Pedroza as Dreamer Cat. Photo courtesy of Jaclyn Chessen.

6:01pm | So there’s this website, right, icanhascheezburger.com, where you upload supposedly cute and/or funny pictures of cats jumping or yawning or in some sort of contemplation (it hardly seems to matter), and then other people suggest supposedly funny and/or cute captions, usually in this Internet feline English patois called lolspeak. “Clik teh foto 2 add a funneh capshun!” we’re instructed. “make ur own lolz.”

Some of us might completely dismiss such a thing. But Ellen Warkentine and Andrew Pedroza have found it to be both inspiration and opportunity, and over the last year-and-a-half they’ve been hard at work creating LOLPERA, a brilliantly funny/cute musical made by stitching selected LOLcat photos into plot, the libretto quilted from the captions. The leitmotifs created from these captions bring us character, mood, LOLcats’-eye-view philosophical themes, all set to leitmotifs that dance solo, intertwine, change partners, all while moving the story forward.

At least that’s what I saw at the Garage Theatre on Nov. 6, where the fantastic ensemble workshopped what they have of Act I. 

And what they have may be the next big thing. If so, it’s deserved.

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The Plot

Oh hai. Ceiling Cat, who sees all (“Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate”), created the skies, the shapeless Earth, etc. “‘I can has lite?’ An lite wuz.”

Fast-forward to the present, where LOLcat Co. is some sort of Internet concern spreading cats (memes — see below) everywhere. “Im in ur computer eatin ur bytes.”¹ Astro Cat, the face of LOLcat Co., is blasting off into space in search of “cheeseburger…out dere…sumwheres,” leaving behind his mistress, Precious Cat.

Meanwhile, LOLcat City has some new arrivals:

• The homeless LOLrus arrives with his sole companion, his “bukkit” (a sobriquet for his baby), which is stolen from him.
• Happy Cat comes with a desire to bring the citizens to Ceiling Cat in spirit. She quickly founds a “ceeling cat study yooth groop,” during which we are filled in on more of the LOLcats creation myth: “in teh Beginning, ceilin cat n basement cat wur BFF,” but “Ceiling Cat Banisht Basement Cat To Teh Bowels of Hell.” Thus was evil born, and now “Basement Cat iz in ur computer nommin all ur gigabytes.” In her personal life, Happy Cat meets Precious Cat — who, after finally giving up on Astro Cat, has fallen into stripping — and the two move in together.
• Dreamer Cat comes with “goals / I haz dem,” “A dreem / I has one,” and “Dance Skillz / I haz dem.” Shortly he meets Tango Cat (“Iz practising mah tango”), and sparks fly. And while he does not find immediate success in LOLcat City, eventually he is contacted by Anonimus Cat and told he has a job interview, which turns out to be with LOLcat Co. “Internet. Serious Business,” Dreamer Cat is told. Winning employment with his “three years Excel and Powerpoint…and excellent cuddle skillz,” he learns that “Teh Internets are a series of tubes transmittin LOLcats.”

But something nefarious is afoot. Basement Cat is involved with LOLcat Co. As Act I comes to a close, “Basement Cat summons his legions…and so it begins….” And while Astro Cat returns from space with Cheezburger, we see that Ceiling Cat has always been the possessor of what we presume is true Cheezburger.²

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The Process

Sometimes inspiration comes in the form of combining preexisting elements in untried ways. Find a novel combo but fail to do more with it, and what you have is a clever gimmick. That could have been the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern getting their own play, wherein the action of Hamlet runs on- and offstage, swallowing up R&G when it comes and spitting them out when it goes. A gimmick, and a clever one. But Tom Stoppard’s the bloke who got this afflatus, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is as brilliant, funny, poignant, and nuanced a script as humans can produce.

Warkentine says LOLPERA started out as a “composition experiment.” She and some friends were so taken with the ludicrousness of the whole LOLcat enterprise that when they came across a picture of a cat on a keyboard against a star-field background with the caption “Astro Cat will Play for you the Symphony of Space,” they decided to create song around it. 

“But why stop there?” Warkentine recalls of their reaction. “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be absurd to…’ — and it just grew.”

Pedroza saw the potential for something bigger than mere experiment and exhorted them to develop it into a full-blown production. “The more seriously we took it,” Warkentine relates, “the more meaning we saw we could find there.”

The pair says that during a summer 2009 trip to Las Vegas they talked seriously about making it happen, and from then on every meeting between them saw a major step forward in the journey.

Before long they approached the Garage Theatre’s Jessica Variz about directing the show, and she bit. “That’s kind of when we really got our act together,” Pedroza says.

That LOLPERA is being directed by Variz, the same person who helmed the Garage’s meticulously rollicking Cannibal! The Musical (based on an early Trey Parker/Matt Stone film project — and easily outdoing it), absolutely shows. Even here at the workshop stage you can espy that same signature of detail, all actors onstage projecting as if the spotlight is on them even during moments when their role is peripheral.

That same minute detailing is evident in the music itself. Just as Parker and Stone’s South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is a legitimate musical top to bottom, LOLPERA is a true opera, sans spoken dialog. 

Moreover, the songs themselves, even when musically sophisticated, are perfect gist for the memetic mill, setting an already-successful meme like “Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate” to catchy, waltzy music, exploiting the human brain’s special relationship to music so that you walk out of the theatre singing. A group of actor-friends not in the cast broke into the raucous “Good solz go to Ceiling Cat / Bad solz go to basement“³ at a party the day after seeing the show. (“Wait, I’ll do the soprano!” someone volunteered.)

While as of Nov. 6 several details of Act I were yet to be worked out, some aspects of the production that might be seen as rough actually contribute to the spell it weaves. For example, several scenes are set up or joined together by title cards rather than onstage action; but allowing the audience to fill in inessential connective tissue might be more effective than staging action simply to connect up two prime set pieces. A good instance of this came after an opening musical sequence introducing the LOLcat creation myth, the LOLcat/meme theme, and a bit about LOLcat City. We then got the following title card: “ASTROCAT, THE FACE OF LOLCAT CO., ARRIVES FOR HIS BLAST-OFF CELEBRATION. HE IS FOLLOWED BY PRECIOUS CAT, HIS LONG-SUFFERING MISTRESS.” That alone is funny, and it absolutely gives us all the background we need to contextualize the Major Tom-like ceremony that follows as Astro Cat blasts off in search of Cheezburger.

Similarly, at the workshop the cast of LOLPERA was barely cat-costumed, instead sporting minimal suggestions of the kitties they represent. This is far more effective than anything elaborate would be;⁴ it made the proceedings all the funnier. Anything in the full production that would obscure the actors’ faces would be a loss. As it stands now, the LOLcats depicted in the onscreen slides give us a visual that the actors are charged with fleshing out by using only their bodies and faces. The choice to represent/embody the onscreen cats, rather than copy them with costumes, makes for hilarity. 

It is here that the casting shows itself to be inspired. Examples: Pedroza as Dreamer Cat and Elizabeth Messick Fernandez as Tango Cat dance just as their photographic avatars suggest that they should; Sayaka Miyatani’s Japanese accent is a perfect fit for Precious Cat’s signature line, “Is it can be hugs tiem now plees?”; the ensemble as the Ceiling Cat youth study group disports just the right combination of jocularity and embarrassment as they learn that “Ceiling Cat is watching you masturbate.”

As for staging, Pedroza says he wants to keep the production intimate, and to use that intimacy to help the show be “overwhelming, overstimulating — because that’s kind of the point: technology is, like, brainwashing us. That’s one of our themes.”

That overstimulation is very likely to come from the set, for which Dicapria Del Caprio is developing some rather wild conceptualizations to bring LOLcat City to life. Pedroza estimates it will cost about $3,000 to realize Del Caprio’s ideas, so the team will be looking for funding help to pull it off.

 Del Caprio’s conceptualization of the set design.

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 The Philosophy

“LOLCATS and the Meming of Life” reads a sort of subtitle inside the LOLPERA workshop program. The wordplay is clevercute, but the words form a ruminative thesis. What is the significance/signification of the phenomena at play in this show, on this planet? How do we inhabit them? Can they support life?

“It’s funny that our excuse for culture is using this powerful tool [viz., the Internet] to communicate and share and build on each other’s ideas…to post cat pictures,” Warkentine marvels. “Our one, big collective mind online is creating and sharing and communicating. … But, like, these memes are so silly.” 

With LOLPERA, then, Warkentine and Pedroza are “taking our excuse for culture and putting it in a real space, and putting it in the context of ‘high art,’ repackaging the meme. … Any medium we have — television, Internet — you think about how it’s being used in relation to how it could be used.”

Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to refer to a chunk of information that can (through whatever media) be transmitted from one mind to another.⁵ The term meme itself is a meme that’s having a good run of success. Susan Blackmore dubbed us “meme machines” in her book of the same name; we are creators and carriers. We are responsible for the spread.

Viruses cannot self-replicate; they need to take over a host cell and use it for replication. Similarly, memes enter the corpus by hitching a ride inside some host that is able to pass the meme along. 

But very unlike the case with viruses, the spreading of memes can benefit a body, anybody, like an antibody, combining with substance your system recognizes as alien (even if you don’t) as a means of counteraction, of rendering the insidious harmless, of sparing you from the viral intruders in your lifeblood. Memes can be trained to do that trick.

Mimesis (Greek), from mimeisthai, imitation. But if Plato is to be believed, the mimetic is always the representation, the copy, inexact, imperfect, different than the original in every iteration. So too with memes, which reproduce imperfectly. They lack, for example, stasis, permanence; they are evolving all the time. This inherent flux means memes always must change/be changed, and so always can be (made) better. LOLPERA is a case in point. Teh LOLcats meme gets in da inside, and iz chngd!!! 

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The Money

The logistics of how things will develop with LOLPERA inevitably will involve some legal terra incognita. That I Can Has Cheezburger is trademarked or that the Cheezburger Network has specific proprietors is not in question. The unknown lies in who has just which rights to its content and controls how that content may be used.

This is partially addressed in Cheezburger Network’s FAQ regarding the question of why images/captions posted on the site receive an icanhazcheezburger watermark: “When you submit and save your LOL[cat picture/caption,] you are granting Cheezburger Network non-exclusive rights to your image and caption.”

‘Non-exclusivity’ means they don’t own it, nor do they get to say it can’t be used elsewhere. In copyright law, ownership for all artistic creations (yes, we’ll call this art for the moment) generally goes automatically to the artwork’s creator. I did not have to get a copyright notice from the Library of Congress for my just-completed novel⁶: the rights to it were mine upon creation. The copyright notice is just a formal memorialization of my ownership.

That’s not to say Warkentine/Pedroza & co. can use whatever they want from the Cheezburger Network willy-nilly. I really don’t know what the legal status is, and I’m not sure anybody does completely on this frontier area of an ever-evolving legal landscape.

Warkentine and Pedroza contacted the Cheezburger peeps prior to the workshop, and the latter had no problem with the workshop going forward. And since the Garage Theatre is a nonprofit organization, revenue generated from the premiere run is not a real issue. But what happens if/when the production moves on to larger venues? I’m guessing we’re gonna find out.

When you read the recent news that Cheezburger Network just raised $30 million in venture capital, you know that all this silliness is, indeed, serious business. An irony about serious business is that sometimes the more money people have, the greedier they get.

I don’t know anything about the Cheezburger Network folks — let alone the individuals who post LOLcat content — so I’m certainly not suggesting they fall into that ironic category. What I hope is that they’ll look at what Warkentine/Pedroza & co. (people currently living in a very different financial reality) are trying to do and realize that LOLPERA means Cheezburger Network will enjoy increased interest in and expanded meaning/meming of their websites for doing absolutely nothing extra (although the more they promote LOLPERA, the more positively it will feed back on them), and so they don’t in any way obstruct what these Long Beachers are trying to do. That would be a win-win situation. A big win. Huge.

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It’s easy to imagine a world where an opera based on LOLcats would be a truly sorry signifier, a genetic-defect-ridden breeding of culture elements, aesthetically equivalent to texting while driving. But as the world actually turns, dis cats iz teh pick ov da litter, an artful, heartful soap-operatic response to (as we read in the program) “you wast[ing] time on LOLCATS online, … you in your mindlessness and when you seek truth in places where no truth can be found.” LOLPERA is a “witness[ing] these cats’ attempt to move beyond these mindless places” — literally, to transcend the medium of their existence — “to find truth and meaning.”