Interview: JASON NODLER about CATASTROPHIC THEATRE 2024-2025's SEASON!

Jason Nodler is one of the CATASTROPHIC THEATRE's founders, a director, and one of their artistic guides. The company was formally launched in this current incarnation in 2007 and rose from the ashes of INFERNAL BRIDEGROOM PRODUCTIONS. They are known for their wickedly delirious presentations of avant-garde and experimental theater. BROADWAY WORLD writer Brett Cullum got a rare chance to sit and talk with Jason about the company’s upcoming season and plans to change his name!  

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Brett Cullum: Let's run through next year. The show you open with SPIRITS TO ENFORCE, and that's gonna be coming to us on September 20th. Tell us a little bit about that one.

Jason Nodler: This is a Mickle Maher play. We have produced his plays more often than anyone but Tamarie Cooper's. I often feel like he's the greatest American playwright you've never heard of. His plays are deceptively complex, and they feel just like really fun rides. They are mashed up of disparate elements that don't seem to make any sense together, and in the end, they all sort of converge, and the whole thing comes true. And you realize there's been something far more than simple entertainment or something like that.

SPIRITS TO ENFORCE is a mashup of telephone fundraisers, THE TEMPEST by Shakespeare, and superheroes. So what's the premise is that there are a series of twelve telephone fundraisers sitting on at a phone bank dialing for dollars, you know. They're calling to raise money for the production of THE TEMPEST and to sell tickets to this show to be performed by the Fathom City enforcers, the local superhero team.

So it's like, first of all, it's it's going very poorly. They're they're not raising any money. They haven't sold any tickets. Rehearsals aren't going well. Some of them don't particularly seem to like each other. And every line is delivered to a telephone.

So, the actors are not speaking to one another. It's 12 actors facing out. They never get up, yet they take you on the wildest ride, and the language creates a cacophonous symphony. One reviewer said, “The play was more to be conducted than directed, and I feel that way very much. 

And that's really fun for me. It's really fun for the actors. It's a it's a real tour de force aspect of the production, if you if you get it right. But it's also incredibly funny.

Mostly, though, I just wanna say that people will like this because it is hilarious.

Brett Cullum: So, second up. Brian Jucha presents LOVE BOMB, which is probably the best title of the season! So I'm assuming it's dance.

Jason Nodler: Well.

Brian makes experimental dance theater that is extremely informed by ensemble work. So they get together, and they create compositions together. It's viewpoints-based. Brian was on the ground floor of a viewpoints theory. His plays are imagination machines; they defy description. 

He was in a company that Anne Bogart led, and after fourteen years with that company, he left, and Brian became an artistic director. 

We're the ones that he makes theater with now which is sort of extraordinary. The work that we do with him is unlike any other work that we do.

Brett Cullum: The one I'm most excited about coming up next season is Candice d’Meza will give us MISS LARAJ’S HOUSE OF DYSTOPIAN FUTURE. Last year was this artist’s first collaboration with you guys. Is that correct?

Jason Nodler: We produced three short films by her during the pandemic called 30 WAYS TO GET FREE. A MAROON’S GUIDE TO TIME AND SPACE was thrilling, wasn't it? 

Candice is the sort of artist that makes a theater like ours go, that makes a theater-like tower move forward. She's a seeker. She is constantly seeking, and her imagination is off the charts. I mean, the world of her mind is… I mean, it's… it's incredible.

Brett Cullum: Anybody that hasn't seen it. It is an absolute collage of spoken word sound, film lighting effects sets, and then she has this Afro-punk sci-fi vibe! It's as if Prince were alive and dialed into the future. It's just so impressive to see!

Jason Nodler: She is going to be a very important voice. In the American theater going forward and outside of it, I mean, she works in so many mediums, as you just referenced; it's exciting to see her coming back.

 She's busy being born all the time. She's never the same artist from one day to the next. 

Brett Cullum: Which is mercurial; I mean, that's amazing. That's what makes a great artist. But you have tons of great artists! Why is that?

Jason Nodler: We believe very deeply in the ensemble. We believe deeply in creating safe and open spaces for people to express themselves in evolving ways, which happens when they feel the trust of the theater they're working with. They don't feel like they're writing to please them or to have a hit or something like that. And in all of our years, we're very proud that we have never programmed a single play because we thought it would do well at the box office! We do the work that we feel is important to our audiences, to our artists, that we feel like we'll get through to them that we feel like will be meaningful to them. And if we do well at the box office based on that, then? How wonderful! You know, then that means that more people saw it, which is great. But if we get through to one person over the course of a production, then we have more than done our job. 

Brett Cullum: So she's definitely a voice that I'm excited about. But another voice I'm excited about seeing is THE FROZEN SECTION, a comedy by Lisa D’Amour. 

Jason Nodler: This is the world premiere production. Lisa is an old friend of the company. Lisa we met when she was performing with her multidisciplinary duo with Katie Pearl. She was just an experimental playwright. 

Brett Cullum: And now she is just a friend that was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. There you go.

Jason Nodler: We don't work with these people because they're famous or because they're important nationally or internationally recognized. We work with them because we love what they do, and we love working with them! We're not only collaborators; we become friends, and we become chosen family! 

Lisa, having received the accolades, came back to us and said, “I've done that thing that people want to do as artists. I wanna get back to doing the thing that really fed my soul, which is working with groups like yours.”

We went back and forth on several places she had been working on. And this one really just really rang a bell with me. It's subtitled “A Comedy on Aisle 9.” It's very much about the existential dilemma of how strange it is to be a human animal living on the planet Earth. We came from nature. We're animals. And now we walk upright, civilized, and get our food from air-conditioned buildings with prepackaged produce that's under plastic. And aisles of frozen cuts of meat, or that sort of thing! I mean, we're just. We're so we're so far afield from from our roots!

These people are very alienated from one another. And they're struggling existentially to understand their place in the world and what seems wrong in their lives, so they can't quite put their fingers on.

They create a chosen family, which is a theme of many of Lisa's works That is a really ongoing theme of our company itself.

Brett Cullum: No kidding. You guys are like this family! And speaking of long-time collaborators and chosen family you wrap up the season as you do every year. We've got “ANOTHER DING-DANG TAMARIE SHOW!” The title does not reveal what the subject material is.

Jason Nodler: The title came from not knowing yet. Tamarie, said, “Well, I could just write something around the phenomenon of the Tamrie Cooper show, and that would work. So just call it “ANOTHER DING-DANG TAMARIE SHOW!”  

Think of it as Catastrophic’s NOISES OFF! It's very much a look, a peak backstage. 

Brett Cullum: Well, it's funny because I think she shares a lot of DNA with Mickle Maher, and that's somebody that you keep returning to as well. 

Tell me a little about how you approach things. 

Jason Nodler: We’ve talked about how we are making theater for people who hate theater. We do attract a certain number of traditional audiences, but mostly, our houses are filled with local punks and musicians and other scenesters, a lot of young, a lot of non-traditional audiences on the opening night of any play. 

We're a New Works theater. We have to make new work that is meaningful to us. And we're an avant-garde theater because we want to change the game and tear down old walls to build something new.

We're still doing that. I mean, we are.

Making art is difficult, and the kind of work that we make is…  perhaps it's a notch more difficult. I don't know. I mean all, all theater making is difficult. I don't want even to say that ours is more so.

Brett Cullum: I will say that your shows feel more honest. A little bit more going on at the core of the artist. There is a space here with your work where we never know where we're gonna come out.

And that speaks to your entire season. I mean with Mickle Maher, Brian Jucha, Candice d’Meza, Lisa Amour, and Tamarie Cooper. We're never really sure where we're going to go.

Jason Nodler: Our plays are willfully and purposefully ambiguous in order that there might be as many entry points as possible for an audience member to go off on their own, to wander away from the play maybe and think about themselves and their lives and their experience of life.

It's about healing. It's about it's about generosity. It's about a community.

Brett Cullum: So basically, you are telling me you really are just a little community theater out here. 

Jason Nodler: (glares) My greatest gift. Perhaps my only one is the ability to surround myself with people who are far more talented than I am. And I feel like. I have succeeded greatly in that, at the very least. The artists that I get to work with are my heroes. I think they are so brave for what they do and so incredibly good at it.

Brett Cullum: So, like a bunch of superheroes putting on plays and selling tickets by phone? I got it!  

Jason Nodler: Don’t you want to know what I am changing my name to? 

Brett Cullum: Sure. 

Jason Nodler: BATMAN JONES! 

Brett Cullum: (silent) 

Jason Nodler: You disapprove? You don’t support me? 

Brett Cullum: It will look wonderful over the title of SPIRITS TO ENFORCE. And it will make a really cute Tamarie song. And it sort of turns me on in a very odd way and, at the same time, makes me want to giggle. It makes me want to collect stamps. Mission accomplished! See you at the MATCH, Jason. 

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