Tamarie Cooper out and about (photo by: George Hixson/courtsey Catastrophic Theatre)

By Alex Wukman

Summer in Houston means a few things: shorts, mosquitoes and musicals. From the big budget musicals of Theatre Under the Stars, who close out this season with Urban Cowboy, and Broadway Across America, who bring back the world famous Lion King, to smaller companies like Stages, reviving their smash production of The Great American Trailer Park Musical, summer in Houston is a time for musicals. In fact it was five years ago this summer that Catastrophic’s previous incarnation debuted what many consider to be their most well known play Speeding Motorcycle.

And this summer Catastrophic Theatre will offer the 14th installment of what has alternately been called Tamilalia and the Tamarie Cooper show. Any critic attempting to comment on this semi-annual event is faced with the question of how do you review an institution? How do you comment on something that has come to epitomize Houston’s summer musical theatre season?

Cooper has become a legend in Houston theatre circles based upon the strength of her musicals. They have drawn praise from critics and audiences throughout Houston both for their high energy music and highly original subject matter. As the Catastrophic theatre website states “over the years [Cooper] has taken on everything from love to camping, speakeasies, time travel, domesticity, neuroscience, and cocktail parties”

This year’s intallament, The United States of Tamarie: An All-American Revue (made in China), sees Cooper taking her unique vision and applying to the American political system. After almost a decade-and-a-half of summer shows the question of burn out is inevitable. And Cooper recognizes that which is why, after welcoming a new addition to her family in 2024, Cooper feels that balancing the demands of family and art has giver her a chance to recharge a little.

“I’d feel like I was getting pigeonholed by [the shows] if I had do to one every year,” says Cooper. Another way that Cooper keeps it fresh is to bring in new collaborators. Despite being filled with names well known in the Houston alt.-theatre scene, like Sarah Jo Dunstan and Jodi Bobrovsky, the United States of Tamarie marks the first collaboration between Cooper and musical director Miriam Daly.

Daly, a Houston local, is a renowned musical director who previously worked on the off-Broadway smash Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding and Death: The Musical. She’ll be joining Catastrophic regulars like Kirk Suddreath in the onstage band and combining her take with Cooper’s, admittedly, old-school outlook.

“I used to love those old school musicals [and] all of the shows have a bit of a send up of the old style musical numbers,” says Cooper. She goes to cite such icons of musical theatre as Guys and Dolls as one of her primary influences. Cooper goes on to explain that throughout the years she has been careful of ‘sequel creep.’ “There’s always this idea that it has to be ‘bigger, louder, faster and funnier;’ but I have this formula that works for me,” says Cooper.

Tamarie Cooper keepin it real...awkward (photo by George Hixson/courtsey Catastrophic Theatre)

Cooper explains that initially she drew heavily from her own experiences. “I used to joke that I take all the things that people pay money to tell a therapist, put them in a musical and charge people to come see it,” says Cooper. Another aspect that separates The United States of Tamarie from most other shows is the length of the run.

Unlike most alt-theatre performances, which often seem to close a week after they open, Cooper’s run is always at least six weeks long. She explains that the last Catastrophic show to receive such a lengthy treatment was Blue Finger. Cooper’s show, which runs from July 15-August 20, often marks the end of summer in spirit if not in temperature and has been known to help culture goers prepare for the onslaught of the new fall seasons. However, the announcement of another installment of the wildly popular Tamarie Cooper franchise has been overshadowed by news of an almost monumental proportion from the fringe performance community.

Culturemap has reported that Catastrophic Theatre is one of four organizations that is planning to relocate to the new $22 million Independent Arts Collaborative in midtown. When completed the facility will not only house Catastrophic but will also be the new home of Suchu Dance, Main Street Theatre and arts hot spot Diverseworks, whose warehouse has anchored the north downtown arts scene for years even though the air conditioning has to be turned off during performances.

Liocated a few blocks from the Continental Club, the Mink and the Ensemble the IAC will allow a sort of one-stop shopping for people who don’t want to risk getting their car burglarized in the mean streets of the East Downtown warehouse district; or who want to be able to grab a post performance cocktail without having to drive all the way back to midtown. However, despite the optimism in the initial announcement no projected completion date has been given which gives it at least one thing in common with the Tamarie Cooper franchise.

The United States of Tamarie: An All-American Revue (Made in China) premieres July 15 and runs until August 20 at Diverseworks, 1117 East Freeway, For more information and tickets call 713.522.2723 or go to catastrophictheatre.com.

By Alex Wukman

There are plays that are entertaining for both the audience and the actors. There are plays that challenge the audience or actors, either through the difficulty of the script or the themes that are explored; and then there’s Catastrophic Theatre’s production of Sarah Kane’s play Crave.

The performance doesn’t so much begin as unfold; the audience is admitted into a smoky theatre filled with a diffused light that offers little clue as to when, or even where, the play is set. It could be on a fishing pier in a British coastal town with an oddly descriptive name, like  Walton On The Naze or Broadstairs, in 1995 or it could be  inside someone’s mind. The costumes and the four actors offer few clues to the location or period of the piece–a middle aged man in a shirt and tie, a younger man in a dress shirt and jeans, a young woman in a sweater non descript pants and flip-flops and an older woman in a chiffon dress.

As the audience members take their seats the actors stare out, each reflecting a different state of emotional agitation. Director Jason Nodler chose to let the beginning of the play occur organically, with the actors starting Kane’s script after the buzz of conversation dies down, rather than creating an artificial barrier between the reality of the play and the reality of a Houston street. And once Kane’s script begins it overpowers any thought or expectation. As Ian Shuttlesworth, writing for the Financial Times, stated of a 1998 performance Kane paints “fierce, impressionistic portraits of the turbulence in human hearts.”

The impressionistic nature of the writing–four voices revealing only pieces of conversation, monologues, Biblical references or direct quotes from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land–leaves almost everything open for interpretation and debate. From who these people are, Kane’s script only identifies them as A,B,C and M, to whether the work even qualifies as a ‘play.’ Because the play lacks any recognizable plot, action and only the vaguest of characters ritics and reviewers have often likened Crave to a spoken word poem; in fact Catastrophic’s own program notes describe the piece as “a tone poem for four voices.”

Looking at only the formal elements of the piece fails to acknowledge the emotional truth in the language. To say that since there’s no clear three-act-structure, no character progression, no easily discernible climax or denouement it can’t be a play ignores the beauty of the audience participation that Kane’s writing requires. Because, at the end of the day, the thing Crave is most like, from an audience perspective, isn’t a standard piece of drama or a classic poem–it’s a partially overheard conversation. An intriguing overheard conversation that makes the listener wonder just who these people are and what they are talking about. It’s a conversation that encourages the can’t-help-but-eavesdrop-because-you’re-on-your-cell-phone-on-the-bus audeince member to construct his or her own story around the characters and the snippets of conversation that they seem to share. And to have a theatregoer leave with that feeling, and for that feeling to carry on for days, is an accomplishment in our easily distracted society.

Crave runs until June 4 at Diverseworks Art Space, 1117 East Freeway. For more information call 713-522-2723 or visit catastrophictheatre [dot] com.

Kristina Wong performs "Cat Lady" at Diverseworks Friday, March 25, and Saturday, March 26.

By Alex Wukman

 There’s an image in Kristina Wong’s photo stream, mixed in with the vacation shots, of her onstage, wearing matching blue windbreaker and news dealer cap, projected on to the back wall of the theatre are words that could be said to define most people in this country: race and identity. As a solo performance artist Wong dealt very overtly with race in her previous one woman show Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In the show Wong opened a dialogue about the high incidence of anxiety, depression and mental illness among Asian American women. Her press kit explains that she was trying to use “art as a healer” by exploring the issue of mental health in marginalized communities and “move past oppression into [a] healthy [future].”

Through continual touring and performing Wong came to be widely known in theatre circles across the country, the Associated Press called her “raucous and irreverent” and LA City Beat described Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as one “of the funniest shows in town and engenders a level of audience participation that’s enthusiastic without becoming embarrassing.” In a tale as old as time Wong began to feel isolated and alone by life on the road.

At her new production’s fundraising site on the United States Artists.org network Wong discusses some of the burden she felt performing a show about suicide and mental illness for four consecutive years.  “The process of making the show was the most heartbreaking and depressing endeavor I had ever taken up.  The last four years of touring alone on the road have been some of the most isolating years of my life,” she writes.

She goes on to explain that she was doing her show “so much, I was becoming the character from my show– conversations from real life flowed into my real life monologues.” In Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest she plays a character named Kristina who is hospitalized for mental illness, something that never happened to the real Kristina Wong. However, the subtlety of the distinction between artist/actor and character were often lost on audiences.

“I’d have people come up to me after the show and say that it was brave of me to talk about being hospitalized,” Wong said in an interview. She explains how over the course of touring so much of her identity became fiction that her own memory began to change because she “spent more time thinking about the script” than the events of her own life.  She goes on to describe how taking a show about mental illness on tour proved uniquely difficult. “It felt like I was a town crier, I’d show up at a college campus after someone had committed suicide,” said Wong.

The isolation of the road, and the feeling of being consumed by a character, allowed her to connect with a surprising subject. “In my isolation at home and on the road, I read Neil Strauss’  “The Game” and started watching “The Pick-Up Artist” reality competition show,” writes Wong. Strauss, a journalist for Rolling Stone, wrote about the subculture of male pick-up artists. Wong goes on to write that she became fascinated with the parallels between the life of a theatre performer and those of a pick-up artist.

“Their (morally questionable) techniques and (manipulative) seduction tools seem plucked straight from improv theater training. Like me, they used their “scripts” on audiences to escape the reality of their loneliness,” writes Wong. According to Wong, during and after the success of Cuckoo’s Nest loneliness came to define much of her life.

“I finally got to feel like an important artist and create a space where people got to talk about depression and suicide , but I felt so empty inside,” said Wong. Wong also began to feel guilt about her success, as she went on to say, at times it seemed that the only reason she was able to get work was “because people are killing themselves.” As Wong began researching the world of pick-up artists and interviewing individual pick-up artists she realized that both her and her subjects shared the same motivations. “We were both doing theatre from a need to connect out of our [own] loneliness,” said Wong.

One of the things that Wong said surprised her was how much time pick-up artists spent learning to talk to someone. “The art of interpersonal communication is dying and these guys are paying thousands of dollars to learn to revive it for their purposes,” said Wong. Seeing parallels in the unchanging scripts of the pick-up artists and the repetitive nature of many conversations Wong asked “is human communication just a script we play over and over again?”

It would be easy to say that Wong’s other choice of subject for her performance piece, one of the enduring clichés of American life, cat ladies, offers a contrast to the forced extroversion of the pick-up artists, the only problem is that they are eerily similar. “They both hoard pussy as a surrogate for actual human connection,” said Wong. One of the press releases for the show describes the juxtaposition of pick-up artists and cat ladies as “the parallel world of the pathetically lonely” and describes Wong “bending [them]…into an intersection of characters living at the margins of gender and society.”

 Cat Lady debuted at Diverse Works on March 24 at 7:30 p.m. and continues until March 26. Call 713-223-8346 for ticket information.