"Company, Man" by Sarah Bridgins
I didn’t realize the new revival of Company featured a gender-swapped lead character until my friend told me as we were sitting down in the theater. The fact that the poster features a giant picture of Katrina Lenk sitting dead center instead of a man should have been my first clue, but I had never seen the show before and hadn’t given it much thought. All I knew was that it was about a bachelor whose couple friends were all pestering him about when he was going to get married. Transforming this character into a single woman didn’t immediately strike me as a more progressive choice, but what did I know? The whole reason I wanted to see Company was that I was moved by the outpouring of grief following Sondheim’s death and wanted to become more familiar with his work. Although I generally enjoyed the show, by the time the curtain fell I had a million questions about what I had just seen. Why did Joanne want Bobbie to sleep with her husband? Why would Bobbie propose to her friend Jamie knowing he was gay? And what was going on with the ending? Did Bobbie ever want to get married or not? I went home and found a recording of the 2011 Lincoln Center production starring Neil Patrick Harris on YouTube to see if the traditionally cast version made any more sense. Watching it, I felt validated in my initial skepticism of the new production. Far from making the material feel fresh, director Marianne Elliott’s casting changes only serve to highlight the difficulty of updating a more than fifty-year-old show to fit modern sensibilities, creating a version that is less interesting and more confusing than the original.
Company is already a confusing show. Part of this has to do with its structure. The book was written by George Furth and is an adaptation of a series of one-act plays he wrote in the 1960s. Stephen Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics, and the show was first performed in 1970. There’s no central plot to speak of. In its place is a central question: Should Bobby, the main character, a New York bachelor who just turned 35, get married? His five sets of married friends seem to think so, but he’s not so sure. Over the course of approximately 2.5 hours we watch as he spends time with each couple in a disconnected series of scenes that both reinforce his hesitancy to settle down and make him wonder if it wouldn’t be nice to find someone to spend his life with. Which leads to the other reason Company is confusing, the question behind the show’s central question: What is Bobby’s deal, really, and what about observing his friends’ mostly dysfunctional relationships ultimately makes him conclude that he’s tired of being alone? The show never gives much explanation for why he’s been so committed to being single up to this point, beyond that he wanted to spend some time having fun. Which, fair enough. What makes the scenes with Bobby’s married friends so interesting though, and what made Company feel so revolutionary when it debuted, is the stark, often unpleasant, realism of their relationships as viewed through Bobby’s eyes. He has the perspective that only a true outsider can, as someone who hasn’t spent his life taking for granted that the way his friends have chosen to spend their lives is in fact a choice, and not just a natural consequence of entering into adulthood.
The absence of any narrative explanation for Bobby’s cynicism (e.g. a traumatic breakup, a family history of divorce), has led many over the years to speculate that Bobby is in fact gay; a theory that Sondheim vehemently and repeatedly shut down during his life, denying all requests to stage a production that portrayed the character as anything other than straight. Even if Bobby is straight as an arrow, the show itself presents a perspective on the institution of marriage that is undeniably queer. Furst and Sondheim were both gay men, and both living in the closet when they wrote Company. It premiered at a time, 1970, when societal norms around everything from drug use to monogamy were changing. Even though same-sex marriage wouldn’t be legalized for another 45 years, it makes sense that the possibility of someday being able to participate in what up until then had been an exclusively heterosexual institution would start to seem real in a way it never had before, leading to the very questions posed in Company. Bobby’s conclusion at the end of the show, that marriage is worth it despite seeing how flawed his friends’ relationships are, is easier to understand when you consider that it was written by a person to whom this choice was not available at the time.
Past productions have found subtle ways to incorporate these questions around Bobby’s sexuality into the show without explicitly changing the way the character is written, through the casting of the actors that play him. In the 2006 Broadway revival directed by John Doyle, Bobby was played in a Tony award winning performance by Raúl Esparza. The show’s opening was preceded by the publication of a New York Times article about Esparza just three days in advance titled, “Breaking Character for the First Time.” In it the actor came out as bisexual, revealing that he and his wife had separated and that he was dating a man. Esparza spoke about relating to Bobby and the dilemmas he faces saying, “I think the real thing that Bobby is going through is that he’s trying to grow up, and that means accepting things you can’t change, and it also means that in spite of all the messiness and failure you make a choice to love someone and live your life in the way that’s right for you.”
In 2011 the New York Philharmonic staged a four-show run of Company at Lincoln Center directed by Lonny Price in which Bobby was played by Neil Patrick Harris. At the time, Harris was known for being both one of Hollywood’s most famous openly gay actors and for starring in the popular sitcom How I Met Your Mother as the straight, womanizing, chronically single bachelor Barney. The production played with these parallels, most notably in a scene that was cut from the original book then reinstated when Sondheim and Furth revised Company in the mid-90s. In the scene, Bobby is standing on a balcony with his friend Peter who asks, “Bob, have you ever had a homosexual experience?” The camera moves to Harris and lingers on his face as he raises one eyebrow and stares out into the audience which loudly laughs and applauds. Bobby eventually answers, “Well yes, I have.” But he scoffs when Peter asks if he’s gay. If this scene was meant to put the question of Bobby’s sexuality to rest it does the opposite, an effect that is heightened by the audience’s presumed knowledge of Harris’ own sexual orientation.
All of this backstory and subtext is complicated, and I would argue that to fully appreciate Company requires at least a little knowledge of the men who created it and the time period in which it was written. This might seem like an unfairly heavy lift for modern audiences, but it’s also what makes the show so interesting and rewarding, and why it’s one of Sondheim’s most beloved works. Being aware of all of this and deciding it would be easier if the lead character were a heterosexual woman, is like being presented with a beautifully prepared three-course meal and deciding that rather than savoring each dish, it would be more efficient to simply put all of the food in a blender and chug. In the new production currently on Broadway, director Marianne Elliott takes all of Bobby’s complications and nuances and replaces them with a clock; a giant loudly ticking clock hanging above the now female Bobbie’s bed meant to represent, you guessed it, the character’s biological clock.
In an interview posted to the new production of Company’s YouTube channel Elliott says, “I had a real instinct that Bobby would make sense as a woman and that the choices and the concerns facing that character are concerns of many 35-year-old women now…I actually think Bobby being a woman helps you care about the character more. Traditionally Bobby is a quite hidden, mysterious person, you never quite know who they are. But if seen through a female lens then her worry, her dilemma, her anxiety is a given. You just get it.”
As someone who had never seen Company before, I take issue with Elliott’s assertion that audiences will easily “get” Bobbie’s dilemma in a way that they were unable to “get” Bobby’s. We’re supposed to assume that the reason Bobbie’s 35th birthday kicks off a sudden re-examination of the value, or lack thereof, of marriage is that her biological clock is ticking. She has a limited amount of time to solve this equation before her eggs dry up and it’s too late. But what if the audience doesn’t make this assumption? As a 37-year-old unmarried woman living in New York who decided years ago not to have children, I didn’t. And without resting on outdated stereotypes about women and aging, there’s almost no way to come to this conclusion from what’s presented on stage. No mention is ever made of Bobbie’s ticking biological clock because it’s not what the show as originally written and performed is about. Company almost completely avoids the subject of children. They’re referenced in passing, but Bobby never mentions fatherhood or being a parent. Which means Bobbie doesn’t either, even though we’re meant to believe this is the whole reason why she’s suddenly trying to figure out if she wants to settle down.
The only scene to make direct reference to motherhood and Bobbie’s apparent anxiety about it is a dialogue-free fantasy sequence in Act II that was added by Elliott despite Sondheim telling her he did not think it should be included. It takes place when Bobbie is hooking up with a flight attendant named Andy who she has been casually dating. Several actors playing multiple Bobbies and Andys move through the rooms in her apartment, some of them carrying babies, while the clock above her bed loudly ticks. The scene suffers from both a lack of subtlety and narrative incoherence since Andy’s defining characteristic up until this point is that he is an idiot whose stupidity is played for laughs. It’s impossible to imagine why the sophisticated Bobbie would even for a minute think about having a child with him.
Which brings us to the other problem with Elliott’s gender-swapped production. For what is supposed to be a bold and modern update, Elliott’s ideas about Bobbie’s sexuality are conspicuously rigid. Turning Bobby the man into Bobbie the woman means also changing the genders of several supporting characters. In the most obvious example, Bobby’s girlfriends are now Bobbie’s boyfriends. The decision not to have Bobbie date at least one woman is a missed opportunity to make the show feel both more current and more in keeping with the queer subtext of the original production. It’s impossible to know how much of this can be attributed to Elliott’s lack of imagination and how much can be attributed to Sondheim’s own stubborn refusal to allow the male Bobby to be portrayed as gay. He collaborated with Elliott on this update and it’s entirely possible that he shut down any questions about the female Bobbie’s sexuality. Either way the result is a modern production that feels more stagnant and muddled than one from five decades ago.
Elliott’s attempt to make the show feel more relevant to current audiences by changing the sexuality or gender of some of the supporting characters while keeping Bobbie’s heterosexuality intact leads to some baffling scenes. In a change that Elliott has said she hopes “. . . makes the production feel very, very now,” two of Bobbie’s friends have been turned into a gay couple with the female character Amy being replaced by the male Jamie. The scene initially works fine with Jamie expressing wedding day jitters about marrying his fiancé Paul, but falls apart when Bobbie proposes to Jamie after he tells Paul he can’t go through with the wedding. Straight Bobbie asking her gay friend to marry her on what was supposed to be his wedding day comes off as an awkward, insensitive joke as opposed to the sad, desperate, and at least half-serious gesture of Bobby proposing to Amy in the original. In a bizarre contrast, Elliott takes another scene in which it really would make more sense to portray a character as queer and bends over backwards to ensure this is not the case. Instead of having a drunk Joanne hit on the female Bobbie as she does the male Bobby in the original production, Elliott re-writes the dialogue so that Joanne asks Bobbie to sleep with her husband.
Even when Elliott’s updates don’t render scenes completely nonsensical, they manage to drain them of their original intention in a way that makes it difficult to parse what their significance is supposed to be. Company doesn’t have a tightly-structured plot. Instead its themes are derived from observing the nuanced interactions between characters and determining what these say about romantic relationships and marriage as a whole. Its critiques of marriage are very specifically tied to the gender dynamics in traditional heterosexual relationships that were prevalent at the time the show was written. Most of the women in Bobby’s couple friends are housewives who fetch snacks when he comes over and whose husbands remind them that it’s “my money” that pays for their trendy exercise classes. In an apparent effort to make these dynamics feel less regressive, Elliott has swapped the genders of one couple, Jenny and David, so that David now has Jenny’s lines and Jenny has David’s.
In the original scene, Bobby smokes weed with the couple at their apartment. Prim and proper Jenny isn’t used to getting high and the three of them laugh when she starts cursing, something she typically never does. The mood takes a turn, however, when Jenny suggests that Bobby roll them another joint. David tells her no, that they don’t need any more and that she should go get them some food. After Jenny slinks away to the kitchen David explains to Bobby that his wife didn’t really like getting high. She was just pretending to for David’s sake. Ever the outsider, Bobby seems perplexed by what he’s being told, having taken for granted that Jenny’s stated desires were in fact an expression of what she wanted. But David tells Bobby, “I know her, she’s what she said. Square. Dumb.”
So much of how this interaction plays out is dependent on both the audience and Bobby as the audience’s proxy recognizing the dynamic in it as a clear depiction of a certain brand of old-fashioned misogyny in which the husband thinks of his pretty, timid, wife as nothing more than an extension of himself who he can quickly snap back into line if she drifts too far outside of his rigid understanding of how she is supposed to behave. The speed with which David shuts down Jenny’s request to Bobby without ever raising his voice is chilling. When he orders her to the kitchen saying, harshly, simply, "food" it’s like he's issuing a command to a pet. When you switch the genders of both the couple and the person observing them, it becomes something else entirely with a meaning for the characters that’s impossible to decipher since the play was never written to account for this new dynamic. What is Bobbie thinking as she’s watching all of this play out? That Jenny is being controlling? That it’s refreshing that the woman in the relationship is so clearly the one calling the shots? Does she find the exchange emasculating for David? It’s impossible to know. When Jenny scolds David it feels mildly condescending. When David scolds Jenny it’s menacing. The scene is transformed from a chilling and incisive glimpse into a couple’s gendered power differential into something vaguely amusing with no clear point of view. Removing the misogyny also removes the implied criticism of this misogyny, leaving the audience with a scene that says nothing at all.
In Elliott’s YouTube interview she says, “What is vital for me when I direct any show is that it needs to speak to the now. And Company was written in 1969. It’s about a 35-year-old man with a great job, a great apartment, lovely friends and he’s not married at 35, but nobody really cares about that in 2022.” I would argue that at its heart Company isn’t about any of those things, not really, and not least of all because we never even find out what Bobby’s job is so there’s no way to know if it’s “great” or not. Company is an incisive critique of what was, at the time, the strictly heterosexual institution of marriage as seen through the eyes of a possibly gay outsider who feels torn between longing for the level of intimacy this type of long-term commitment brings with it, and being horrified upon observing the dysfunction of his straight couple friends’ actual married relationships. Reducing it to a show about a single guy with “great friends” and a “great apartment” betrays the shallowness of Elliott’s interpretation.
Elliott’s critique is right in one sense. In a society where anyone can choose to marry or not, the decision to remain single isn’t as momentous or suspicious as it once was. Which is why, rather than serving as evidence that Sondheim and Furst’s 50-year-old musical was in need of a modern makeover, Elliott’s muddled production suggests that maybe Company can’t be updated. Maybe it’s a period piece, a product of its time. And maybe that’s okay. Not every work can be airlifted decades into the future and still make sense. There’s value in something depicting the past. It’s a testament to how well-written the show is and how specific its observations are that it can’t just be warped and bent to fit any era. If Elliott wanted to direct a show about a 35-year-old woman in 2022 struggling to navigate the competing cultural pressures being placed on her, she could have written one or teamed up with a playwright who already had. Trying to graft this narrative onto an existing show that already has its own complicated and unrelated story to tell is like taking apart a beautiful piece of origami, changing half the folds, and expecting it to retain a version of its original shape. Most likely you’re just going to end up with something formless and unrecognizable, unworthy of being displayed.
Sarah Bridgins' poetry collection Death and Exes is forthcoming from Eyewear Books. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, BuzzFeed, and Bustle among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn where she is the co-host of the Ditmas Lit reading series.
