Mark Mulcahy & Ben Katchor

When I saw a workshop of The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, or the Friends of Dr. Rushower, at the Kitchen Theater in New York City in 2004, I was captivated. I knew Ben Katchor's cartoons from Metropolis Magazine and books like Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, so it should not have been a surprise that in teaming with musician Mark Mulcahy, he would create theatre marked by the same level of originality. Here was a cartoon landscape peopled by characters with rich inner lives, and a story at once funny, smart, wry, political and moving. As the story spins out from a New York penthouse to a tropical island of exploited factory workers, it introduces us to the engaging cast of characters that people Ben's singular imagination, and to Mark's lithe and gorgeous music. I sat down with Mark and Ben before one of the final casting sessions to talk about the inspiration behind the show, and their experiences working in a new medium.       - Sarah Stern, Associate Artistic Director

Where did the story for Slug Bearers come from?
Ben Katchor: By accident, I dropped a princess-style telephone on the floor. It broke open and I discovered that a small lead weight was screwed into the case. I wrote a one-page strip for Metropolis Magazine as an attempt to explain the existence of this weight, where it came from, its purpose and how it functions in the world. Also, I have always felt that the texts of instruction manuals were a form of found poetry. So Slug Bearers combines these two themes into a romance of humanitarianism and exploitation. 

Mark, you've been making influential music since the 80's, first as the front man of the band Miracle Legion, and now with your solo shows and albums. Does Slug Bearers feel like a departure musically?
Mark Mulcahy: Some of the stuff in here I could easily have just written as a song of my own, which I guess you'd call rock, but that's such a broad category - maybe more of the folk presentation of rock music. The music in Slug Bearers keeps changing, and certain themes return with certain characters, so its less song-y than what I might normally write for myself. What's nice about this show is that none of the characters are black and white, good or evil, and I think it’s more interesting that way - we try not to insult anyone by hitting you over the head. It's hard to know whether a character started out a certain way because of the text, or became that way because of the music. It made it a lot more fun and made writing the music it a lot easier. 

How did your creative collaboration work on this piece? Was it different from how you normally write music?
MM: Ben worked for quite a while expanding his strip into a libretto. When he gave me eight or ten scenes, we already had a deadline that revolved around a workshop at the Kitchen. I started working on it late and then got into a little panic about it; I just sat in this room with door shut. Normally I either write the whole song, or write lyrics and someone else writes music. So I was on the other side. 

I had a whole bunch of ideas musically, so I went back to the way I normally had done things. And that started to work out really well, writing just what I thought was good music without looking at the words at first. Now that we've written a second piece I feel like I know how to do this now. It's hard, but in a way I find it now to be a relief not to have to write the words or come up with the subject. I really like it because it just gives me a completely different place to write music from.

Ben, when did you become interested in adding a performance dimension to your work as a cartoonist? 
BK: Bang on a Can commissioned me to turn one of my comic strips, “The Carbon Copy Building”, into an opera. I had some acquaintance with opera and music-theatre over the years, and it happened that I'd been listening to a lot of light operetta - Gilbert & Sullivan, Offenbach - at the time, but I say listening to it more than going to see it. So it happened that I got interested in music, divorced from the visual. When they approached me I said, well, I'll see what it's like. I had no concrete idea of what that meant to make theatre work. I had no idea up until rehearsals. 

Did your ideas about theatre change in those rehearsals?
BK: Bob McGrath was the director and he let me sit with him and look at how it was being put together. At some point I started thinking, this is very similar to what I do on paper. Which way does a person come in? How does somebody enter? I think about those questions all the time. I didn't realize this at first, but there's a long history of connection between theatre and comics. Comics were an early way to graphically represent what happened in the theatre. 

Do you think the same impulse draws you to both comics and theatre? 
BK: Theatre wasn't a big part of my life as a child, but I came across comics on every corner newsstand. There was something about that combination of these little scenes and texts that I liked in comics. I went on and my life became involved in making theatrical events on paper. I think theatre comes from the same urge to combine images and text, so it feels like a natural thing for me to do. 

Yet the forms have obvious differences, not the least of which is that theatre involves lots of other people.
BK: I think I gravitated towards comics because there are fewer people. I just wanted to work alone and have this complete control, like a novelist has. In my comics, everyone is a consummate actor, because they do exactly what I have them do. There's no bad acting. In theatre you have to collaborate, which can be a gamble. But if the collaboration works, the result is something greater than either person could achieve alone. I'm always surprised and delighted when I hear a piece of my text set to music by Mark. And I like the idea of continuing to work with the same people, so that it starts to feel more like a company.

The story and the music work seamlessly together to create this piece. How did your collaboration begin? 
BK: A mutual friend of ours brought me to see Mark sing. I liked how he sang language - this point that's somewhere between spoken poetry and music - and he does that very well. I don't think I was thinking about opera at that point, was I? 
MM: I think it was that we met and became friendly, and then the idea of doing something came up, and that sort of festered for a few years, and then finally, you know, our wives…
BK: What?
MM: They started pushing it a little bit.
BK: I wouldn't say, no, no my wife didn't push.
MM: Well, they didn't hurt. 
BK: Really? I don't remember that. He just wants to credit his wife. 
MM: (laughter) It was something that just kept rising up, and then finally we just went for it. I think at some point somebody gave us a bit of money to sit around for a couple weeks to figure something out.

That you're both coming to theatre from other related mediums is I think part of what makes this piece so wonderfully singular and theatrical.
MM: I think we work really well together - I feel really happy with our relationship and collaboration. On some level I don't understand theatre because it's so much work and effort for such a transient moment - there's no record, no book. I admire the tenacity I see in people to do this thing that I know is really hard. It takes so many people, and it's amazing that it's so dependent. But I understand it a little better now. I'm learning that it's like a big club that maybe I'm slightly in, and that's cool.