Here Comes Commander Kitty! Is she talking to me? But I’m just an audience member. Should I respond? Can I have an M&M? Will that be awkward?

[img_assist|nid=648|title=Blow jobs for the boys, Kirsten Slenning as Commander Kitty, Mike is to the left fondling his M&M's|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=384|height=255]By Michael John Unger

A few years ago at the "Theatre Under the Gun: Show Off Festival":http://plankmagazine.com/feature/another-48-hours-without-nick-nolte-sho..., the team of Matthew Bissett and Kennedy Goodkey presented a brilliant piece of theatre in which they basically played themselves rehearsing for their presentation at Show Off. They discussed how they’d done lots of different kinds of theatre and set out to try and figure out what they hadn’t done yet. They came up with a mathematical equation and graphed out four quadrants. The axis lines were the actor’s self awareness and the actor’s awareness of the audience. Now bear with me as I try to explain it. The most common form falls into the quadrant defined as self awareness: low; audience awareness: low. That’s your basic fiction play, like Ibsen or Chekhov. The characters aren’t aware of themselves and the fourth wall is up. On the opposite end of the spectrum is when awareness is high for both. That’s basically like stand up comedy, where the performer knows he is a comedian and he’s talking to the audience. The next one would be, self awareness: low; but audience awareness: high. This one is a bit trickier but can be best seen best in sketch comedy, where the actors are playing characters talking to us the audience. In the last quadrant, Bissett and Goodkey find something they had never done before or even seen: self awareness: high, audience awareness: low. They jokingly say how boring that would be, like if you snuck into a lecture hall to watch a professor rehearse. Of course we then realized that’s exactly what we just watched. After that performance I realized that I may never come close to seeing another performance in that “quadrant” again, that is until I saw “Exit Commander Kitty”.

*Exit Commander Kitty* is created by the "TigerMilk Collective":http://www.tigermilkcollective.com/company.html, written by Stephanie Hayes and Lindsay Reoch and directed by Reoch. They describe it as “a theatrical experiment about loss of identity”. Commander Kitty is a veteran of a post-apocalyptic army, who is at home making preparations for her own retirement dinner party which she has been forced into at the age of 25. The job she’s leaving required her to sing, dance, throw parties and perform sexual favours for the weary troops in order to keep their spirits up. When we enter her world it appears we are participants in this party, as the ushers bring the entire audience onto the stage, separating the men and ladies onto opposite sides. I quietly rued the fact that I chose the front row because, with Commander Kitty (Kirsten Slenning) basically performing right on top of me, it was impossible for me to sneak M & M’s from the bag stashed in my pocket. In addition to Kitty we are also introduced to the Musician/Slave with no name (James Coomber) and, seemingly in control of everything, is the Author (Lindsay Drummond).

The play is largely a character study of Kitty and her struggle with her chosen – or perhaps forced upon – profession. It’s very much a soldier story except she happens to hold a martini glass instead of a gun and unleashes blow jobs instead of bullets. As I mentioned before, TigerMilk’s chosen method of telling this story ventures very close to the aforementioned Bissett and Goodkey “final quadrant”. This is something you rarely see, mainly for semantic reasons. In truth Commander Kitty is not really in that quadrant because she is aware of the audience, she does talk to us and she isn’t really aware of herself, she is still a character and Slenning never breaks that. However all of those lines become blurred throughout the piece and at points it almost did feel as if I was watching a play where the character was aware of themselves but not us.

Commander Kitty is giving her last performance, but to who? Us? Who are we? We’ve been brought on stage with her so perhaps we’re some sort of judges in purgatory. The performance appears pre-arranged as the Author throws up slides onto the back wall which contain stage directions for us to see, as if we have snuck into the theatre and were accidentally watching a rehearsal. Kitty asks for audience participation and gets it from a female, but after she responds in kind the Author then cues Kitty to let us in on what she would have said if the volunteer had been male. Not surprisingly, a very similar response. At other points we watch Kitty talk into a camera, which is presented beautifully on the back wall above us. It’s her motivational speech to the soldiers but we’re not the soldiers, we’re back to watching a fiction play and when she returns to us she references her performance again. She points out to us that when we’re not laughing; she points out an audience member and asks “why are you looking at me like that?” She bemoans and self loathes her performance. She even threatens any critics that might be in the audience.

“I’m sorry Kitty! I know I shouldn’t have snuck M & M’s in to your performance. Oh god she’s going for the big knife.”

Kirsten Slenning gives a brave performance as Kitty and she is quite captivating but she is also right in my grill. I have no choice but to wait on every word Commander Kitty has to say, even if I’m not really sure if I’m being entertained by a script which is kind of like a burlesque dancer who’s not dancing but is instead telling us of her insecurities and faults as a human. It’s experimental theatre and as the genre goes, it’s not for everyone. Honestly I’m not sure where I stand, I guess I’m just an experimental reviewer bringing myself into the review of the play that I was sort of a part of.

_Exit Commander Kitty written by Stephanie Hayes and Lindsay Reoch, produced by the TigerMilk Collective; Directed by Lindsay Reoch; featuring Kirsten Slenning. Original musical composition and performance by James Coomber as the Musician/Slave. For more information march_ "here": http://www.tigermilkcollective.com/productions.html