There is more than a fine line between, on one hand, arguing that marijuana should be legalized and that our country’s war on drugs—which began long before Nancy Reagan told us to just say no—has been counterproductive and often unjust and, on the other, portraying weed as a miracle drug and force for good in the universe, and suggesting that anyone who believes otherwise is buying into racist, capitalist, xenophobic propaganda.
I didn’t expect Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville to adopt either of these strategies. Commissioned and produced by HERE, an arts organization dedicated to presenting inclusive, multidisciplinary performances, and co-presented by La MaMa, Cannabis! was conceived, written, and co-directed by experimental theater artist and musician Baba Israel, with original music by co-creator Grace Galu, one of his colleagues in the hip-hop and spoken word collective Soul Inscribed. Israel and Galu lead the cast along with fellow member Jonathan “Duv” Zaragoza as, respectively, Magical Mystical MC, Satina Diva, and Trickster Hipster.
Accompanied by other Soul Inscribed musicians and a group of dancers, the trio immediately establishes a warm, welcoming vibe. Audience members can choose to sprawl out on bleachers or perch on seats at cabaret-style tables, while Kate Fry’s brightly colored, street-glamorous costumes and Nic Benacerraf’s fanciful “environment design”—fashioned with “plant artisan” Helen Ran, with Fran McCrann providing “disco leaf fabrication”—suggests something Taylor Mac cohort Machine Dazzle might have envisioned after a few mellowing puffs on a spliff.
Galu’s groovy, intermittently catchy tunes are well served by a nimble fusion of funk, rock and jazz textures. (A few more familiar songs are sprinkled in, among them such predictable choices as Bob Dylan’s “Everybody Must Get Stoned” and the Beatles’ “With A Little Help From My Friends.”) She’s also an alluring presence, if a little overzealous as a vocalist, and Israel and Zaragoza, while not as effortlessly charismatic, cheerfully strive to keep the crowd turned on and tuned in. At a recent preview, I stopped counting the number of times Israel used that trite and true hip-hop exhortation, “Make some noise!”
Alas, anyone hoping for a blissed-out trip—or a giddy satire along the lines of Reefer Madness The Musical, for that matter—is quickly disillusioned. After an opening spiel in which Israel dedicates the show to a checklist of heroes and disenfranchised groups—saluting the “cannabis entrepreneurs in the room,” he urges, “May you not all be white, male, and may we all please remember the grass roots” (Get it? Grass roots?)—Cannabis! emerges as an energetic but pedantic and, at times, specious primer on Mary Jane’s role in our elusive search for social justice.
The journey of the “people’s plant,” also referred to here as the “flower that buds in the female form”—yes, misogyny will be addressed in this musical sermon as well—is traced back to Africans who carried it while being transported to lives in captivity and Mexicans who cherished it as a folk remedy before both they and the drug were persecuted across the border. Louis Armstrong is the focus of a segment noting weed’s popularity with jazz artists, who are dismissed in quotes attributed to Harry J. Anslinger—the notorious first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which was dissolved in disgrace in the late sixties—as “Negroes, Latinos, Filipinos and entertainers” peddling “Satanic music.”
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan pop up as other villains in archival footage—interspersed with hallucinogenic montages in David Bengali’s splashy video design—while, conversely, homage is paid to crusaders such as medical marijuana pioneer Dennis Peron and Mary Jane Rathbun, who earned the nickname “Brownie Mary” by baking spiked treats for AIDS patients. In one of the show’s more touching sequences, Israel describes how the drug has alleviated the suffering of his own mother, an alumna of the groundbreaking experimental company The Living Theatre now grappling with dementia.
A key problem with Cannabis!, though, is that it makes no real distinction between the merits of such therapeutic and responsible use—even those who don’t suffer from chronic pain have credited marijuana with everything from relieving stress to expanding creativity—and those of your everyday stoner lifestyle. This wouldn’t be an issue if the show weren’t as relentlessly earnest or hyperbolic in celebrating its subject. Certainly, its attention to the opportunistic and, especially, racist aspects of our long history of criminalizing and exploiting this drug—and others—is worthy, even if it might have been rendered with less preaching and more wit.
But you needn’t be a doctor or a social worker to know that the people’s plant hasn’t proven a boon to the physical and emotional well-being of all people. Nor has it been a cure-all for the truly afflicted, as it’s suggested here in a ludicrous dance routine casting one performer as a military veteran suffering from PTSD. Lurching and howling upon his entrance, he then takes a few tokes and suddenly begins gliding smoothly across the stage, as angelic voices envelop him.
Toward the end of the preview I attended, a young “cannabis activist and entrepreneur” offered a lecture on the importance of expanding legalization. “When we can all give cannabis a collective yes, anything is possible,” she urged, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. on the value of change for good measure. A festive jam session followed, in which one band member boasted of having been able to get through high school stoned. Call me a party pooper, but I doubt that’s the kind of progress Dr. King had in mind.
Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville opened July 20, 2022, at La Mama and runs through July 31. Tickets and information: lamama.org
