More than most other South Florida theater companies, Miami’s Mad Cat has been able to attract a young audience, pulling them away from pop culture and electronic media for a couple of hours.
How? With plays like artistic director Paul Tei’s So My Grandmother Died, Blah Blah Blah, a messy grab bag of pop culture and Internet references with only tangential interest in a narrative thread.
It is Tei’s contention, I suppose, that his target audience sees little value in linear structure or any of the other elements of what was quaintly once called “the well-made play.” Maybe he is right, for the assembled crowd with whom I saw Mad Cat’s latest opus certainly seemed engaged and entertained, even if they had little context for the scattershot mentions of Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen and other dead white dudes that are dropped into So My Grandmother Died like factoid bombs.
In fact, the play concerns the Chekhov family. No, not the Russian clan of the master playwright of the early 20th century, but the Hollywood, Florida, Chekhovs, whose grandma — as advertised — has recently kicked the bucket. This brings home daughter Polly from that other Hollywood, where she has been trying with little success to forge a career as a comedy writer. Since she is the writer in the family, it falls to her to write Granny’s eulogy, a task which sends Polly into a massive writer’s block.
Polly (Melissa Almaguer) is one of three sisters, including unmarried new mother Monica (Erin Joy Schmidt), who has a knack for mind reading, and brooding modern dancer Annabella (Deborah L. Sherman). Let’s assume Tei is familiar with the cartoons of Jules Feiffer, from which Annabella seems to leap. He certainly knows Chekhov’s Three Sisters and his take on this trio of angst-ridden sibs who yearn to go to Miami is drily amusing.
Then there is Mom (Beverly Blanchette), a dim bulb straight out of early ’60s TV sitcoms, and Dad (George Schiavone), whose passion seems to be the Heat basketball team. It is one of those families where nobody knows best. Not related, but very much in evidence, is a three-member chorus — Anne Chamberlain, Troy Davidson and Ricky Waugh — inside Polly’s overactive head. They roam about the expansive playing area of Mad Cat’s new home base at the Goldman Warehouse tossing in non sequiturs, footnotes and Wikipedia definitions with fourth-wall-shattering glee.
There may be a link to the evening’s various references to Ezra Pound, Billy Joel, Willy Wonka, Inception and Long John Silver’s fast food or, more likely, it is Tei dumping out the detritus of his mind for whatever connections we may make of it.
Try to make sense of it all at your own peril. Instead, accept the moment-to-moment enjoyment, which is considerable. Any insistence that it all add up to more, while understandable, would surely mark you as an old-school fuddy-duddy.
SO MY GRANDMOTHER DIED, BLAH BLAH BLAH, Mad Cat Theatre Company, Goldman Warehouse, 404 NW 26th St., Miami. Through Sept. 10. Call (866) 811-4111 for tickets.