Buying It Anyway for $1.95: Markets in and for Little Shop of Horrors (Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqb6juQXNf4

Part 1

I have joked many times that Little Shop of Horrors was my introduction to capitalism (“I can finish him with simple laissez-faire” improved my understanding of socioeconomics AND French!). It’s one of the funniest shows in the musical theatre canon while also being a biting critique of capitalism. It’s also got a pretty significant race problem.

In case you don’t know the show, a quick summary: when nebbish Seymour Krelborn begins to feed blood to his baritone-voiced flytrap, affectionately named Audrey II for his crush, he finds, to his distress, the monetary, personal, and romantic success he’s always dreamed of. While the show takes a generally comedic tone, the musical’s tragic end complicates this; the only surviving characters—black-coded, Motown-singing Audrey II and the three African-American “Doo-Wop Girls” who narrate the action—take full control of the shop, selling the bloodthirsty plant and allowing it to literally take over the country through market consumption.

Consumerism kills in Little Shop of Horrors—it requires blood to live, and it can talk anyone into giving it the blood it needs. As the plant grows and takes over the small shop where the play is set, material goods pour into the set in the forms of money, customers, fans, and new equipment, but characters are killed off as a cost. The play’s message is clear by the end: the plant is for sale and currently tempting you, the audience, but the cast begs us “don’t feed the plants.” However, it cannot be ignored that not only consumerism, but black participation in capitalism in particular kill in Little Shop of Horrors—the plant is coded black, and its final dominance is achieved through the corporate participation of Crystal, Ronnette, and Chiffon, the three black women who function as a doo-wop Greek Chorus. Little Shop of Horrors uses humor and tragedy in equal measure as it personifies greed in the plant, who both utilizes and breaks down traditional, white markets for its own gain.

To understand the critique at work in Little Shop of Horrors, we’ll need to brush up on our Marx. Perhaps the key to Marx’s critique of capitalism is his notion of the alienation of workers: “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him” (Tucker 72). Unlike the artisan-craftsman, the worker creates not for his own sake or even his own profit, but as part of a larger entity where both the product and the profit exist entirely separate from the worker and his labor. A Ford factory worker, for instance, cannot point to a car that they made themselves, despite their hours of labor. The worker under capitalism sells both their body’s labor and the product of that labor to the owner/boss.

We also need to understand capitalism not merely as a system of economics but the base on which human culture and society rest. Marx notes that the relationship(s) formed between workers, owners, and products “constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” (Tucker 4). In other words, the economic system at work in any given society serves as the foundation, the Marxist “structure,” out of which all other facets of society grow and develop. To Marx, legal and political systems—the superstructure—develop in service to economic systems in general, and contemporary legal and political superstructures serve the capitalist structure on which they rest. Beyond the legal and political, social and intellectual relationships and understandings of the world develop as well out of capitalist structures. However, as Marx notes, these conditions are constraining to those workers alienated from their labor, and will eventually cause an uprising of the oppressed workers, the proletariat, against the complacent, business-owning bourgeoisie. These systems, grown out of a capitalist structure, oppress and thus must be destroyed

In Little Shop of Horrors, structure and superstructure are both conflated and exposed in its set design. The set, as described in the script, consists of five key elements: an ‘internal’ flower shop space, with a cash register and work table; a backstage, unseen workroom within the shop; an ‘external’ urban space defined primarily by the flower shop’s stoop and a fire escape; two screens, used to reveal (and conceal) set elements to create secondary scenic spaces; and a placard reading “LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS.” In setting the play primarily in a shop, Menken and Ashman put on display the economic factors underpinning the characters’ relationships, desires, struggles, and dreams, even before any of these characters speak a line. The shop, thus, serves as both foundational structure and superstructural culture. Further, the technical function of the set lays bare the relationship between structure and superstructure. As the musical’s title suggests, the shop itself is the place of key interest and the defining feature of the set, with external spaces literally growing out of the set in the case of the external stoop, and the screens acting around the theatrical assumption that the shop does not particularly move or change in any substantial way. The technical scenic elements of Little Shop of Horrors not only mirror, but actively expose the structure/superstructure relationship outlined by Marx; that is, the set is grounded in the unchanging foundation of the shop, with other scenic elements acting visibly in its service. The scenic design of Little Shop of Horrors is capitalistic structure and superstructure taken to its logical extreme, where structure and superstructure, economy and public culture, are one and the same.

If Little Shop of Horrors’s scenic circumstances are the extreme of capitalism, then the Audrey Two is the logical end result, the personification of Marx’s alienation of labor. Audrey Two enters the characters’ consciousness after Seymour purchases him as part of a market transaction from an old Chinese man, who sells Seymour the plant (that is not his) for “a dollar ninety-five” (Ashman, 24). However, there is implication that the plant is an extraterrestrial—as it arrives during a “TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE SUN” (Ashman 23), and it has never been identified before within the world of the play, humorously drawing others magnetically to it (Ashman 22). That the plant needs blood to survive and to grow is an allegorical manifestation of Marx’s alienation of labor—while Seymour systematically feeds his time, effort, and lifesource into Audrey Two, it grows into something entirely outside his control, and something that ultimately devours him, everyone he loves, the United States, and the audience itself. This comes about not only from Seymour’s Audrey Two, but by the numerous plants purchased after the events of the play by “unsuspecting jerks from Maine to California” (Ashman 94). The logical end result of capitalism, then, is complete and total destruction of those who participate.

by Casey Berner

To be continued...