Theater maker creates change through art

Rebecca Schaffer sits alone at a desk in an office, presses her interlocked hands forward, cracks her knuckles and begins.

A dainty, allegro tune sends her to work, Schaffer’s fingers dancing away on a typewriter with confidence and determination, interrupted only by the once-familiar ding that sends her to the next line on the page. For about 90 seconds she will continue this routine, her face alternating from a focused stare to a ridiculously contorted, over-the-top, self-satisfied smile.

A crowd appears in front of Schaffer and the sounds of stifled giggles give way to full-blown laughter. When they look closer, the audience will notice the scene around her has disappeared. Or, rather, was never there. Gone is the typewriter, the desk and the office; all that remains is Schaffer, her curly black hair bouncing and her black-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose.

The skit, borrowed from the imitable Jerry Lewis, is a departure from the usual fare of her theater troupe, Whitefish’s Viscosity Cabaret. It is innocent yet brilliant in its simplicity. Here is Schaffer, alone on a stage, pantomiming work on a piece of technology that hasn’t been relevant for 30 years.

But it connects. It works with the crowd every time despite, you know, how darn stupid the whole thing is.

“I know, right?” Schaffer laughed.

Schaffer, 35, loves to create. A theater writer, director, actor and scene builder, she takes pleasure in making art that flips ideas on their heads. Art that makes audiences laugh and cry, sometimes in the same skit.

But there’s something about this absurd typewriter gag that makes it so joyful for both the performer and her audience, and says something larger about the theater world she is a major part of in the Flathead Valley.

“There’s something so magical about seeing something that isn’t there,” Schaffer said. “(It’s) what theater does to me, too. It allows the audience to engage with their imaginations in a way that they can’t otherwise engage.”

PERHAPS UNSURPRISINGLY, Schaffer, who loves mimes and magic, and once created a show centered around, simultaneously, clowns and death, was an unusual child.

The daughter of a coal mining engineer and a counselor specializing in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, she and her two younger siblings spent their high school years in a tiny eastern Kentucky town called Louisa.

“I never quite found my ground there as a kid, even though high school,” Schaffer said. “I was a pretty weird kid and that was a strange place to be a weird kid.”

So that weird kid found the theater, and set off to make a life in the business. There were some early missteps — including a few different colleges and a doomed online romance that sent her, briefly, to Newfoundland — but eventually she landed at the vaunted Missoula Children’s Theatre and began to create her art in Missoula.

She co-founded Viscosity Theatre there in the early part of this decade, a precursor to Whitefish’s cabaret, and worked with novelist Josh Wagner to create a series of avant-garde shows, including “This Illusionment,” a tale about the universe falling out of love with itself.

For Schaffer, doing things a bit differently has always been less by design than out of obligation.

“I can remember being in Girl Scouts and doing arts and crafts, and I would always try to make mine different,” she said. “And people would be like, ‘that’s so creative’ but that’s not what it felt like.

“It felt very forced, in a way, that I was pushing against something; not even to find something else, just to be different. Just to be weird.”

Schaffer graduated with a Master’s degree from the University of Montana in 2013 and shortly thereafter was hired in Whitefish to direct “Oliver” for the Whitefish Theatre Co. The next job she got, directing “The King and I” — a story about an Asian king that has not aged particularly well in the nearly 70 years since it was written — left Schaffer in need of a palate cleanser.

“So then I started the Viscosity Cabaret as an outlet to sort of talk about things and deal with ideas and deal with my white guilt,” she recalled with a winking smile.

The cabaret began in late 2014, and at the time Schaffer was traveling back-and-forth to Philadelphia where she was producing shows and working with a magician, Francis Menotti. When the cabaret started to catch fire, Schaffer moved full time to Whitefish in early 2016.

AT FIRST, Viscosity Cabaret was supposed to be something for all ages. A show in two parts that began with a kid-friendly scene and concluded with a raunchy adults-only set. There was only one problem.

“We didn’t write any family-friendly material,” Schaffer said. “And so we were like, well that’s not going to work.”

The cabaret today consists of performers Schaffer, Becky Rygg, Mikey Winn, David Blair, Collette Taylor and Adam Pittman, and musician Don Caverly. Their shows are decidedly not family-friendly — Schaffer once led a skit with a singing beaver puppet dancing, well, where one might imagine such a puppet on her person — and their shows are certainly not apolitical.

Schaffer and her cohorts are outspokenly left-leaning, and their skits skewering racism, sexism, antisemitism and biases against LGBT people feel like activism as much as theater. After the group’s Christmas show, in the midst rising tensions and threats of anti-Jewish violence by an online message board, Schaffer led some audience members on a makeshift parade through downtown Whitefish singing “Love lives here.”

“I don’t think that we’re unbiased or down the middle. I think we have an agenda,” Schaffer said. “I don’t know if we’re a political movement but we facilitate political discussions.”

Schaffer believes powerfully in theater’s ability to connect with audiences in a way that can lead to societal change, and without being overly negative or insulting. Viscosity’s skits may include piercing jabs at its political opponents, but it is Schaffer’s hope to deliver a more uplifting message.

“That’s why I think ... sending that message of hope and love and ‘how can we be better’ is one of the most important things that we facilitate,” she said.

And Schaffer plans to facilitate that conversation however she can and connect with her audience in greater and deeper ways, whether that be through a beaver or a typewriter or anything in between.

Viscosity Cabaret’s next performance is “Train Kid Cabaret” and begins July 9. Shows are held at Whitefish’s Great Northern Bar and Grill.

Schaffer is also currently directing “Cabaret: The Musical” for the Whitefish Theatre Co., with a final weekend of performances on tap at the O’Shaughnessy Center.

For more information on Schaffer, her career and future projects, visit www.rebeccaschaffer.com.

Entertainment editor Andy Viano can be reached at (406) 758-4439 or aviano@dailyinterlake.com.