HISTORY
The Missoula Oblongata formed in 2005 in the middle of a harsh Montana winter.
Two of us - Donna Sellinger and Madeline ffitch - holed up in the basement
of an old building downtown, where we found a tandem bicycle, a tattered projection
screen, an incomplete drum kit, and no windows. In this basement we spent
several months writing and rehearsing our first collaborative play, The Wonders
of the World: Recite.
At
the time, Missoula’s punk and DIY community was undergoing a crackdown
by the fire marshal, who had systematically shut down almost every local venue
that wasn’t a bar. This meant there was no affordable and accessible
place for young people to organize concerts, art shows, or events. When people
responded to this by organizing shows in their own houses, the fire marshal
found the houses, shut down the shows, and threatened arrests.
In response to this strange and grave situation, The Missoula Oblongata’s
first production was a performance of Macbeth, which we held in secret in
the basement that we’d been renting out for rehearsing. The space was
only accessible through an unmarked door hidden in an alley. There was no
public advertising for the performance. The performers (local artists and
friends who had never been in a play before) each handed out sealed invitations
to people they knew (not including the fire marshal, with whom we were all
now well acquainted). The invitations instructed them to meet at The Oxford
(a local dive) on April 6th at 8pm wearing a red carnation. Sure enough, on
that day, at 8pm, an usher dressed like a skeleton arrived and escorted the
entire carnation-wearing horde from The Oxford to the alley and the unmarked
door, and then down into the basement to watch the play.
Though the Missoula fire marshal no longer haunts us, we have maintained this
tradition of secrecy. All of our Shakespeare productions to date (Macbeth,
Richard III, The Tempest, and King Lear) have been performed in a secret location.
Each time, we have met the audience in an unusual place – a subway stop,
a traffic island – to escort them to a secret venue. For us, this is
both a way of marking a meaningful (and in many ways, defining) moment in
our history, and of demonstrating that even with Shakespeare, the delight
of surprise is wholly possible.
A month or so after Macbeth, we finally debuted the play we had been working
on in the basement all spring. By this time, we had two new collaborators
on the project. We had imported Madeline’s old friend Leo Gebhardt (of
the bands Tall Birds and The Catheters) from Seattle to write and perform
music for the play. At the last minute, we stuck a pipe in his mouth and made
him play a character as well, but there were no hard feelings about that.
It was also at this time that Sarah Lowry (an old friend of Donna’s)
came to town to direct the piece in its final week of rehearsal. While Leo
has been unable to join the company full-time, due to having his own life/wife
in Seattle, we all decided that Sarah was an absolute necessity to whatever
The Missoula Oblongata would become, and that’s how the long-term, three-member
company was born.
The first stop was the Montreal Fringe Festival, where The Wonders of the
World: Recite was officially named one of the top ten productions at the festival.
From there, the play went on to earn standing ovations and critical acclaim
around North America—ending the tour at The Edmonton Fringe Festival
(the second-largest live arts festival in the world) where the play earned
four-and-a-half star reviews, and a place among See Magazine’s “Best
of the Fringe”. Due to popular and surprising demand, the play toured
nationally for a second time in January of 2007. This was when we really started
seeing demand for our work and a growing interest in DIY theatre on a national
level. After the second tour, with the set covered in molding cake and an
entire graveyard of slaughtered umbrellas, we laid The Wonders of the World:
Recite to rest and (for a variety of reasons that had absolutely nothing to
do with the theatre company) moved across the country to Massachusetts.
In Massachusetts, struggling to build an artistic life for ourselves while
making sense of a new town and making ends meet, we conceived of a fantastic
get-rich-quick scheme which we called Dinner Theatre. We wrote a play called
The Ghost Wedding of Arle Redfern and performed it in people’s homes
for audiences that they invited themselves. We did not in fact get rich quick,
but we did realize that transforming people’s homes into temporary theaters
was fun and rewarding, and that it was something we wanted to do more. From
this sprang The Moon, The Raccoon, The Hot Air Balloon, an hour-length play
which we still perform in smaller venues—like dining rooms—but
without the dinner, and without the goal of getting rich quick.
As with any new place, life for the first year in Massachusetts was difficult.
We found it difficult to meet new people and make friends, since there was
only dancing one night a week. To pass the time, we started a pizza delivery
service called My Pizza, My Idea!. This idea was in fact not our idea, but
was conceived by Connor Kizer, who gave us license to be the first to enact
it. The premise of My Pizza, My Idea! was that The Missoula Oblongata would
show up with a table at a public event (say, a rock and roll concert). At
this table, people could sign up for a free two-week trial of the My Pizza,
My Idea! service. They gave us their name and address, nothing else. At some
point during the next two weeks, they were delivered a pizza. They did not
have any control over when the pizza would arrive or what kind of pizza it
would be. Sometimes the pizzas even showed up while the client was at work
or on a date. If the client protested about the timing of the delivery or
the flavor of the pizza, we intoned the company motto, “My Pizza, My
Idea!” Needless to say, the service was a hit.
After that, the rhythm of the company solidified somewhat. We began to plan
our seasons and projects further and further in advance, and through this
process realized that we had become a full-time company. We made new plays,
moved to other states, and stopped incorporating cooking into so much of our
theatre. As of right now (the moment that this history is being written and
put up on this website) the company has completed national tours of four
full-length productions, two separate Dinner Theatre productions, four radical
productions of Shakespeare, two Colloquial Disforums, a play in a car, a public
installation for breaking up as performance art, and innumerable workshops
around the country.
