The Brooklyn Rail

I don’t know many indie theater artists who are having kids. The money, the square footage, the hope for our future; there’s a lot that artists don’t have. So it’s funny that, despite this, theatermakers find themselves at countless baptisms: the births of new works. And if you found yourself at the February 27 Ars Nova presentation of HOMO ERECTUS, you may have witnessed a twofer—a new musical, and, if your mind could summon it, a newborn.

Created and performed by American Sing-Song (musical duo Jake Brasch and Nadja Leonhard-Hooper) and presented as a work-in-progress for one night only, HOMO ERECTUS is set in 2131 but looked like readings have for eons. There were seats before a proscenium, industry people milling, and music stands waiting. It is from these bare bones that would-be producers are asked to imagine: what could this show look like with a couple mil behind it?

And so I was predisposed to watch a new musical presentation at a theater that has developed new musicals that went to Broadway with a couple mil behind them—Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, KPOP—through the lens of how this show might look with that kind of funding.

The numbers quickly added up.

HOMO ERECTUS has a time machine, drones, and flying cars. There are mountains and high-tech glasses. A couple flamethrowers. And that’s just Act I—the shared portion at this presentation. But this is a zany comedy; maybe these props could all be puppets? Or comically conceived cut-outs on dowel rods. Need be, a video design?

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HOMO ERECTUS follows Tim and Harry, a very cis, very gay, very American couple that might look a lot like one you know: Tim has money, Harry has ethics. Familiar enough, except they now live in American Siberia because America fell to wildfires (and wild boars). Fret not, corporations still reign, predicting your every need—in Tim and Harry’s case, a biological baby. This being 2131, they can create one that’s 40 percent Tim, 40 percent Harry, and 20 percent pig uterine tissue. When they get off the waitlist for the insemination process, all these F-slurs need to do is get to the medical facility and ejaculate, together, within the hour. Dick-tock.

That’s all exposition—then the show really gets wackadoo. All the while, I imagined how castable this Scrappy Little Musical would be: small cast, handsome gays. Maybe Cooper Koch would play one of the homos, and some newbie with only 3,000 Instagram followers would play the other. You know, parity. Women show up later; Jayne Houdyshell could play them all. (Their names or references are “Darlene,” “old woman obsessed with her washing machine,” and “nurse,” whom Houdyshell has indeed played.)

Plus, the score seems to only call for a keyboard—keep the orchestrations simple and the octane high! It’s very Little Shop of Horrors with less personnel, very Gutenberg! but for today: gayer.

My experience of witnessing works in process was such that the one in front of me, performed by its creators, was meant to scale, in some way, on its artistic terms. But then I opened my ears.

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Reading from music stands, Brasch and Leonhard-Hooper performed as Harry and Tim, respectively, while also taking on a handful of other roles. Brasch played the keyboard throughout the near nonstop score, and I noticed Leonhard-Hooper took on an extra role: reading stage directions.

Usually unheard in performance, stage directions illuminate a writer’s physical intentions for a production or its tone. HOMO ERECTUS’s tone was immediately revealed as satirical; after Harry takes some drugs to enjoy a psychedelic weekday hike, which he can do because Tim makes coin, Harry stood before a woodsy expanse. “He recognizes his privilege,” Leonhard-Hooper said.

In a presentation, reading of stage directions is normal. They are less commonly sung.

At one point, as a character ascends a mountain and faces fluids running down its slope, I jotted down “and the pee makes it slippery”—someone had sung that (yes, berserk) lyric, however it was not from a character’s voice but rather from the omniscient third-person narrator. The stage directions. I noticed, a few numbers in, that Brasch and Leonhard-Hooper were not standing in for actors who might take on these roles, and not reading stage directions themselves because it’s cheaper than bringing in a whole extra person, but because the fabric of their work is built around creating musicals that are true aural, not physical, experiences. Any manifestation of the mountains and flying cars and flamethrowers was only meant to live in my mind.

This may not have been new information to some of the one hundred people who packed into Ars Nova to laugh throughout HOMO ERECTUS’s absurd situations and clever wordplay. Friends surely knew of American Sing-Song’s schtick. I did not. After the show, I consulted the duo’s bio: “this male alto and female tenor will attempt to give you a musical experience so epic, so sweeping, that the only stage large enough to hold it is the one in your mind.”

It was thrilling to, in real time, discover this purpose for myself and reevaluate the ways in which new works are developed and then packaged. How many shows have been poorly scaled because they were not understood on a fundamental artistic level?

With just Brasch and Leonhard-Hooper in the driver’s seat—alongside the presentation’s director, RJ Tolan—American Sing-Song can dictate precisely how its imaginative works are received. Look no further than the “costumes”: Brasch and Leonhard-Hooper were not donning 2131 attire but instead their own matching, branded jumpsuits that, in silvery glittery font on the lapel, read the acronym for American Sing-Song, “ASS.”

This is not to say that Homo Erectus can’t grow or feature a suggestive design. (Spinning gobos, used a couple times throughout the presentation, telegraphed the characters’ time travel.) American Sing-Song’s north star, however, is to explore a different kind of musical, a form known for its dizzying spectacle that, in this incarnation, breathed more like a novel. This minimalist approach may be out of necessity—finding that couple mil ain’t easy. Regardless, American Sing-Song is curious about subversion and finding counter-cultural ways for audiences to absorb content—less with your eyes and more with your imagination.

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Reboot films, like the live-action Disney ones, prey on nostalgia to recreate beloved movies with far less artistry; instead of illustrations that opened avenues for awe, Disney’s new films use live actors and computer-generated backdrops to deplete any possibility for creative interpretation. Last year, on Broadway, Redwood relied on digital panels to show audiences exactly what real trees look like. Some customers at restaurants now order by pointing not to their menu but to photos of dishes on Instagram. Photos already show what words take work to conjure.

HOMO ERECTUS wants you to conjure, and, based on its audience’s reactions, we were ready to do so. This was refreshing: the musical could be a podcast—it is essentially its own musical audiobook—but American Sing-Song doesn’t want you siloed. By bringing a crowd together, the presentation offered a rare, sparky, and live opportunity for an audience to practice collective imagination as one. My envisioning of the musical’s mountainscape may have looked different than my neighbor’s, but there’s the magic. The spell worked; in the best way, I felt like a child sitting at a public library’s story hour.

I was also a willing test subject. Alongside performing, Brasch and Leonhard-Hooper were collecting data; after one mid-show duet sung by unlikely comrades, “It Takes a Man to be a Mommy,” the audience roared in response, and—as Leonhard-Hooper cheekily noted as an aside—it was the first time the audience had gotten a chance to applaud all night. Edits will be made, more buttons will be found. Audiences are beautifully pliable to musicals’ beats and rhythms. Just as I was learning how HOMO ERECTUS operated, Brasch and Leonhard-Hooper—while simultaneously singing their faces off—were perhaps learning how it was received.

They may have also noticed a slight energy dip near the end of their ninety-minute runtime: a perfect length for a musical’s first act, but this one was nonstop. For all the story’s play with time, the writing offered little variety: most scenes and songs were at a breakneck pace. That is partially necessary—given the amount of world-building the musical needed to accomplish, initial songs were more focused on speedy words than memorable melody. Cuts, and air, can offer clarity.

But our world, too, is fast-paced with much to absorb. The characters in HOMO ERECTUS contend with that, particularly Tim. To drive his flying car, order his take-out Caesar salad, and know what time it is, Tim relies on his pair of Oculus glasses: futuristic visors that tell him, well, everything. He can’t function without them and their many applications. Sound familiar?

Harry nudges Tim to remove his glasses, to return to the world of unknowing. He does, even if it means losing access to information—including his husband’s birthday. But when the mind is blank, what invitation might that become? Without ads and stocks and meetings clouding his literal vision, what might Tim see?

He sees, at one point in the musical, a newborn. Through the power of gentle descriptions and wacky other-wordly settings, I saw one too—and it probably looked quite different than the one in your head.