It’s easy to become lost in the minutiae of intellectual property here at the Patent and Trademark Center. And while it’s hard to dispute the necessity of rolling up our sleeves and helping people find information (this is a library, after all), it’s also important to occasionally step back and take a broad view of the role that patents, trademarks, and copyrights play in our lives.
I recently had the opportunity to do just that by attending a performance of Wendy Kramer’s original play, “Trademark Girls” at the first night of San Francisco-based Small Press Traffic's annual Poets Theater Fest & fundraiser on January 16th.
“Trademark Girls” is a cathartic (and funny!) exploration of the meaning behind all of those characters on boxes and cartons in the supermarket. It’s a hard, critical look at the political and cultural baggage included in each box of Aunt Jemima pancake mix, each can of StarKist tuna, each package of Morton Salt, in so many product labels. In the play, these trademarks step off of the shelf and speak up.
Trademarks are, after all, symbols, and, while poets and advertising agencies tend to have different ends, one could argue that the reliance on symbolic language and imagery to illicit an emotional response is crucial to both poetry and advertising copy.
Wendy was generous enough to have lunch with me and talk about her play and her perspective of the meaning behind trademarks.
Patent and Trademark Center: How did you get this idea to turn trademark girls into poetic characters?
I've drawn my poetic material from trademarks and logos for years, ever since 1995 when I started making verbo-visual collage poems made out of product labels, magazine clippings, junk mail, and other trash. These poems, when read, were performances in themselves, so the dramatic stage was not a big jump, especially in the context of Poets Theater. Product labels of all sorts combine text and images that can be read poetically in a literal or imaginative way. You can read a "Skippy's Peanut Butter" label and read it so that the skipping and the butter and the blue and tan-ness of the letters and the peanut butter comes forward. I don't know exactly how the "girls" in particular--Little Debbie, Sun Maid Raisin Gal, Morton Salt Girl, etc.--became characters, except that I had been collecting and noticing them for a long time; I had been sort of informally or mentally cataloging all the trademark girls I saw. There are dozens of them.
PTC: Tell me some more about how these characters developed.
I had been planning to write a Trademark Girls play for a couple of years. I had joked about and
discussed it with people and read some books about trademarks and advertising. I had taken a lot of notes and begun to imagine people I knew in different roles. But until David Buuck asked if I had any material for this year's Poets Theater, I hadn't actually sat down to write the script. Once he asked me and I had a deadline, it started to come together. And once I was writing the script and getting feedback and suggestions while simultaneously casting specific friends and co-workers and poets to play them, the characters began to develop. We had a 10-15 minute performance time limit, so we had to convey who they were very quickly. Visually, that's simple once you have the costumes. Tanya Hollis and Fran Blau did an amazing job of conceiving and making these costumes that used actual labels, thrift store clothes and hand-sewn props to make the trademark girl easy to identify: Blue Bonnet's bonnet, for instance, or the Hamburger Helper's helping hand.
That's the practical end of things. Interpersonally, the characters developed as cast members brought their personalities to them. Some characters were cast more deliberately than others. For example, once my teenager, Rafique, agreed to be in the play, I wrote the Chicken of the Sea Mermaid role specifically for her; her character was intended to embody some of the issues around gender and personhood that are a part of our daily life together. Clo the Cow (Nell Jehu) pretty much invented herself and sewed her own clover. People brought inflections to their lines that sounded more accurate and alive than anything I could have directed them to do.
The trademark girl characters developed as a way for me to make the societal question of who gets to be a person in public a literal one. Neighborhood gentrification and Prop 8 are two obvious real life examples of issues we've been living with that address or imply this question. Who gets to set the terms of discussion?
Blue Bonnet Onit is literally just a head, and she represents margarine. But if she were a person,
wouldn't she be so much more than a head and than margarine? We know that we ourselves are more than butter or margarine, that our individual and collective imaginations are different from the corporate processed foods we are sold in the supermarket. With this play, I wanted to take the corporate and advertising words and pictures in our allegedly public space and re-claim them for poems and play. Serious play.
Intrigued? Wendy says that plans are in the works for more performances later in the year, which I’ll be sure to post in this space. In the meantime, there are still two more weeks of Poet’s Theater left, where you’ll be sure to find some excellent (probably not trademark-related) work. For more information, visit http://smallpresstraffic.blogspot.com/.
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