‘When you’ve got friends like mine’: Company as tragedy and the queer potentiality of friendship

Abstract

My first experience with Company was the 2011 concert version, released in theatres across the nation the same month that marriage equality was passed in New York State. With so many people fighting so hard to get married, the answer to Company’s big question, ‘Should I get married?’, seemed obvious, and Bobby’s final outcome inevitable. However, as a queer, aromantic viewer who values the importance of friendship, the end was a tragedy: rather than celebrating his birthday with his friends, Bobby spent it alone, abandoning the relationships he had already cultivated for an empty romantic ideal. For a show about marriage, Company spends an inordinate amount of time showcasing friendship, such as Bobby’s platonic connection with Amy and his many birthday parties. Queer historians, such as Michel Foucault and Peter Nardi, have theorized the radical potentiality of friendship to undermine heteropatriarchal capitalism and build community. What does it mean to centre Company on friendship? What new possibilities could appear if we intentionally staged and read the show as a failure of community rather than a triumph of maturity? If we take Bobby’s final claim seriously – ‘Alone is alone, not alive’ – we are left condemning single people to less than full lives, including Sondheim, who spent most of his life ‘alone’, invested primarily in intense, deep and lasting friendships. A queer reading provides a liberatory if tragic analysis that Bobby was, in fact, never alone but instead, stuck in a society that undervalues community, friendship and chosen family.