Text me when you're done: In the company of "Company"

Putting this reference on my profile was a signal to a secret maladjusted fan club, an if you know you know for the melancholic homosexual. But there was, too, that hint of truth: in between the lines, there was an indication that I sought someone who also sometimes felt like they were on the outside looking in. 

After its most recent, gender-bent Broadway revival starring Katrina Lenk, Company has emerged from the murky corners of a Sondheim 201 class and entered the realm of more overt canonization, aided in no small part by Patti LuPone’s sloshingly meme-ready performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch.” But that production, with its neon bells and whistles, put a sheen on its material so bright that it obfuscated the show’s most interesting elements. 

The parts of Company that cement it as a classic of (musical) theater are perhaps less obvious, but always there if you look. The way its nonlinearity belies emotional detachment; how Sondheim’s music expresses uncertainty about how to situate oneself in life among friends and loved ones like pieces of a puzzle not quite fitting together; the uncanniness with which married life is rendered. Company still has the power to surprise its audience of comfortable adults whose relationship to marriage, sex, and dating continually changes over the years. The further in time we get from the politics of the show’s original context, the more its existential night terror should resonate. 

It’s the proshot of the John Doyle production of Company from 2006 with Raúl Esparza that I return to most often—the slick set, with the actors dressed in black and navy balancing their instruments on what look like chic cubes of ice, and the nearly deadpan line delivery belying Sondheim’s music and George Furth’s book becomes a kind of modernist existential horror show. Its sardonic humor is rendered even colder here, and the cast is pale enough to suggest that these Upper East Side denizens may as well be the walking dead. 

When it was originally produced on Broadway in 1970, the subtitle “A Musical Comedy” affixed to the big orange letters, it was the stealth way to get middle-class theater audiences to examine their lives. Songs like “Sorry/Grateful” and “The Little Things You Do Together” picked at the scab that was straight marriage to expose the freedoms, covered over and confined, that some nevertheless still yearned for. 

The proshot is out of print on DVD and Blu-ray, but intermittently shows up on YouTube in its entirety. I have some HD rip downloaded to my laptop. When I use Company as a point of connection or some kind of courtship endeavor, the slight anxiety of expectation regarding how my companion will receive the work gets articulated through my jangly kid-like body, as I run around grabbing dongles and HDMI cords in order to connect my computer to the big TV in the apartment I share with my roommate. I’m especially proud of the soundbar, which, when amplifying the spare instrumentations, really brings out the tactility in Bobby’s wishy-washiness when he sings “Someone is Waiting”: “Did I know her? Have I waited too long? / Maybe so, but maybe so has she.”

Will the person I’m sharing the show with feel lost in the music, the way the show seems to reach with no certainty of what or who it will grab? Maybe showing them Company in the first place is a kind of performance, to signal how hip and disaffected I want to seem. 

While many a queer audience member is ready to pipe up that Bobby’s existential crisis stems from the fact that He! Is! Gay! Actually!, Company’s queerness has less to do with the literal sexual identity of its main character and much more to do with the fact that Sondheim, Furth, and director Hal Prince abstracted straightness—as habit, performance, and aesthetic—before it was cool. Through vignettes held together by Sondheim’s roving, searching, and intricate music, Company feels like someone looking for their whole self while their friends point out the pieces that should be shoehorned into a frame not fit for them.

When Company is not preoccupied with sex and romance in the post-sexual revolution age, it is keyed into the push and pull of what Bobby wants, what his friends want, and how they use one another in an attempt to get it. Bobby’s friends can live vicariously through his singledom, with the husbands saying things like, “Call me tomorrow, I want the details.” The wives can express their disapproval of his girlfriends (“Dumb, tacky, vulgar, old,” they sing). Meanwhile, Bobby can get a window into married life, with its almost imperceptible gestures—the passive-aggressive comments and the little flirtations—made larger than life in their legibility. 

Yet the most compelling feature of Company, and the thing that best lends itself to connectivity, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, is its central conflict. Who is Bobby anyways? He’s a blank slate, an everyman just attractive enough to be wanted by friends and lovers, but not so attractive he’s been snatched up by wedding bands. Without a linear narrative, Bobby drifts unmoored from scene to scene. He’s a problem on the page, a character whose motivations aren’t quite clear until he has to be told by one character, “Want something; want something.” 

Company was made about the sliver of New Yorkers who felt left out of the late 1960s free love fest, before the age when desire became gamified. Bobby’s ambivalence towards relationships, what they can and cannot grant you in terms of security and a sense of self, remains tactile as ever. The next best thing is a swipe away. And while the show is a rich text over which one can wrestle—debating Bobby’s character or the best songs or the best performances of certain characters—what if I used it as a calling card of sorts? As of this writing, I’ve watched it twice in the last three weeks: a production in ASL at Lincoln Center and the 2006 recording with someone who I thought was a prospective lover. 

The ASL production, staged by Deaf Broadway, reified the show’s relevance: what does it mean for Bobby to be 35 and single and also deaf? What does it mean for him to be surrounded by people who have found deaf partners and, therefore, a sense of intimacy or community with other people? How do married deaf people sign differently than single deaf people? It made me want a fully mounted production. Most of all, it showed how communication—what we do and do not say to each other—is a central component of what makes Company tick. 

So what did it mean that I skirted around what I really wanted to say when I watched the 2006 production with a poet a week later? I asked to get closer and, despite the previous times we had made out, there seemed to be a prickly precarity about the erotic tension between the two of us as we sat on the couch in the TV room. The candle wavered like Esparza’s voice in “Someone is Waiting”. Damning. The poet liked the musical. We did not end up hooking up—they decided they would rather be friends. 

Bobby has the uncanny ability to allow his audience to either project who they are or who they resent onto the character. He can be the car mid-spin-out, whose metallic sheen distracts from the smell of burnt rubber he’s trying to hide (the man you met at that East Williamsburg bar in those priceless tabby shoes, whose life is falling apart between bumps of k), or the rank plumes of smoke spilling from the exhaust pipe that remain glued to your olfactory parts like gunk (those times you stumble home from a hookup swearing that you’re done dealing with the kind of people who take you for granted, even as you open up an app to once again scroll, dead-eyed and aimless). And as the liturgies of sex and romance become forever augmented and shaped by digital technology and social and political evolution, the ability to remain in limbo between these two archetypes, and to identify with or distance oneself from them while engaging with the show, keeps Company in a bizarre state of being a show about dating and marriage intimacy from both another time and still of our time. It’s so easy to drive a person crazy. Or, on another date that feels like an interview you’re trying to nail, feign being alive. 

In John Doyle’s version of the show, the buoyant metropolitan rush of humor and yearning freezes over into something darker, sadder, more searching. It’s stripped of the high comedy and turned into a sardonically aware version of itself. Its abstractions of the lifestyles people choose to lead, or look into, are chillier and droller. It feels like someone who’s intellectualized intimacy into oblivion. Through various stages of dating and sex, through the unpacking of my baggage in therapy and with friends, I’ve never fully identified with Bobby’s indecision about relationships, although the show’s bold and aggressive way of defamiliarizing the obvious and quotidian has always felt personal to me. It’s more comfortable to compartmentalize or intellectualize the emotional papercuts, so that you’re analyzing the slices instead of feeling their sting.

It makes sense of structures and rituals which are foreign to some, queer people especially, transmuting norms into games replete with irony and dread. Within that aloof aestheticization of the negotiation of intimacy, of scrounging for a self when one is used to being a projection of others’ wants and desires, is some kind of ache and absence and terror. A funny thing happens when I show Company to people who haven’t seen it before. They feel a little galvanized, or perhaps jolted awake. Maybe they experience a sense of familiarity with those aforementioned feelings. Maybe they feel a little less lonely. I want to tell them that I hope they know, as Bobby sings at the end, that “I'll always be there / As frightened as you / To help us survive.”