The second coming
Ground Zero aims to get a rise out of U.S. producers with Cocktales: The Remount
THEATRE PREVIEW
COCKTALES: THE REMOUNT
Ground Zero Theatre
Runs until March 2
Pumphouse Theatre
Director Sean Bowie wasn’t expecting a smash hit when he told some friends in a bar that he wanted to create a series of short plays about the penis. It was shortly after Ground Zero Theatre had produced a wildly popular version of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, but Bowie didn’t have anything so Important-with-a-capital-I in mind.
"When I first started this, I just wanted to do a show with some guys and have a good time," says Bowie. "None of us had any idea that it would be this big, this popular. Or that the show would be as good as it was – that was maybe the biggest surprise."
But an even bigger surprise for Bowie might be that his show about the male appendage has attracted the attention of theatre producers in the United States. Cocktales, which was produced by Ground Zero last September, is being revived this month. According to Ryan Luhning, the company's artistic director, the "remount," as it's being called, is partly at the behest of producers in New York and Chicago who are keen to see if the show is as good onstage as it is on paper.
"I can't give you any names, but there are a couple of producers coming up to see the show," says Luhning, reluctant to lift the veil of secrecy. "The producer we are dealing with here... had checked to see if anyone else is doing this kind of show. We're pretty much the only ones doing it."
All this buzz for a play that is essentially a male response to The Vagina Monologues has Bowie intrigued, especially since he claims that the show was put together in "the guy way."
"It really came together, against all odds," says Bowie with a laugh. "We just sat around a table at Bass Brothers and said, ‘Let’s do this and this and this,’ and a week later we’d get together and say,’Did we do anything? No....’"
As luck would have it, Bowie managed to get Luhning and Alberta Theatre Projects playwright-in-residence Eugene Stickland interested in the project. They put out a call for submissions right away, but Luhning echoes Bowie’s recollections of the creative process after that.
"We’d get together for our weekly meetings and basically go, ‘Ha! This thing’s gonna write itself! So what’s new with you?’ and we’d smoke cigarettes and drink coffee," says Luhning. "Then all of a sudden it was August and we were like, ‘We don’t have a show yet.’"
It must have been fate, because somehow the submissions came in, the actors were hired, the show was staged... and the run sold out. Luhning describes the demand for tickets as "mass hysteria," and says that when Ground Zero lost the rights to another play (Tracy Letts's Bug) that was slated for production in February, he couldn’t resist using the slot at the Pumphouse Theatre for Cocktales: The Remount.
"We’re going into it this time with a bit more confidence behind us," he says. "When we were first doing it, we didn’t know if it would succeed, if anybody would appreciate it for what we were trying to put out there, so there were a lot of nervous Nellies among us. And then all of a sudden it picked up this giant momentum that we almost couldn’t keep up with."
Both Luhning and Bowie consider the material that was staged in the fall as "first draft" work. Although they offered public performances, Luhning called them workshops because they were using the experience to find out what parts of the script worked in front of a live audience. He says that there was a temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though, and they had to resist the urge to rewrite too much.
"There is a point where you can mess with things too much, and it loses all perspective," he says. "We were reading one piece that got quite a hefty overhaul by the playwright, and we were like, ‘what does this mean now?’ Sometimes playwrights don’t know how to edit."
Bowie is a man who never seems to get bored with his job in theatre, and says he’s enjoying the process all over again. He has enjoyed spinning yarns with his collaborators on the project, although he admits that none of them could ever quite believe they were talking about their penises. Despite the popular notion – at least among women – that guys don’t talk about anything else, Bowie says that it’s unusual for a bunch of men to have this kind of conversation.
"We might talk about sex, or girls or boys or whatever – but we don’t talk about our own equipment, you know?"
There’s certainly plenty of talk about the equipment in Cocktales. From disease to dysfunction, from the newly awakening adolescent cock to the aging and dying one, it’s a collection of mostly comic musings on the male member that all boil down to an honest plea to be heard.
"I think this is the most compelling thing about the show, for me: the penis is such a huge source of vulnerability," Bowie says. "It’s the doorway to this great, gaping chasm of loneliness and embarassment and shame.... And because we’re men, we’re conditioned not to be vulnerable."
Yet for all that, it’s certainly not all that serious – and Bowie says he’s stopped using The Vagina Monologues for comparison.
"The most important thing, I think, is that we never forgot what we were trying to do – which really wasn’t much," he says. "We just wanted to tell stories about our wangs. That’s it. It never got political, it never got sociological. It was treated with humour and humility and respect, and we weren’t out to do anything else." |
