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Available Light’s new play honors visionary composer John Cage
Clinton Reno illustration
You might not recognize his name, but you’ve heard his influence: Composer John Cage’s avant-garde ideas blare through contemporary music from Philip Glass to Brian Eno to The Velvet Underground.
“He’s probably one of the 10 most enormously influential artists of the 20th century and, out of them, he’s one of the least known,” says Matt Slaybaugh, writer and director for Available Light Theatre.
A chance to remedy this collective cultural blind spot begins March 21 at the Riffe Center’s Studio Two with the premiere of “John Cage 101,” a play/survey production crafted in honor of what would have been Cage’s 101st birthday year.
After months of research and conversation among actors, dancers and other artists associated with the theater company, Slaybaugh says the group decided to present the work like a mixtape of important vignettes of his life and creative process.
It’s fitting of Cage, whose work interrogated the stiff conventions of classical music. He tied kitchen utensils to the strings of a piano to tweak its sound (a trick later employed by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale), and his seminal composition “4’33” sent a musician onto a stage to sit quietly for four minutes and 33 seconds.
“The subtitle for this may as well be ‘15 Short Plays about John Cage,’ ” Slaybaugh says. “It’ll jump around in time a little bit, but there are just a number of small moments that add up in his life.”
Those small moments include Cage’s relationship with Zen Buddhism and his drawn-out discovery of his homosexuality and subsequent relationship with choreographer and collaborator Merce Cunningham.
In one scene, to illuminate Cage’s sense of wonder and play, his character will simply pick up small musical instruments and tinker with them while discussing his childhood, Slaybaugh explains.
“Cage wanted to make art something that was accessible and welcoming to everyone,” he says. “Our hope is to reveal the welcoming, human stuff behind his ideas and make him approachable to everyone.”
