The multiple billing of monologuists in a single revue is a great idea, but nothing new. What may be new--it's certainly new to me--is the formation of monologuists into performing collectives, who function like a theatre company. One such is BoyGirlBoyGirl, who despite the rather adamant specificity of their name have always, whenever I've been lucky enough to see them, boasted five members, with Girl invariably tipping the balance.
Such was the case on a frigid night in January when I ventured with a few friends to the Prop Theater to catch their latest opus, The Flesh Market. BoyGirlBoyGirl's modus operandi is to draw inspiration for each show from a single, usually highly marginal text; this time out it's the title work, a 1970 "adults only" exposé by one Pat Lawrence ("famed columnist for the National Informer)" that promises the tawdry truth behind the then-current sexual revolution. "TRUE CASE HISTORIES," the back cover blares.
And True Case Histories is exactly what we got from the performers. But beyond that, each delivered something entirely unexpected and particular, tailored to his or her own highly polished persona. I've been following some of these artists for years--even decades--and they've reached the point at which they really have no equals on the Chicago scene. They're civic treasures...and would be national treasures if our national cultural life weren't so debased. The trick with monologues--and it's a trick indeed; believe me, I've been there and done that--is to straddle the fine line between speaking intimately to each member of the audience, while still playing to the audience as a whole. The men and women of BoyGirlBoyGirl don't just walk that line; they prance across it like circus aerialists. The pluck and strum it like a violin. They whip it like a lariat, and reel you right on in.
There's an almost mystical quality a performer acquires after years spent toiling away on the stage; a kind of mastery, a command of even the spaces he's not occupying, that creates the phenomenon in which, as one critic described it (and I wish I could remember who, 'cause I've been quoting him for years), "the room grows small"--meaning, everything disappears but the drama unfolding before you. Every single member of BoyGirlBoyGirl possesses this quality; they're not just actors, they're costumers and stage designers and choreographers and, at least in one instance in this show, a full orchestra.
Rachel Claff began the evening with a piece entitled "[Insert Joke Here]" in which she recalls how, while waiting for the 36 bus, wearing a baggy t-shirt and even baggier jeans, she was inexplicably mistaken for a prostitute and tentatively, slyly propositioned--so slyly that it wasn't till minutes afterwards that she realized what had happened. This occasions a slow burn that finally ignites into a flat-out fit when the bus belatedly pulls up in front of her; and I mention this because when I now play the scene in memory, I not only see Claff jumping up and down and stamping her feet like Rumpelstiltskin, I see the bus. I hear the hiss of its door as it opens. Likewise the woman who propositioned her--a hooker herself, trying to recruit a third party for a client who waited in an idling cab; Claff invested her with so much life, I could pick her out of a police line-up tomorrow.
She's either in her mid-fifties or she's in her extremely rough forties. She's got yellowy peroxided hair cut in a sort of lady mullet and her face looks like a leather handbag, creased and seamed and pouched. She's wearing a t-shirt, a white t-shirt with a denim jacket over it and very pale denim cutoff shorts...Clogs, maybe? She doesn't so much walk up to me as she somehow kind of vaguely appears in my eye line via some sort of forward motion.
Claff is a cherubic, tousle-haired type; the only place you'll find hookers who look like this is Ron Howard movies. So the incongruity of her drawing this kind of attention is funny, and gets funnier, as she describes the kinds of "bats--t crazy" types who inevitably hit on her, from small men who bark at her like dogs, to a trucker who actually rolls up and bumps her with his rig.
Now, you know what? This is good. This is good because now I know. Now I know that this is going to be what it's like for the rest of my life. Because clearly, at some point, I did something that the universe considers unforgivable, and it's like that song in The Sound of Music--'Somewhere in my yooouth or childhood'--except I must have done something horrible so now all I get is this.
In his piece, "Grub," David Kodeski also managed to draw an indelible portrait of another character--his childhood friend, a girl as single-minded as any small rodent in the pursuit of something to eat: "A zwieback. A heel of bread. A tomato. Anything." He also beautifully evokes an entire time and place: a sleepy suburban enclave in the 1970s, in which his ravenous gal pal seems to be the only active agent, like a bee buzzing from house to dormant house in search of sustenance. Kodeski's role in the narrative is largely passive; he follows her and occasionally acts as her proxy, but mainly he observes--giving us a few tantalizing glimpses of the sensual undercurrent that simmers just a few steps off the beaten path. Appetites intermingle--the gustatory laced with the erotic--and some of the anecdotes have a surreal comic edge:
For a while in junior high school there was a group of girls who roamed the hallways between classes, each carrying an open box of Jell-O into which they would dip their saliva-moistened fingers and lick them clean, justifying their behavior with claims that it was good for their fingernails. They would stand in front of their lockers, licking and dipping from their own box or a box offered communally. In the lunch room, their fingers stained magenta, rose, pale orange, violet, green, they would not eat, but sat hypnotically dipping and licking, licking and dipping, flicking their hair.
Certain images reflect each other in squirm-worthy ways, such as Kodeski's reference to the "dark and brooding Curcione house," where his attention is drawn by paintings of "martyred saints--some of whom offered their eyes or their breasts upon plates"...and where, just a few beats later, the eldest Curcione sister emerges from the kitchen to "unceremoniously drop the platter of chips into the center of the coffee table".
Kodeski's stage presence is mild, unassuming; you can see how he'd be a natural observer, even as a child. It's not till he gets going that you catch the ravenous glint in his eye, betraying an insatiable intelligence that overlooks no incident or detail. He's made a career out of finely tuned observation, and out of rehabilitating entire lives from a mere smattering of clues; he's as much archaeologist as monologuist, Though much funnier than most of the former.
Next up was Stephanie Shaw, whose "If You're Feeling Blue, Paint Yourself a Different Color!" was the most unconventionally structured narrative of the night. Rather than tell a linear story, Shaw went at her theme--female friendship, female expectations--in a more impressionistic manner. She looks very prim, so you never know quite what to expect from her when she comes onstage, and she kept us off balance right from the start, starting with a dialogue between her and her husband as they share a bathroom, a scene of domestic intimacy that's both endearing and a little awkward. Their conversation ranges far and wide--the middle east, a dream she had--till she hits you with this:
Somewhere in this conversation my husband and I come to a shared conclusion and this, ladies and gentlemen, is why the marriage has last as long as it has; the shared conclusion we reach is that there are two things in this life that neither of us fully understand. The first is the impulse to defecate on top of your partner during sex. An act sometimes described as a Cleveland Steamer. The second is scrapbooking. Only ever described as scrapbooking.
As non sequiturs go, this is up there, and it held us to her for the remainder of the monologue, which leapfrogs across decades, the very loose thread being Shaw's inability to maintain a female friendship and the possibility that this is due to her "owning the wrong stuff"--as represented by the totemic, almost fetishistic ideal of the scrapbook. It's a dazzling piece of writing, but dazzling pieces of writing don't always translate well to the stage; this one did, driven by Shaw's unerringly paced, matter-of-fact delivery.
Just because my daughter desperately wants to be friends with your stinking daughter doesn't mean I need to be friends with you, it's not you I desire it's that book, that book of sunshine and accomplishment, brilliantly illustrating a state of neurosis that it is meant to disguise. It's a funeral.
In the end she manages to bind together all the stray images and themes--yes, even the Cleveland Steamer--for a slam-dunk finish that left the audience all but gasping. Brava.
Diana Slickman followed with "Confidence Game," a meditation on waning sexual attractiveness in middle-age, as well as regret for sexual opportunities not taken--and now gone forever. Slickman is an extremely appealing performer, one of those lucky few who, for whatever arcane reason, has only to walk onto a stage to get the audience on her side. As such she's the ideal vessel for this kind of thing: the only kind of woman who can get away with minutely documenting the slow collapse of her body, is the kind who can look the audience squarely in the eye without a shred of self-pity. She parsed each phrase for its full share of wry humor, as when she lamented having wasted her "brief period of sexual desirability in the early '80s" on partners less than entirely worthy.
I expended most of my wattage of older guys, insecure guys, guys with personality. The men I had sex with usually had a qualifier attached. Handsomely built...for a guy so much older than me. Very good in bed...for a paranoid schizophrenic. Awfully attentive...for someone who is, in every other way, a horrible pig.
Having looked at the life she left behind her, she dares to peer ahead, wondering if it's possible to be openly sexual in old age, and not finding much hope in Hollywood.
At some point you stop seeing Katharine Hepburn's neck. I'm not sure when it happens. Somewhere between African Queen and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Kate's neck stops putting in an appearance. Swaddled by scarves or blinkered by high collars--she's very careful of it, as though her neck were an invalid or a crazy aunt, best kept from public exposure. In later years, her hands flutter nervously about it, checking to make sure that it hasn't escaped. She can't leave it alone.
The piece ends on a positive note, with Slickman finding a role model in the "Naughty Granny" cartoons that ran in Playboy in the '60s and '70s. Making other people uncomfortable with your sexuality, she implies, is better than being uncomfortable about it yourself.
The evening closed with Edward Thomas-Herrera's "Some Penis," a contemplation of onstage nudity in general and of one example in particular: an early-Nineties one-man-show called Summer Madness by Michael O'Halleran. The names of both show and performer have been changed (to evade "a heady vortex of storytelling ethics from which there is no easy escape"), but you could probably Google the originals if you were so inclined, especially since Thomas-Herrera helpfully informs us that the show received a glowing review from Richard Christiansen back in October 1994. ("No, I don't know what he was thinking.")
Thomas-Herrera relives the sensation of being in the audience, ostensibly watching the performance but actually anticipating the much-touted debut of Michael O'Halleran's penis. ("When will it appear? How close will it approach? In what state shall it be encountered? Will I find its revelation quotidian, arousing, beautiful, 'brave and daring?'") In the meantime, he treats us to a cringe-inducing, but hilarious, running commentary on Summer Madness's badness:
Michael O'Halleran now strips off his t-shirt and drops his blue jeans to reveal a close-fitting pair of candy-apple red hotpants equipped with a large circular pull for a zipper that extends down from his waist and over a considerable genital bulge, before disappearing into the hairy depths of his crotch. With all the sincerity of a serious artiste, he announces, "I'm five years old and I love the beach."
My friend Annie, seated on my left, remarked on the tension she was feeling; because, we both agreed, there's an element of the unexpected in every Edward Thomas-Herrera performance. Being essentially fearless, he'll say or do just about anything, and given that his theme tonight was onstage nudity, we could only imagine where he might go with it. Especially since Stephanie Shaw had already set the bar pretty high with the Cleveland Steamer.
As it happened, the unexpected moment was--well, entirely unexpected; it came when Thomas-Herrera, finally confronted with the real star of the show, is moved to rhapsodize it with a flat-out, Broadway-style, belt-it-to-the-cheap-seats musical number:
Step aside, here comes the penis! Your decorum is the only thing between us. Here I am! Real live penis! I could be your favorite sight, or the obscenest...!
And that's just the first stanza.
Thomas-Herrera ends by wryly recounting the phenomenal success enjoyed by Summer Madness (including a two-year run in London's West End). We're left to reflect on the paradox that a performance piece's reception can hinge on something other than the performance. No such worries with regard to BoyGirlBoyGirl. They're the real deal; the gold standard. And, Chicago? They're ours.
For more on BoyGirlBoyGirl visit their website, www.boygirlboygirl.org.
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