Beowulf on Beowulf
by Sam Hurwitt, Associate Editor

Written by Jason Craig and composed by Dave Malloy, who also costarred as Beowulf and King Hrothgar respectively, the Shotgun Players-commissioned world premiere run of the Banana Bag & Bodice songplay Beowulf--A Thousand Years of Baggage in May and June of last year earned rave reviews and spots on critics' top 10 lists (including mine) for its propulsive cabaret-inspired song-and-dance numbers, spectacular low-tech showmanship and witty juxtaposition of brawny wrasslin' and academic cant. It was perhaps no surprise when five of those critics gave it the Glickman Award for best original play to debut in the Bay Area in 2008. Local audiences had one last chance to see the show in a sold-out one-night revival/revamp at Berkeley Rep's Roda Theatre in January before the show went on to its New York City run at the Abrons Art Center this April. There it got great reviews in Time Out and The New Yorker, as well as some snarky blog dispatches and a baffled and baffling write-up by Neil Genzlinger in The New York Times (who seemed to think it was a klezmer musical). I spoke to Jason Craig on the phone after the second weekend of the three-week New York run.

How's the New York run going?

It's going very well. We're getting good responses. We got some nice reviews, and people are showing up. We're playing in a relatively big house for our standards. It's 350 seats, and we're getting anywhere from 140 to 200 people in there, which is great.

Does Beowulf play differently in New York than in the Bay Area?

I think the Bay Area's a great testing ground. They are much more open to new ideas, just because they're not exposed to as much theatre. It's been a great tool for us to test out our pieces out there. Whereas out here a lot of audience members are jaded, or they're always comparing styles to the style they'd seen the night before. So yeah, it's quite a different audience. For Beowulf in particular, it was probably a lot more boisterous out in California. People are appreciating the piece here, but it's not as guffaw-like out here. I think people were tapping more into the whimsy of the piece and the humor in California, whereas out here they're analyzing it more. The press has been a lot harder on us out here too. But I think the majority of the audience is definitely digging it, so that's a relief.

How long have you been based in New York?

We formed the company Banana Bag & Bodice in 1999, and we moved out here in 2000 from the Bay Area. But we've been coming back and forth since we moved out here. All the pieces we've performed, apart from The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen, had a showing in the Bay Area. We still have a strong connection with the community out there, even though we've been living out here pretty much the whole time.

Has the show changed much since the original run?

Yeah, since Ashby Stage the end has changed a considerable amount. We have a new actor. Beth Wilmurt is in Academic #3's role, so she's brought her own flavor to the piece. Also a lot of the text toward the end with Beowulf when he confronts the academics is quite different. The "Art in Violence" song, which was kind of like a calypso number before, that's changed drastically so that it's more of an aggressive song. The commedia element of the end is not really there anymore. We pretty much workshopped the show for New York right before the Roda, so whatever we did at the Roda is now out here, although there have been some small changes since then.

How did it come up to do Beowulf?

Shotgun wanted to commission myself and David Malloy to do some kind of musically based theatre piece, and we agreed to the challenge. They suggested maybe an adaptation of something. I suggested Beowulf, and they liked the idea. But it was kind of a whimsical choice, really. I hadn't read the poem yet. I just kind of liked the cover of the book, to be honest with you. And it has such weight to it that I kind of wanted the challenge of reading it and making some kind of statement about it. It was definitely an odd choice to start with, because I hadn't really read the original.

What was your perception of Beowulf before you read it?

It was a weighty text that people had to be convinced to read and was probably not an incredibly enjoyable experience for them. I wasn't forced to read it in school like a lot of people, so I didn't really have that relationship with it, but my impression was that it was probably a thick undertaking. But when I actually read it, it's not so bad. It's quite an easy read. I read the Seamus Heaney translation, which is probably a much easier translation to read than the one kids had to read 20 years ago--and of course some people had to tackle it in Old English as well, which is a completely different challenge altogether. I pretty much just took the bare bones of the story. The first thing I [read] was the Cliffs Notes, just to acquaint myself with the story. I actually started writing some of the script before I read the actual poem, or the translation of the poem.

What struck you when you read it?

Well, when I first read it, even it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, it still didn't really jump out at me as a fantastic piece of work, at least thematically. I'm not really into war games or masculinity and demons and all that stuff. I'm not one of those kids that played Dungeons & Dragons, so thematically it was not all that exciting or interesting to me. I think it was because I was not so attracted to all that stuff that I was able to have a lot of irreverence with the telling of the story. Probably that's why the Beowulf that we represent is 37 with glasses and not necessarily in the greatest shape. He's not your typical warrior. Because I didn't really play with swords and all that when I was a child, slaying monsters wasn't necessarily the first on my list of the type of plays that I really wanted to write. So it was kind of a discovery of what I had gotten myself into. I think if I had really loved the poem, it would have been a completely different piece. I don't think there would have been as much fun and humor in it, maybe.

Music has often played a part in past pieces, but had you done a musical piece on this scale before?

There's always music in our pieces, but not as detailed. The last show we did in New York was about a punk band, so we all learned to play our instruments. I learned how to play bass, and Jessica learned how to play drums. The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen definitely had a lot of music in it, but a very different approach to the music. It was more of a DIY approach to the music and quite different from the orchestral piece that Beowulf is. The music's written out and there are professional musicians in the room. It's very exciting to have that kind of professionalism onstage. Shotgun was the able-izer in all that. It was commissioned by them, and there's no way that Banana Bag & Bodice would have been able to do a detailed show like that by ourselves.

There was a lot of talk in the lead-up to the piece about whether it was going to be an opera or a musical or what.

We originally put the challenge to ourselves to write an opera, and it was clear pretty early on when I was writing the text and Dave was writing the music that it wasn't going to be as operatic as we imagined it to be. I know there are so many different types of opera, but it was clear that we were doing something more akin to a musical--but we always shied away from that term. We decided on "songplay," which we took from the German Singspeil. But it really is sort of a musical. We kind of cringed at that term, but it really is a musical, to be honest.

What associations does the term "musical" have for you?

I guess I'm just not really a big fan of musicals. I know Dave has more liking for that kind of theatre. It's just that the musical theatre world is so specific and so different from what our aesthetic as a company has been, and probably will be for our next shows. We just had a lot of reticence about calling it a musical, just because it has a specific style to it and we didn't want to advertise it that way. I don't know whether it's good or bad, the choice we've made. But we're sticking with songplay.

Were there other ideas you were tossing around for the commission besides Beowulf?

Maybe taking on the Charlie Manson story was one idea, or Rasputin. Usually Banana Bag & Bodice shows are me sitting down and writing a script from my imagination. Because of the commission I guess I had to sell the idea to [Shotgun artistic director] Patrick [Dooley], so I was giving him concepts that were tangible, and we came up with Beowulf from that list. I think we are going to do the Rasputin story with Shotgun in 2011, maybe.

Will that be a songplay?

It will again be a collaboration with myself and Dave, so I'm sure there'll be a lot of music. Whether that will be our operatic piece or whether it will be a musical or songplay, it's hard to tell. I'm not sure at this point. It may even be straight theatre--"straight theatre" being an odd term as well.