Okay, so it’s a little lo-fi …

… But I can’t wait to see the new staging of Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy’s musical theater piece, Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, opening next week at the Vineyard. Katchor is an awesome illustrator and comic book artist (The Jew of New York; The Beauty Supply District; Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer). Mulcahy is a musician who is perhaps best known as the leader of the house band for the great mid-90’s Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete and Pete.

I saw their other collaboration, The Rosenbach Company, at Joe’s Pub a few years ago and loved it—I’m pretty sure this show follows a similar set-up. Rosenbach’s concert-like staging was very simple: A screen displayed a shifting mix of Katchor’s drawings and animations, while a small group of singers and actors, seated in front of the screen, performed the dialogue and score.

Katchor and Mulcahy's shows offer plenty of interesting connections to this portfolio topic. Rosenbach was about a pair of (real-life) brothers who ran a famous rare book company in Philadelphia. Slug Bearers, according to the press release, “follows the efforts of a New York philanthropist to bring the modern poetry of instructional pamphlets to a group of exploited island workers.” So in both cases, these plays are about arcane forms of reading, and about romanticized notions of the book as object—the latter only heightened by the shows' allusions to comic books, which are increasingly being seen as literary art objects (in their "graphic novel" form) as opposed to disposable entertainments.

Katchor and Mulcahy's shows an oddly elegant mix of cool technology and warm, hand-made tactility. The way Katchor and Mulcahy interweave image, text, sound, and space calls to mind plenty of contemporary electronic literature projects—even as Katchor himself says he's drawing on a 17th-century Indian practice known as "picture reciting," in which a storyteller hangs a painted banner in a public area, tells his tale, and then sells prints of the image afterward. A good reminder that most "new" ideas are, in fact, old ones.