Watch an excerpt from Gale McNeeley’s one-man show celebrating 100 years of ‘Archy and Mehitabel.’
Gale McNeeley has never been an actor who revels in the mainstream. He left a promising career on Broadway to go to clown school, favoring a direct connection with an audience over the spectacle of other theatric forms. McNeeley has performed revivals of music by Yip Harburg, Pete Seeger, and Tom Lehrer along with other more obscure skits and songs, always selecting work he wants to perform based on its heart, beauty, and of course its wit. He is big on wit.
Take for example McNeeley’s upcoming show, which will tour the Central Coast after a run in New York City a few weeks ago. The show revives two long-forgotten characters created by a New York columnist exactly a century ago. Don Marquis imagined Archy and Mehitabel, a cockroach and a cat respectively, who are reincarnated people that embody the human spirit of creativity and expression through poetry and prose.
“I think I’m kind of like a missionary, because people don’t know who Archy and Mehitabel are until I introduce them to them, and then they want to know them better because of the wisdom that’s in the poetry, and the satire, and the wit,” he said. “There’s not much wit left in the world anymore.”
The canon of Archy and Mehitabel includes more than 500 short skits and poems, McNeely explained, so he can present only a selection of their genius.
Even within these short skits, Archy and Mehitabel relate stories that include various characters, so McNeeley is far from performing monologues. Arguments, discussions, and heart-to-hearts between characters from Shakespeare to a mummified Egyptian pharaoh all make an appearance under Archy or Mehitabel’s narration.
“I like doing voices and characters,” McNeeley said. “I like doing crazy characters talking to each other, and changing voices and physicality quickly.”
The unlikely duo, though insect and feline, exudes a human creative spirit, McNeeley said.
Archy is a reincarnated poet and is compelled to create verse. The story goes, Marquis found the anthropomorphic arthropod hopping up and down on his typewriter keys, driven by his artists’ spirit to create verse, despite his creepy-crawly form.
“I don’t do him as a cockroach, he is human, his insides are human, so I play him as a human,” McNeeley said. “I think I can channel who I am through these characters and sketches and poems, and it gives them a fullness.”
McNeeley performs the show primarily at libraries. He’s already performed it in New York and San Francisco, and he’s scheduled for shows at the Santa Maria, Solvang, Santa Barbara, and Montecito libraries. The Santa Maria show will also include some musical accompaniment by McNeeley’s longtime collaborator Betty Faas.
The library is the perfect institution for just such a show, McNeeley explained, as the characters are family friendly, yet insightful and witty. Even though most librarians aren’t familiar with the characters, he said libraries are a place where audiences are excited to learn about literary obscurities. It’s also a great space to explore these seemingly small characters that hold some simple, satirical wisdom that doesn’t shy away from the deeper aspects of life.
“They allow me to say what I want to say through the metaphors, the images, and the characters that Archy brings to life in his poetry,” he said. “I would say the poetry, to a large extent, deals with the issues of life and death; the things that are happening to us while we’re living, and the shadow of death that is hanging over us.
“What I mean by that is, we have to enjoy our lives while we are on the Earth in this incarnation,” he added, “and we never know when the guy with the sickle will come by and tap us on the shoulder.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne now can’t help looking over his shoulder. He can be reached at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
VIA SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY/YOUTUBE.COM
This article appears in Apr 21-28, 2016.