Infernal Bridegroom Productions: 1993 - 2007

Having never encountered Houston’s most respected avant garde theater troupe in its “homeless” days – when it staged productions in bars, restaurants, warehouses, a moving bus and even the parking lot of a defunct shopping center – I’ll never forget my first visit to the company’s first and last “home.” Driving not only through darkness but through a seemingly abandoned industrial area east of downtown, I parked in front of the only building that had any lights on, and proceeded to become a passionate fan of Infernal Bridegroom Productions.

The show at the Axiom that night, drawing on the dank, shady atmosphere of what I’m told was a long-ago punk music club, turned out to be the very thing that kept the lights burning as long as they did – one of Tamarie Cooper’s manic evenings of self-absorption called Tamalalia.” From the start, the show felt as though Houston had given birth to its own Rocky Horror Picture Show. Audiences returned to edition after edition, year after year, to see how Cooper struggled again to reconcile being Jewish in a world of Gentiles and chubby in a world she perceived as frighteningly thin. Her Jewishness fueled some hilarious stage fantasies, rendered in song and dance, as they had fueled Woody Allen many years earlier. But most of her fantasies involved bacon, which come to think of it, combined her two forbidden fruits into one.

With the news that IBP has ceased operations, there is much to be sad about. Sad surely, but also confused. The news release cited “insurmountable financial difficulties” as the cause of death, but you always had the feeling there was money around. Most of its shows sold well, with many selling out, extending runs or returning for encores. And, though the dollar amounts were never made public, IBP expressed gratitude for funding from the Houston Arts Alliance, the Houston Endowment, the Brown Foundation, the Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, and many individual donors. Those were not exactly the kinds of Houston names you’d expect to find supporting plays with titles like Fucking A, topics like the 9/11 bombers in We Have Some Planes, or indeed the cultish songs, art and writings of Daniel Johnston in last summer’s premiere of Speeding Motorcycle. For those of us old enough to remember The Who’s Tommy, it was nice just to think somebody still bills anything as a “rock opera.”

If the list of public support was surprisingly high-brow, IBP could also point to press clippings that dressed to impress. Many major cities have avant-garde theater groups of some sort, and happily Houston has a few more that can hopefully pick up the banner. But few are likely to draw favorable attention from The New York Times or, for that matter, Art in America. Those are only two of the admiring reviews garnered by “Speeding Motorcycle.” American Theatre magazine dished out praise to several of IBP’s other productions, thus justifying the feeling around the Axiom on show nights that Houston was a special place on theater’s cutting edge. This wasn’t the Moscow Art Theatre, of course, and no one including Cooper was giving Stanislavsky a run for his rubles. Yet the same city that trotted out grinning tap numbers by Theatre Under The Stars at the Hobby Center was capable of doing some of the wildest, most thought-provoking theater anywhere.

As the years (and, of course, the Tamalalias) rolled past, I came to realize that this company enjoyed not only a loyal audience but a loyal cadre of performers as well. Assuredly, the same faces turned up in show after show, a beloved gang of seeming misfits and quirky character drawn not so much to fame and fortune as the chance to do something truly weird. And we loved them for it. Even more impressive was the slow awareness that many of these same performers kicked in everything from funny lines to entire skits when appropriate, while others wrote songs and/or played in the IBP “orchestra” for the musicals. I never knew how or even if these people were paid, but their enthusiasm and zeal was contagious. Theirs was, frankly, the exact kind of energy live theater always engenders when it is functioning at its best.

Amazingly, the troupe that gathered as IBP was also able to do the one thing you’d think they probably couldn’t – get excited about a show that wasn’t weird, avant garde or smutty. Somehow I missed their version of Frank Loesser’s musical Guys and Dolls, but I was lucky enough to catch (speaking of the Moscow Art Theatre) their impressive rendition of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. While certainly staid compared to IBP’s usual romps, this sad, talky classic in their able hands was a reminder of the most profound theatrical truth of all – that this was avant garde when it just appeared. Just as Puccini was when his first operas were produced, just as Stravinsky was when he first started composing music for ballets. We all take the oldies for granted, IBP seemed to be telling us, but each is probably around today because it shook somebody up when it was new. Yes, dear audience, just the way Infernal Bridegroom Productions shook us up until the day it ceased to exist.

– John DeMers

RIP IBP
1993 - 2007