February 17-March 26) is not something to soften us up for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats.
In fact, our little furry friends are merely the hook playwright Kenny Finkle uses to catch our attention and reel us in to his exploration of the problems of human communication and relationships.
Not that the storyline isn’t, if you will, purrfectly delightful. Samantha (Angela Brazil) is quite satisfied with her life as a housecat until a frisky alley cat named Oscar (Jacques Roy) appears at a window and entices her with tales and descriptions of life outside her walls. “It’s water and sand forever — it’s like a giant litter box!” Samantha’s human, Shuman (Mauro Hantman), gets concerned enough about her resulting change in behavior to take her to a cat therapist (Phyllis Kay). Adorable.
But does it edge over that fine line into cutesy?
Brazil doesn’t think so. “On the page it was lovely and charming and cute,” she says. “And then I heard it read out loud with real voices — with real voices, not the voices in my head — and realized it was about a lot more than cats. There was a lot of unexpected depth.”
Roy, speaking before a rehearsal, concurs: “My experience was pretty similar, I think. We’re doing a nice little romantic comedy, with a few laughs here and there. That’s what it is. And then I walked into the first reading, sat down, and spent the whole reading going, “Oh . . . oh . . . oh.” It’s not just about cats. It has a depth to it and is interested in human relationships in a way that I hadn’t seen with just a cursory read.”
The story is really about how people get along, or fail to, or miscommunicate. Rehearsing has involved taking what they know about real cat behavior — Brazil and Hantman have cats and Roy grew up with them — and playing the characters somewhere between that and how a person would behave. Making the audience too aware too often that she is a cat would distract them from more important things going on, Brazil feels. “If I had on a kitty costume,” she says, “that might be a little too embarrassing for any of us, don’t you think?”
She elaborates. “So we’ve tried to sort of go in and say, ‘OK, well, a cat would do this and a human would do this in this moment, so what’s our language for it?’ If I took it to an extreme and ran around on all fours, that would be horrible, right?”
Which is not to say that both of them have not been having a great time coming up with little bits of stage business to physicalize very physical roles. Roy was greatly entertained in rehearsal when Brazil devised a prance across a pillow to get her master’s attention.
