In 15 years, Stray Cat Theatrehas never staged a Broadway-produced show. Plays mounted on the Great White Way don’t have much in common with Stray Cat’s Off-Off –off – Broadway sensibility.
But this month, Phoenix’s oldest continuing non-mainstream theater will present its first Broadway-originated work and only the company’s second musical.
Is Phoenix’s best-known alternative theater ceding to the mainstream at last and giving up its feral heritage? No way, says Ron May, Stray Cat’s co-founder and longtime artistic director. It just so happened thatAmerican Idiot, the Broadway show based on Green Day’s album, fit Stray Cat’s vision.
May says it’s all in the company name: “I picked the name because I’m a huge cat person. What made it stick was how easily it managed to speak to our aesthetic.” Stray Cat is “not an overly groomed show cat or even a domesticated cat – it’s a cat that may be a little rougher around the edges, wandering down different alleys.”
Then there’s the idea of what a stray cat brings home for supper. “I’ve always liked being able to tell people, ‘You may think you’ve seen all there is to see, but what ‘til you see what Stray Cat drags in!”
So far, it’s dragged in such titles asSex With Strangers; Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party;and The Play About the Naked Guy. Those may seem radical by local standards, but in the world of avant-garde theater, they are standard-issue, and Stray Cat is one of only two Arizona companies (along with Nearly Naked Theatre) bringing them our way.
May left his native Chicago at 22 to study at Arizona State University because of one man: Marshall Mason. Mason, a major New York director, was at the time a lecturer at ASU’s Department of Theatre. (In April, Mason was presented with a Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement.) “I figured I would be crazy not to try and learn from him. Plus, having lived in Chicago my whole life, the allure of the desert climate was a siren song I couldn’t resist,” May says.
May started Stray Cat as a one-play venture with fellow ASU student Ben Monred. Interest in the play – Stupid Kidsby John C. Russell – was sufficient for a decent run, so they launched Stray Cat as a company. They enjoyed moderate success until one production made May and Monred realize that “Wow – we’re on to something!”
“It was a play called Polaroid Storiesby Naomi Iizuka,” May says. “This was a kicky re-imagination of Ovid’sMetamorphoseswith the gods as homeless kids – of which there were many around the venue at that time. Nothing about the show screamed ‘box office gold,’ yet audiences and critics ate it up and made me go, ‘There’s clearly a thirst for a different menu.”
Monred left a couple seasons back – “He got married and life took him to California” – but his influence lives on, says May, who also works as a patron relationship manager for Arizona Theatre Company. Stray Cat collaborated with ATC (on its production ofSex With Strangers earlier this season), a measure of the larger theater community’s regard for May.
May doesn’t use the word “alternative,” which a number of commentators have applied to Stray Cat. “I mean, what’s ‘alternative’ – alternative to what? I call it ‘indie’ theater, because I’m a movie buff. It’s the best word to understand what we do.”
American Idiot, Broadway musical though it is, is a perfect example of the Stray Cat vision. “When Green Day wrote the album, they wrote it with a story that goes underneath it, like a rock opera. It’s about a group of kids who are abandoned by their parents, by their friends, and eventually by their country. All the songs are from theAmerican Idiot album plus a couple from the follow-up album, 21st Century Breakdown.” Sex, drugs and military service figure in the plot.
Like its namesake, Stray Cat Theatre has no permanent home.American Idiotwill play Tempe Center for the Arts (June 24-July 16), but previous productions this season were staged at the Herberger Stage West and the Helen K. Mason Performing Arts Center in Phoenix. May calls his various venues “the cat’s different alleys.”
Where will the cat stray next? Check out the 2016-17 season to see.
