It’s not unusual to pick up labels in life; some you’re born with, some you achieve, some are thrust upon you. Cat McKay’s labels have come to her by all three methods as she wends her way through a theater career taking her from Ohio to London to Chicago.
Some labels she’s collected are fighter, nerd, feminist, and queer theater artist. Her resume reveals she is an actor and playwright. She’s performed on stage and on camera, and for a while laid claim to having performed more aliens than queer humans, though she said that balance has begun to shift.
She’s a three-octave singer who can belt out such genres as musical theater, pop, classical, and opera. She’s a member and featured soloist with two of Chicago’s LGBTQ+ choruses—the Windy City Treble Quire and the Windy City Gay Chorus.
She’s a committed student. With a bachelor’s in theater (acting) and music performance (voice) from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio (where she studied the Chekhov technique), she’s also studied music at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and taken classes at the Acting Studio Chicago. She’s been a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and has numerous stage combat certifications.
And now? She’s getting ready for the opening later this year of Plaid as Hell with Babes with Blades. Originally scheduled for a January premiere, it has been postponed until the current COVID surge ebbs.
McKay moved to Chicago nearly seven years ago. A professor in college told her if she wanted to be an actor, she needed to either go to the coasts or to Chicago. A midwesterner born and bred, she chose Chicago.
Since arriving, she’s performed with such companies as PrideArts, WildClaw Theatre, and Otherworld Theatre, theaters known for their queer, horror, and science fiction shows, respectively.
She saw one of the Babes shows shortly after arriving in the city, and later auditioned for them, but Plaid as Hell is her first time working with them.
Plaid as Hell was born from the company’s Joining Sword & Pen playwriting competition. Babes publishes an image which becomes a part of the scripts. The ensemble reads and votes on the winner which they put into development with their “Fighting Words” program.
“Babes had a contest image that I loved,” McKay says. “It was a picture of some of the Babes company members all in flannel and holding weapons. I wanted to do a cabin-in-the-woods story. My husband is a horror film buff and I thought horror would be fun as it has a determined structure.”
She’d only written a few plays and never one in the horror genre, in part because she doesn’t like shows with a lot of gore. However, she did have experience with the genre on stage.
“I had produced Evil Dead in college,” McKay says. “I liked Cabin in the Woods. Babes’ shows have to have fights and it’s built into many horror shows. It doesn’t have to be gory. What I like best about horror is the idea that the scariest thing is whatever we brought with us, not what is out there. It is the stuff we are already dealing with.”
McKay identifies Plaid as Hell as a dark comedy that starts with four queer women on their annual weekend in the woods. Three are very close and the fourth is the new girlfriend. Then everything takes a turn for the worse. It doesn’t help that there is a serial killer on the loose.
She wrote the sort of play that she would want to act in. As she says on her website, “Any show where I get to swing a sword (or a batleth!) is a good show.”
The fights in Plaid as Hell are less about swords and more about found objects, which she says is some of her favorite stuff to watch.
“Someone working with what they have is exciting,” McKay says. “They’re the kind of thing that you would use if you were to get in a bad situation and you’re not a trained combatant.”
It’s also important to her that the play represents the kind of work that Babes with Blades does, which is to give people a chance to fight who might not otherwise get the opportunity. She wanted to make sure there were underrepresented artists in the show and that they had meaty roles to work with.
“I think all of the characters are fully fleshed-out humans,” McKay says. “As an actor, I like that; even if a role is not as large, it is important that it be a whole person.”
She also says that she loves a show with a twist—one that surprises her. She claims inspiration for that from the shows done at Jackalope Theatre Company in Chicago, and it was something she tried to incorporate into Plaid as Hell.
“You think you are going on one journey and then you’re not,” McKay says. “I love that. I love good roles for women that are complex and complex plays that are as gay as fuck.”
From the time she first turned the script into the contest to the day rehearsals were postponed because of the pandemic, McKay notes that the story has undergone a lot of changes—changes she feels have made the play stronger.
“I had worked with Christina [Casano, the director] before as an actor,” McKay says. “She’s amazing. She has a real gift for looking at something and saying, ‘This doesn’t work. Here’s why and how it can be fixed.’”
She also credits the cast with giving her feedback that made the characters more authentic. The majority of characters she wrote are not white, but she is. So those actors with lived experience were able to help her make it more realistic. She found as she edited and rewrote scenes that listening to the voice of another actor gave that character a stronger part.
McKay started finding her own creative voice when she was in high school. She was in the band and started to do the school musicals. When it came time for college, she had to pick something and decided that theater was interesting.
“And I haven’t quit yet,” McKay says.
As a self-described science fiction nerd, she’s found a lot of shows that match her interests. It’s how she managed to play so many aliens—that and because those shows were ones that had fights in them. She did A Klingon Christmas Carol a couple of times and such shows as Improvised D&D: Season 1, Valkyries: Badasses on Bikes, and Engage! A Choose-Your-Own Sci-Fight Adventure at Theater Wit.
“In the choose your own adventure, the character was just named Alien,” McKay says, pointing out that perhaps that could count as a queer character. “We don’t really know the sexuality of any of them. It is up for debate.”
While she has a lot of professional labels, she’s picked up a few private ones too. She likes to pet dogs, weight train, and read.
“I am a proud bi woman, a big nerd,” McKay says. “In my spare time, I read a lot of science fiction, but you know, the pandemic—it murdered all the hobbies.” But Babes with Blades promises that Plaid as Hell will rise again.
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