Two new plays undercut the pretentiousness of avant-garde theater with hipster sensibility

By Michael Menta

The cast of "Our Farm" goes through the motions to mock experimental theater.

Six actors in black leotards wear hats that dangle carrots in front of their faces. They are playing two horses, two dogs, a pig and a donkey. “Sit!” barks a dog. “Whoa!” neighs a horse.  These “animals” are retelling George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” to deconstruct the oppressive, degrading rule of humanity over the animal kingdom. It’s heady, pompous, experimental theater on the Cherry Pit stage in downtown Manhattan. And it’s hilarious.

Experimental theater is often unintentionally funny, but the laughs in this show are always on purpose. “Our Farm,” which played at the Cherry Pit in the fall of 2009, is a mashup, a new kind of theater style gaining traction off-off-Broadway.

Many are familiar already with mashups in music: two wildly different songs are edited together with surprising harmony, kind of like mixing peanut butter and pizza. One of the most famous music mashups is Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album,” a 2004 mix of Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” with The Beatles’ “The White Album.” While remixes just add new beats to a song, mashups add a post-modern flair, both interweaving songs and tearing them apart. Thanks to “Our Farm” and others, theater is finally catching up to music.

The mashup in “Our Farm,” for example, is a deconstruction of Orwell’s allegory on communism mixed with the pretentiousness of avant-garde theater. Created and produced by students and alumni of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, the play is one of several recent theater productions to achieve success with the mashup model. One group, the Elevator Repair Service, created “Gatz” in 2007, an adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” set in a small business office. A British group, Kneehigh Theatre, created “Brief Encounter” in 2008, an adaptation of the romantic 1946 film of the same name mixed with vaudevillian slapstick. Right now, the most successful mashup is Les Freres Corbusier’s “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” currently at The Public Theater. The play mixes the biography of the seventh American president with the kind of rock concert where angsty 17-year-olds bang their heads.

On its Web site, Les Freres Corbusier calls its mashup style “Populist Theater.” The term is borrowed from the Robin Hood-like political movement that takes power from the elites and gives it to the average public. Alex Timbers, artistic director of Les Freres Corbusier, calls it “theater for people who like rock concerts and television.” Anne Davison, dramaturg for Les Freres, clarifies the specifically subversive appeal of the company. “I think that ‘South Park’ in a lot of ways is the closest pop culture phenomena to Les Freres,” she says.  “It’s a complete, take-no-prisoners irreverence that’s never didactic.” The mashup of “Our Farm” has something in common with Les Freres’s “Populist Theater”—it’s mischievously clever and fervently anti-intellectual. At the center, both of these downtown plays scorn the kind of theater that attracts audiences who read only The New Yorker.

More specifically, “Our Farm” and “Andrew Jackson” are rebelling against traditional experimental theater. “I was making fun of the avant-garde,” says Andrew Farmer, the writer of “Our Farm.” Farmer, a 22-year-old acting major at Tisch, took inspiration from Ariane Mnouchkine, the avant-garde director who since the 1960s has gathered a company of actors into a commune living in the woods of France. “This woman’s despicable,” says Farmer. “She’s so cruel and manipulative to her company. Some actors, they want to be abused and I don’t think that’s how good work gets done. That way of working became pathetic to me.”

However pathetic, the models that Farmer destroys are the same models he wants to hang his carrot-dangling hats on. The Wooster Group, one of the oldest and most famous experimental companies, created a show called “L.S.D. (…Just the High Points…)” in 1984 that mixed an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” with footage of Wooster Group actors getting high on LSD. Acting in the middle of a psychedelic bad trip is a perfect example of the theater Farmer hates. But “L.S.D.” proves that the Wooster Group pioneered the mashup techniques Farmer exploits. These techniques are what NYU drama professor Susan Jonas says are “cliché for those of us that aren’t newbies.”  So are Farmer and the other new mashup-ers really doing something new or are they just young brats that don’t know their history? Timbers of Les Freres Corbusier has the answer.

Timbers watched footage of The Wooster Group and other experimental companies while studying theater and film at Yale, and what he realized just might be the secret to a successful mashup that avoids the cliché:  “The best experimental theater,” says Timbers, “has always had humor about itself.”  The humor formula has served Timbers well. The 31-year-old is one of the most sought after young directors in the United States, recently directing Pee-wee Herman’s live show in Los Angeles and currently helming a Disney show in development called “Peter and The Starcatchers,” a prequel to “Peter Pan.” Timbers’s work in commercial theater is the result of the unique style he developed with Les Freres Corbusier, a style he borrowed from those old experimental companies. “The point is it’s ridiculous!” he says. “The Wooster Group, they have a sense of humor about themselves.” As Les Freres uses experimental techniques, it keeps a hipster-sense of awesomeness by ironically referencing its own pretentiousness. It’s the aim of “Populist Theater” and it has reached perfection in the mashup aesthetic.

Les Freres Corbusier’s style began in Timbers’s senior year at Yale in 2001. As head of the Yale Dramatics Association, an undergraduate theater group, he wrote and directed “Un Piece de Mouvement Historique Avec La Geometrie,” a work Timbers describes as “kind of faux-experimental theater.” The play included abstract, almost incomprehensible, choreography and the audiences were given six pages of program notes to help them “follow along.” From the first line of the program notes (“Mathematics contains the potential for the infinite.”) it’s clear that no one was supposed to follow anything. “It started the idea of lampooning academia while celebrating it,” says Timbers.

Once Timbers graduated, he moved immediately to New York. He took an internship at the Manhattan Theater Club and began acting as a producer for dance and theater pieces at various theaters on their “dark nights”—evenings when no other performance was scheduled. This led to the co-founding of The Tank, a theater still in existence on 45^th street in Hell’s Kitchen that offers a cheap venue for young artists. “At first we expected it to be around for like a year and we expected it to be a bar and gallery space that would have some comedy and performance rock shows,” says Timbers, adding “we were sort of ambitious about trying to do a little theater there and some performance art.” But the pace of producing other people’s work didn’t allow time for his own. Timbers left The Tank in 2003. Having seen tons of new work, he recognized a gap in downtown theater: with so many serious theater groups, why not try being one of the few funny ones?

Les Freres Corbusier entered downtown theater in 2003. Timbers started playing with form and content, aiming for an audience beyond the grey-haired clientele of The Manhattan Theater Club. One of his first mashup successes was a Christmas pageant, performed entirely by children, but based on the Scientology texts of L. Ron Hubbard. Another show featured President Herbert Hoover rising from the dead to stage a concert inspired by Elvis Presley’s 1968 Comeback Special. The intellectualism he loved about academia remained. For 2005’s “Heddatron,” Timbers mixed Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” with robots. Retaining his academic interests, Timbers replaced live actors with mechanized ones to illustrate the way that “Hedda Gabler” follows the traditional structure of a well-made play to the point of being mechanical and automatic. The idea is interesting, but it becomes truly awesome only when you see sputtering metal hunks move according to Henrik Ibsen’s stage directions.

The work of Les Freres made being smart easy and cool, just in time for the arrival of Professor-President Barack Obama. Timbers’s most recent production, “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” treats Jackson like a rock-star, following his meteoric rise to fame as the first populist president, the founder of the Democratic party, and an all-around Old-Hickory-bad-ass. But, Timbers also explores how his severe mistreatment of the Native Americans has given him a lasting reputation as a casual genocidist. Jackson ends the play defeated, finding, like a certain other president, that even with a wave of popular support it is very hard to get things done in Washington.

Timbers’s educational impulses avoid being dry history lessons thanks to the raucous style. On one night, in the middle of a raging power ballad, Benjamin Walker, the actor playing Jackson, leapt off the stage and began grinding on a woman sitting by herself in the audience. It’s not everyone’s ideal evening at the theater. But it’s a visceral, unruly experience. That’s exciting for Timbers, who considers his Les Freres work “the coolest thing you can do in theater.” The Public Theater agrees. The show has been entirely funded by the Public (no outside producers required) and its run has been extended three times since opening in April. The coolness factor is the reason he continues his downtown work even as Broadway and LA keep calling.

With luck, “Our Farm” can be as successful a mashup for Farmer as “Jackson” is for Timbers. Like Timbers, Farmer wants to achieve a similar balance between small creative work and big-budget commercial theater. Like Timbers, he has no shortage of opportunities. As a senior this year in Tisch, he won a department award for best actor, meaning that he can stay on at Tisch as a teaching assistant after college. He also has a friendship with playwright Christopher Durang and might pursue the graduate playwriting program at Juilliard that Durang chairs. For now, Farmer is focused on getting for “Our Farm” what “Andrew Jackson” already has: a long run at a theater with a steady income for the actors.

When it opened at the Cherry Pit last fall, “Our Farm” was the most successful play ever to appear at the venue, being the only one to turn a profit. Part of that is the play’s resonance with young audiences, especially theater students. “I didn’t set out to write a show about my thoughts on theater,” says Farmer. “That just evolved.” Originally intended for students, Farmer was unable to finish the play in time for production at NYU. Several months later, the play was produced at the Cherry Pit and by that time Farmer had drastically revised Orwell’s story in order to tell his own, one that mixes the aims of experimental and commercial theater. “I think it’s a pretty cool opportunity for theater satire,” Farmer says. “We get to see theater as therapy and theater as entertainment, the two extremes. There’s very rarely now a medium.” Farmer may have struck an aesthetic balance, but can the play strike a nice financial balance, too?

In April, “Our Farm” had a reading at The Tank, Timbers’s old haunt. While the venue is an opportunity for Farmer to see and revise the play, his interest in the immediacy of theater makes him long for more. “The audience is so crucial for this show because they’re right there,” he says, indicating the close proximity of the audience to the actors in the small space. “That’s why I think The Tank is not the right space for it. The audience is so far removed from the stage.” The show will have another two readings in May produced by the Full Circle Theater Company. Hopefully, the readings will attract what Farmer calls “industry”—producers or (more likely) their interns who scout for new shows they can move to larger (money-making) productions.

But Caitlin Machak, a Tisch senior and executive producer of “Our Farm,” thinks moving to a much larger space is unlikely. “‘Our Farm’ is kind of the sexy thing right now. It’s cool and awesome and will get Andrew places he really wants to go, but the show won’t make any money.” Machak maintains that the show is meant for the intimacy of a basement, and that those small venues are as far as the show will go.

Farmer is fine with that. His post-graduation options mean that “Our Farm” is not his only ticket to success. But his wishes that the show can be “seen by people I don’t know” may have a harder time coming true. “The problem with ‘Our Farm’ is that the people who saw it are people who know the entire cast in some way,” says Machak. “It caters to a younger audience that is more intellectually savvy, the kind of audience that studies art history and goes to museums for the fun of it.” Adds Machak, “The people who are self-proclaimed dorks and geeks.”

The success of “Andrew Jackson” is that it has expanded beyond the dork and geek crowd, so “Our Farm” will need to open up the inside-theater school jokes if it wants to attract an audience over 30. But, then again, maybe there are enough dorks and geeks to keep “Our Farm” in the black. Sloppy, sophomoric and a little nerdy, mashup theater has something in common with the crude, multi-million dollar appeal of South Park, Judd Apatow movies, and the recent bestselling mashup novel “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” Maybe “Our Farm” can mash up Farmer’s artistic goals with a successful commercial career.