Last week I got a chance to see a performance of a “new-ish” musical at Riverside Theatre directed by a colleague of mine, John Kaufmann. A Dog’s Life, which was first produced by the American Heartland Theatre in Kansas City, is a family-oriented piece by Sean Grennan and Leah Okimoto. It’s a pretty small play with only four actors – three of which play dogs. The intent of the play seems to be focused on the celebration of the relationship everyone enjoys with a dog. With Brechtian quotes about dogs from famous people like Groucho Marx framing each scene, the play’s over-riding “message” is that people are able to enjoy an unconditional and uncomplicated love with dogs. Unlike the relationship one has with a friend, parent, significant other, etc, a friendship between a person and a pet is pure and unfettered.
I love dogs. I love most animals. I have two pet bunnies that I’m crazy about. But I left this performance feeling pretty hollow and, in a way, manipulated. It seems that this was an honest attempt at creating family entertainment, but the absence of any real action or dramatic conflict makes this play not much more than a musical revue featuring singing dogs. A better way of describing it might be to liken it to a series of mildly humorous anecdotes about pets. While I have a soft spot for the little critters, I found myself wanting to see actual animals onstage than humans portraying them.
Essentially, the play seems to have no idea what it is. On the one hand, it’s about the lives of three dogs. The authors paint very articulate pictures of the characters of these dogs which led me to believe that we will follow their emotional journeys throughout the piece. Instead, just when I started to become invested in a character, the play would come to a grinding halt for mind-boggling numbers like Three Dog Night that did little to advance the action. Since the performance was really just 2 ½ hours of pure fluff, about 80-90 minutes of this work could be excised. Furthermore, handling a subject as timid as dogs really suggests that this is family entertainment. So when mild swear words get dropped during the piece, I was left wondering exactly who this play was for.
The play’s faults lay mostly with the authors of the piece. Director John Kaufmann did all that he could with the work. His decision to treat the play as a kind of vaudevillian act was an extremely effective one – allowing the audience to better relate to the show. David Tull, a recent graduate of the MFA Acting program at the University of Iowa, did his best as the top dog of the show. His charm was infectious and his sincere depiction of a hapless canine instantly brought to mind the image of every silly dog or bunny I’ve ever known.
Regardless of the play’s many flaws, a genuine sincerity and potent love for the subject matter is ever-present in this musical. The audience is helpless to not love each of these “dogs” and furthermore identify with the dog owner (a charismatic Jim Van Valen). The play’s ending brings to mind the best parts of the disgustingly schmaltzy film Marley & Me – a film I watched almost against my will this summer. The penultimate number “I Have to Go” is, you guessed it, about the end of the dog’s life and his passing. Of course, regardless of the quality of the script, there was not a dry eye in the house (myself included). It was clear that everyone in the theatre was immediately recalling the loss of a pet that happened to them at one point in their life. Only those with a heart of stone could have resisted such heartstring tugging. In this regard, I guess, the play is a success. But I couldn’t help but feel that this was a kind of emotional cheap shot akin to a cheap laugh. Of course the passing of a pet is painful. Who doesn’t get upset when thinking about the loss of their dog, cat, horse, etc? Setting this heartbreak to music was powerful and effective, but it didn’t make up for the previous two hours.
I suppose family entertainment is a tricky affair. When Pixar tackles it with films like WALL-E and Toy Story, we see not only a crowd-pleasing blockbuster but an innovative piece of cinema endeavoring to take the form to new heights. In theatre, however, family entertainment can often miss. Most family shows, or children’s theatre as it is often called, caters to the lowest common denominator. I don’t believe A Dog’s Life does this, but I do think it suffers from a lack of creativity and attention to detail. Their heart is the right place, but their wits need to go along for the ride.
As hard as it might be to make children's/family theater, it's got to be even harder to produce something substantive about a subject as sentimental as pets. That's why I am fascinated by Donna Haraway, whose Companion Species Manifesto takes "shared human/dog worlds" seriously.
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