Independence Day Special: This Is Your Country on Drugs

SMOKE ALARM

Like Wine, Reefer Madness Ages Just Fine

Hemp sympathizers Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney are still a bit stunned at
the success of their hit musical Reefer Madness. (It's a parody of the 1936
cult film of the same title.) The play will open off-Broadway at the
Variety Arts Theater in the East Village on September 14, after being
performed at Hollywood's Hudson Backstage Theater for most of 1999 and part
of 2000. Studney likened the difficult process of securing a theater in
Manhattan that was large enough to support a cast of 12, plus five band
members, to a morphine or opium high - "slow and sedate."

The advance buzz on Reefer Madness has been strong in New York, thanks in
part to the popular cast album (available on Footlight Records), and Murphy
and Studney are banking on word of mouth similar to that which made the
play such a smoking success in L.A. Reefer Madness capitalizes on the
shifting attitudes over the past few decades toward pot and its alleged
dangers. As Murphy pointed out, "If everyone hasn't actually tried
marijuana, they probably know someone who has, or they've perhaps seen
someone smoking it. And so far, I have yet to meet anyone who has gotten
terribly violent. Usually they just kind of giggle and fall asleep."

L.A. WEEKLY: And is overreaction to hemp's dangers the underlying message
about marijuana in your play?

DAN STUDNEY: If you take the play just at face value, reefer is 100 percent
evil and it will destroy you, and you should not have anything to do with
it. That is the boldface lie of the play.

KEVIN MURPHY: It tries to be very pokerfaced and never let go of that
point. Every scene, every character, every moment is all built around the
central thesis that marijuana will destroy you, and here are the many ways
that it will destroy you. Obviously, Dan and I don't think marijuana is
quite as bad as it is portrayed in the play. This character of the
Lecturer, who is the central authority figure, has a captive audience of
terrified parents. And he stands up at the beginning, in front of a podium,
and basically goes on this fire-and-brimstone harangue about how dangerous
marijuana is. The play is basically a little morality story, as was the
movie, about poor Jimmy Harper and how reefer ruined the lives of him and
his girlfriend.

STUDNEY: We just sort of knocked up the insanity of it. Like, in our
version everybody dies. In our version if you smoke it, you have a giant
orgy and there's a Roman bacchanal of a goat man and fire dancers. In our
version Jesus comes down and sings a song to you about not doing it, and
then when you finally wind up in the electric chair for your crime, Jesus
won't forgive you.

MURPHY: One character sells her baby for drug money, and the baby has a
little lullaby solo about how sad it is to be rejected by your own mother.
Jimmy, the lead character, goes after a cute little kitty cat with a chain saw.

STUDNEY: The writing trick of Reefer Madness has always been - and will
probably always continue to be, as we refine it - one joke, ultimately.
It's about keeping that joke interesting for 90 minutes. First of all, what
was hellacious and shocking in the '30s is not necessarily what is
hellacious and shocking in the aughts.

So why the need for the parody?

MURPHY: All through Reefer we were very coy about this, because we really
thought that Reefer is about something larger. It's not so much about the
marijuana issue - I think it's more about the information issue, and about
how people try to control information to get their way. There's a quote
from Matt Groening that I love: "The authorities don't always have your
best interests in mind. No matter what they say." I see why some drugs are
regulated, because they're really dangerous, but I think that everybody is
being kind of ridiculous about the medicinal-marijuana issue. I honestly
don't understand the difference between alcohol and marijuana in terms of
which is more or less dangerous as a recreational drug. The line that's
been drawn there is sort of arbitrary.

STUDNEY: Our show is not as much about drugs as it is about hysterical
disinformation.

Then who is your audience?

STUDNEY: I wrote Reefer Madness for the disenfranchised 16-year-old boy.
But we wound up getting an audience that was across the board.

MURPHY: After a few months, because we were selling out, we started Sunday
matinees, and suddenly we just started filling up Sunday matinees! We were
getting, like, real older audiences. Little old ladies who were, like,
"Hee, hee, hee! Oh, this is so nutty! I shouldn't be laughing at Jesus, but
my gosh, he's so cute!"

STUDNEY: Yeah, black, white, young, old . . . across the board. We wouldn't
have thought that two years ago. You write this thing that's so kind of
nihilistically young in terms of its point of view. You know, authority is
creepy, and don't let the Man tell you what to do. It has this sort of
rebellious, youthful energy to it. So what winds up happening is that
people who are my mom's age - who were at Woodstock - are like, "Yeah, I
know that! Don't discount me! I put Clinton in the White House."

MURPHY: We had a lot of repeat customers. By the end of the run, we had
people showing up dressed up as the characters, and they were called our
Reefer Zombies. They would sing along with the show, and they would hold up
joints and stuffed animals.

How has the prevailing attitude toward pot changed?

MURPHY: Just the fact that we've been able to appeal to a pretty wide cross
section, at least in Los Angeles, says a lot. Because now I don't think
anyone is afraid of marijuana. People sort of roll their eyes a little bit
when they hear a politician get up and talk about just how horrific it all
is. The intensity with which the "establishment," for want of a better
word, has gone after marijuana in the past has sort of backfired 50 or 60
years later. Because they tried so hard to make it sound so evil, that now
you can pull out those old vintage cartoons and those old hysterical
screeds, and you just sort of laugh at it.

Next Article: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1192/a02.html