Katchor In The Wry

Don’t mistake Katchor for a nostalgic, despite his immigrant aesthetic. “Nostalgia means taking things from the past and oversimplifying it. No, no, I like the present,” he says. Courtesy of Vineyard Theatre

Don’t mistake Katchor for a nostalgic, despite his immigrant aesthetic. “Nostalgia means taking things from the past and oversimplifying it. No, no, I like the present,” he says. Courtesy of Vineyard Theatre

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

The cartoonist Ben Katchor has been likened to many artistic greats: Borges, by the writer Michael Chabon; James Joyce and the painter Max Beckmann, by Edward Sorel, the elder statesmen of cartooning; Hopper, in The New York Times and elsewhere. As for his Jewish corollaries, though, the list is curiously short, consisting of Art Spiegelman and Trina Robbins, two other graphic novelists of his generation. Not a Bellow, Chagall or I.B. Singer in sight.
So nu? Why the loss for Jewish parallels in literature or the fine arts?
“Well, I don’t know. I guess it sort of depends on what you see as Jewish,” said Katchor, whose musical “The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island (Or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower)” recently opened at the

Vineyard Theatre. “You can define me as a person of Jewish descent, and this is what Jews are thinking about,” he continued. But that makes it too easy.
And yet that is particularly tempting for Katchor’s latest work, perhaps his least overtly Jewish work in a career that has spanned three decades. His musical, based on an earlier comic strip and first adapted for the stage in 2003, follows a misguided philanthropist as he tries to save the exploited workers on a fictional island. There are hardly any Jewish signifiers in the work, save a “Kosher Butcher” sign seen in the background, one of Katchor’s many drawings projected on scrims throughout the show. An argument could be made for the philanthropist, Dr. Rushower, or the character Immanuel Lubang, sent to the fictitious Kayrol Island to awaken the exploited workers — the slug bearers — to their own misery. But that’s in name only.
Better, then, to look at Katchor’s overarching aesthetic. It is one easily deduced from his earliest comic strips, many syndicated in The Forward and several published in adored books like “The Jew of New York” and “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.” The same sensibility is evident in his more recent career as director and librettist of musicals, three now in total.
The Katchorian aesthetic (the adjective seems appropriate here; the artist sui generis) is based in the Jewish immigrant culture of New York. It is evinced from the chintzy peddled wares, the lust for print and printmaking and the gritty romanticism of urban decay that features prominently in his work. It is seen in his sympathies with the working class. And it is sewn together in surrealist imagery that evokes the hoping and dreaming that fuels a diaspora anywhere. As it goes, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
But don’t mistake Katchor, 56, for a nostalgic. “Nostalgia
just means homesickness,” Katchor said. “It means taking things from the past and oversimplifying it. Looking backwards.” That is not what his work is about, he says. “No, no. I like the present.”
Perhaps it is more helpful, then, to understand Katchor’s work as a firmly rooted in the present — attuned to its problems and prospects — but ornamented and deeply informed by the past. “The Slug Bearers,” with a jazzy rock score composed by Mark Mulcahy and played by a live band, gets a contemporary feel from the young idealist Immanuel Lubang (Bobby Steggert). He thinks the “poetry” of vintage home-appliance manuals will inspire the workers on Kayrol Island, which has basically turned into a sweatshop, to improve their lot. With financial support from Dr. Rushower (Peter Friedman), Lubang and Dr. Rushower’s daughter, GinGin (Jody Flader), build an institute on the island devoted to their cause.

Throughout the musical, the backdrops of city scenes evoke Katchor’s vintage gritty urban aesthetic — a French cleaner, a Macedonian coffee shop, the kosher butcher. But the plot and themes are entirely fresh. Bleeding-heart accounts from journalists on the island sucker the naïve idealists into action. The “exploited,” meanwhile, just want to be left alone. Toss in the subplots, like a romance between GinGin and an island native, plus the rocking score, and it doesn’t get any more modish.
Katchor and Mulcahy began adapting “The Slug Bearers” for the stage in 2003, a few years after Katchor won an Obie for his first comic-book opera “The Carbon Copy Building,” in 2000. The first incarnation of “The Slug Bearers” was performed only twice, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in the Berkshires, in 2003. Then, after more work, it ran for two weeks at The Kitchen performance space in New York, in 2004.
That’s when Sarah Stern, the associate artistic director at the Vineyard, which staged the original production of “Avenue Q,” saw it after reading the rave reviews. “It was like stepping inside someone’s imagination,” Stern recalled. “I thought it had the potential to be fully realized.” She convinced the theater’s chief artistic director, Douglas Aibel, to see it on the last night. “He was just as excited about it too,” she said.
Now after fours years of planning, “The Slug Bearers” is being restaged in fully realized form. Bob McGrath, not Katchor, directs; the seven-member cast and four-piece band doesn’t have Mulcahy filling in roles; there are more scrims, and this time they’re mobile; the score has been formally written and printed; and the much larger budget has allowed the show to run for almost six weeks, not two. After its opening last week, and more glowing reviews and ticket sales, the Vineyard added another two weeks. It will now close on March 16.
If theatergoers miss the obvious Katchorian cues of immigrant Jewish culture, though, Katchor offered hope for the future. He is currently working on a graphic novel about dairy restaurants in New York, due out later this year. “That has a lot of Jewish dietary laws,” he said, noting that he has been researching rabbinical and scholarly works as he works on the book. Still, that seemed to miss the point. Katchor’s Jewish sensibility is just that, a sensibility. No wonder Art Spiegelman calls him, without compunction, the “most Yiddish” of all comics.
“The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island (Or, The Friends of Dr. Rushower)” runs through March 16 at the Vineyard Theater, 108 E. 15th St., between Irving Place and Fourth Avenue. (212) 353-3366. $40-60.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization