The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man

 The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man

Political Animals and an extraordinary situation for a play!!

 

Let me start with something extraordinary regarding this play-

This could be a funny or absurd note on The Pussycat and The Plumber.

It feels weird and funny not knowing if I write about the right play!

No! Wait!

I am not going crazy- or if I am, it is not because I no longer know what I am writing about here.

Listen to this:

There is an audio production, for Romanian National Radio called “Cum A Ajuns Primarul Tom Primar” which would translate as How Tom the Cat has Become Mayor.

There is no play with that name by Miller, or indeed any other author. Looking among Miller’s works, we find The Pussycat and The Expert Plumber” as the only title that comes close.

But there is a problem- when you Google the title you find Nothing significant about it and you have no way of telling what this is all about!!

In the version that I listened to, there is a pussycat and a plumber, so we can only assume that we are talking about the same play.

But it is really strange. Totally. Today you find millions of pages on anything and nothing on a play by Miller. This is Extraordinary.

Having said that, the play is not exceptional, on the contrary it is rather forgettable, which may explain in part its absence on the net.

But Arthur Miller was an acclaimed, reputed, Pulitzer Prize winner and married to Marilyn Monroe. His life was much more interesting than this here Pussycat and Plumber play. Miller was not just a great writer, but a wonderful man as well, which is extremely rare: many excellent writers have been rather mean, bad: Ibsen, Rousseau, Hemingway, even Tolstoy.

Arthur Miller has been called in front of the Congress committee which was chasing for communists in the infamous witch hunts sparked by Joseph McCarthy. The committee had duped Miller, and then asked him to name people that are involved in “anti-american” activities.

The brave and principled writer refused, putting his career in grave danger, for those who refused to cooperate were blacklisted and found themselves out of jobs and in prison…

My country is lead by “political animals”, which bite, spit, roar, attack and ambush their opponents. With all due respect, this is insulting the animals, who have to fight, cheat and kill to survive as opposed to their political counterparts, who play it dirty for the fun of it. But hey, that is the expression and the behavior associated with assassinating competitors, not literally seems to come from the law book of the jungle.

In this average play, a cat which talks wins the post of …mayor. It is funny and subtle, up to a point. Tom, the cat uses many of the tricks in the politician’s manual, mainly blackmail.

After being elected mayor, he goes on for the next steps. Trying to become elected governor, there is some mischief along the way. Tom meets with a plumber, and there is a dialogue more or less along these lines:

-          I can do the things a man can, says Tom

-          I can see you talk, responds the plumber

-          There is an army of cats ready to help me

-          But can you weld two pipes together?

The satire points out the misbehavior of many leaders and I would say the fact that often we can feel that a cat, or a dog would be better than Kim Il Sung in North Korea, Putin the occupier of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. 85 % of Russians agree with Putin and that makes me think that voters often think like cats: not much that is.