A Feline Farewell: “MEOW!” Excavates Americana at Exponential Fest

What started as a farewell to a beloved cat has become a farewell to a fading starlet, New York in the 80s, and America as we know it. And the aforementioned cat. Experimental noir cabaret MEOW! runs this month in New York. As part of the Exponential Fest, the show joins a number of other indie and DIY performances going up this month in the city.

Occurring in January, the Exponential Festival showcases experimental work by emerging artists in New York City. Exponential Festival offerings this year include a wide variety of titles in various venues. But all of the shows are risky and eclectic, and MEOW! is no exception.

The idea for MEOW! came about when Meaghan Robichaud’s cat passed away in 2022. They called up collaborator Matthew Antoci and said, “My cat just died, we should make a show about that.” And they got to work on a play about grief. However, in reading over what they had written, they felt like it wasn’t relevant anymore. And then they watched the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. They found that it had “grief, lots of cats, and an overwhelming sense of loss.” And inspiration for the show. Robichaud stresses that MEOW! is now less directly about grief, but it’s still there.

The two previously worked together last year on Babies on the Street, another pastiche of a filmed event. Robichaud performed in the show while Antoci created it with Hillary Gao. Robichaud and Antoci consider themselves provocateurs as Antoci notes they “share a love of strange, eerie, queer, confrontational work.”

And yet they stress that while they often foster an almost antagonistic relationship with the audience in their work, they’re not about pissing the audience off. “Really seeing how far I can go while keeping an audience on my side is something I love to do,” Robichaud explains.

Exponential Festival Founder Theresa Buchheister agrees with how the show toes a fine line. MEOW! “is on the edge of so many edges that it could fall right off at any moment,” they told me. “It is not a safe play nor a thing that looks like a thing that I have seen before. It is not trying to be for everyone which allows it to really expand into a full ass piece of art.”

And if Robichaud and Antoci have a nuanced relationship with the audience, they also have one with Grey Gardens itself. The show isn’t an adaptation by any means but a “rehashing” as they like to call it. It’s based more on the time after the documentary, when Little Edie did in fact leave her mother and move to New York in the 80s. So MEOW! is based more on imagining what this little documented period was like. Still, Antoci mentions it retains “that ennui that the film provides, that melancholic wistfulness, that impending dread.”

The show has a number of folks involved in addition to Robichaud and Antoci. MEOW! was developed with Gabriella Gonzalez and features guest performances by Gonzalez and Suz Murray Sadler. The show is produced by Small Boat Productions and associate produced by Leigh Honigman. The production stage manager is Rooke Lewis. MEOW! features lighting design by Em Stripling, set design by Forest Entsminger, sound design by Emma Hasselbach, video design by Suz Murray Sadler, costume & prop design by Hannah Bird, graphic design by June Buck, and promotional photography by Isabel Ebeid.

Robichaud and Antoci hesitate to single out any one designer or collaborator. Everything works at the top of their game to bring MEOW! to life. And yet, they do want to mention the double-duty of Murray Sadler as performer and video designer. In Babies on the Street, the performers operated the cameras. Here, Robichaud and Antoci brought in Murray Sadler to operate the cameras live.  Robichaud notes that Murray Sadler joined them through rehearsal, which proved “key to getting us closer to ‘what is our relationship to the camera and the person behind the camera?”

But again, MEOW! has a number of people involved and a number of categories you can put it in, as part pastiche of Grey Gardens, part tribute to a dearly departed cat. It occurs to Robichaud that MEOW! may even feel like a relative to the Coney Island Sideshow, prompting a mock scowl from Antoci. “Matthew is not loving this [comparison],” Robichaud laughs. But the two absolutely agree that MEOW! is an experimental DIY show. And they love that.

MEOW! runs from January 10th to 17th in New York. Performances are at Loading Dock, located at 170 Tillary Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11201. Tickets and more info may be found here as part of the Exponential Festival.