While you were living somewhere else, Nature Theater of Oklahoma became the coolest theater company in New York City. You found this out before you even got back into town, and naturally you were curious and maybe a little suspicious or worried that there was this whole new thing happening that you had maybe missed. Kelly Cooper’s name was known to you through her membership in Joyce Cho, a collective of terrific playwrights who had all been students of Mac Wellman, the master experimental playwriting mage of Brooklyn. Before you saw any of Nature Theater’s work, you read an interview that Young Jean Lee did with Kelly and Pavol in the Summer 2009 issue of Bomb and it proves beyond doubt that they are all cool. “Nature Theater of Oklahoma is one of the best ensemble theater companies in the world,” wrote Young Jean in her introduction to the interview. “Their work is weird and unlike anything you’ve ever seen.” That interview would make anyone with a heart want to be an artist. Kelly says: “I know that what we do is ridiculous, that no one would care tomorrow if we stopped making it, but I always hope that what we do changes people’s lives, that it alters consciousness, that it cures cancer and AIDS. I know I am failing miserably at any one of these goals, but I have to keep striving for big things when I invite all these people into a room. I have to believe in the power of that encounter.” Later in the interview, Pavol talks about watching TV: “I cherish… shows about sharks,” he says. “I love sharks… I’m definitely afraid of sharks.”
When you finally got the chance to see their work for the first time, it was January 2013. You were a broke grad student but you pulled together about a hundred dollars to go to the Public and see a marathon showing of the first four installments of Life and Times, a multimedia performance epic scripted by the transcript of a company member telling her life story. It lasted all afternoon and evening and everyone you knew was there and even Björk was in the audience in an amazing black-and-white suit. The piece was funny and virtuosic and sometimes transcendent, a testament to what you might create if you had the willpower to stick with silliness in a really serious way, if you could be truly konsequent (as they say in Berlin) about the inconsequential. Reviewing the show, Hilton Als wrote that it “does what Faulkner and Gertrude Stein did with English prose: makes us hear it in all its terrible richness and peculiarity and flatness as it struggles to express itself, or hide from its own emotional life and specious truths.” But there was also something comforting, personal, about the way the show kept reminding you that art is people getting ideas and running with them. And running.
Nature Theater of Oklahoma is a company about blowing up the scope of the imagination. About exploding out beyond the parameters of the event underway so that it has to re-form itself again and again. They’re too smart to claim to be speaking for America, but they know you’ll want to be there when they try.Julia Jarcho, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at NYU. She is the author of “Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama,” and an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director with the company, Minor Theater.
Suggested Readings
Anderson-Rabern, Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
R. Anderson-Rabern, “The Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Aesthetics of Fun” in TDR, 54.3: 81-98.
Leopold Lippert, “Performance Labor, Im/Mobility, and Exhaustion in Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times” in Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, April 2017, Vol. 5 Issue 1.
Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).
Daniel Sack, ed., Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (London: Routledge, 2017).