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Stage

Capsule reviews byJessica Goldman Dollface Medusa was slut-shamed. That’s the premise of

Katharine Sherman’s new play Dollface, a smart, quirky and at times poetic reimagining of the Medusa myth, one that borrows heavily from the classic tale while also speaking to our present culture of sexual assault and victim blaming. “Because you don’t want to be rigid. Because you don’t want to seem frigid. You let your guard down. What could go so wrong?” These are the anodyne thoughts going through young Medusa’s (Arianna Bermudez) beautiful head when a secret admirer invites her to the party of the year on the mainland. She doesn’t really want to go. She’s not terribly interested in the gifts he keeps sending her that wash ashore on her island (a small square dais in the middle of the stage surrounded by craggy rock steps). Flowers, candy, a Victoria’s Secret gift card — they all arrive by sea, much to the excitement of Medusa’s sisters, Sthenno (Susan Ly, almost upstaging the uniformly strong cast with her hilarious Steve Urkel-like performance) and Euryale (Monique Holmes), who are far more boy-crazy and impressed by the wooing than Medusa is. “Dude,” the sisters shout, you have to go to the party; he bought you stuff. He invited you! But this is Medusa as she once was. Sherman, with director Jacey Little’s authoritative finesse, wants to make sure we get the whole picture, so she starts us off as Medusa now is. Living in darkness, alone on her island, hissing snakes in her hair, a cursed woman. It’s only when Perseus (Josh Duga) arrives to slay her (“I came to kill you, but…um…I’m not supposed to hit a girl, right?”) and hesitates that Medusa regales him and us with her tale of assault, shame and excommunication. A rape may happen between two people, but it takes a community to deal with the fallout. Sherman echoes this notion by populating her play with a female chorus (Elizabeth Seabolt Esparaza, Regina Ohashi and Callina Situka) to amplify the play’s heightened emotions. They writhe and undulate in shadows, creating Medusa’s hissing strands of hair. They spout dated ad slogans as the girls get ready for the party (“You are in a beauty contest every day of your life”). Most disturbingly, they admonish poor Medusa post-rape with language we’re unfortunately all too accustomed to hearing. “We’re not saying you were responsible exactly, but what were you thinking?” “A pretty thing like you, you know what he wanted to do.” “Slut.” The chilling result is an uncomfortable surround-sound effect of shame and blame.

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Art

“Canon” As a child, Peru-born Juan José Barboza-Gubo

May 5 - 11, 2016

Houston Press

Capsule reviews by Randy Tibbits and Susie Tommaney

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witnessed the brutal beating of a trans woman and it made him wonder, “Why no value?” Fast-forward many years and academic degrees later to the man, now an artist with years of teaching experience, who has found a way to return dignity to these fringe dwellers of Lima’s society. At McClain Gallery, he and collaborator Andrew Mroczek are displaying 11 portrait tableaus and two costumes inspired by Spanish Colonial paintings from their “Virgenes de la Puerta” series, as well as three haunting landscapes from their “Fatherland” series that document the locations of hate crimes or murder. The portraits are beautiful, textured compositions that invoke symbols of the Catholic Church and culture that shunned these trans women: crown of thorns, beaded cape, halo, offering plate and braided hair. The artists worked with local craftsmen to create the traditional costumes, including a gown made of hundreds of embroidered flowers, a 25-foot hand-crocheted veil, and crowns of silver and gold. While some of the models were insecure, lonely and ostracized, others felt confident, empowered and radiantly beautiful. Most of the images were taken using an eight-by-ten view camera, with the women partially clothed or nude, and at different stages of transition. The vignettes that introduce architecture are most stunning: as in Carol, where the model in hoop skirt basks in the sunlight, surrounded by heavily carved doors with tinted windows; and Lucha, holding a flag in what

Just as effective as the chorus is in evoking our disturbance is the Andy McWilliams sound design. McWilliams takes us from party mode, in which the girls dance gleefully to Kesha (wink wink for those following the news) and Taylor Swift, to a remarkable acoustic depiction of what it feels like to have something slipped into your drink. Medusa is dancing with her sisters when suddenly the music slows to a nauseating crawl. She begins to lose her balance and tries to remain upright. Music back again to full speed as she attempts to brush off the feeling and dance. Music once again slowed down as she staggers in a kind of alternate-reality state. The party tunes play on as she finally collapses. Little never shows us the actual rape. Or Poseidon, for that matter. And that feels right. It’s not about the act or the assailant. Sherman is writing about the victim and what happens afterwards, and she does so with a deft ability for evocative language, an ear for modern courtroom victim-blaming and a clever way of merging the myth with the modern. Photos were taken of Medusa. Everyone on the mainland has seen what a “slut” she was that night. Yes, she seemed to have passed out, but so what? She probably asked for it. I don’t want to give too much away here because the effect employed is wonderfully clever and arresting, but let’s just say that you’ll never think of a message in a bottle the same way again. Nor will you question the damaging power of social media to further victimize one who has been raped. Meanwhile, poor Perseus has spent most of the play muted and tied to a post, watching the flashback scenes take place. He’s learned what happened, how Medusa came to be the monster she is today, and he comes to understand what turned all those other men to stone. (Hint: It’s not what we thought it would be.) Now able to speak again, he must decide, whether to kill Medusa or to show mercy. Fight or flight. We hold our breath and watch. Through May 14. Studio 101, 1824 Spring Street, mildredsumbrella.com. — JG Heathers They made the 1989 movie Heathers into a musical. With book, music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe, best known for composing Legally Blonde, and Reefer Madness author Kevin Murphy, the potty-mouthed, politically incorrect and morbidly dark teen comedy is back in our lives. At the heart of the story is the high school clique, with its power to include and exclude and the resulting emotional (and in this case) physical trauma it causes. Our heroine, Veronica, is part of the popular group of four girls (three of whom are named Heather) at Westerburg High. But while Veronica is part of the clique, she’s also secretly appalled by their sadistic and pointlessly cruel behavior toward each other and everyone around them. So much so that when she meets J.D., a rebel who’s just moved to town, she joins with him in a plot to murder her friends and disguise the killings as suicides. The musical is not an exact replica of the film. But then, did we

really expect that it would be? Remember, folks, Heathers was made ten years before America’s first massive school shooting and in an era where teens weren’t being bullied to death on social media, rape was something that happened to other people and homosexuality was still a tee-hee moment for many folks. The good news is that much of the un-PC stuff we loved about the original is still there — teenage suicide, bullying, homophobia, slut shaming, fat shaming, sexual assault, eating disorders and the blowing up of a school full of kids — yup, it’s all in there. Sure, some sharp corners have been rounded off, but it doesn’t take away from our guilty enjoyment at watching teens behave very badly. Smartly, O’Keefe and Murphy start the show before Veronica became friends with the Heathers to give us insight on why this smart and decent girl was driven to become popular and how that drive led her to murder. On a two-story stage simply but effectively clad in rows upon rows of lockers, the strong opening number, “Beautiful,” sets up the horror that is the high school experience for anyone who isn’t popular. Rather than suffer further loser hell, Veronica (a splendid McKenna Marmolejo) uses her note-forging ability to woo her way into the Heathers gang. But life at the top isn’t all that much better. Leader of the clique Heather Chandler (Kathryn Porterfield, having the bad-girl time of her life) wields her nasty rule over Veronica and the other two Heathers, Heather Duke (Chelsea Stavis, nicely channeling a miss bossy wannabe) and Heather McNamara (Natalie Coca, with a voice like an angel). Enter J.D. (Mason Heathers Butler), the new, mysterious, brooding kid in school, who may look like the role Christian Slater made famous, but this is a J.D. different from the one in the movie. Gone are the upfront malice and intensity that Veronica was both attracted to and scared by. O’Keefe and Laurence instead give us a J.D who is more of a broken soul, lovesick for Veronica and willing to do anything to make her happy. When Veronica tells J.D that she hates her friends, especially Heather Chandler, who has recently shamed her in public and kicked her out of the clique, J.D’s suggestion of murder disguised as suicide is more mettle than malevolence. Still, the dynamic between them works, albeit it’s not as much fun as watching Veronica come under the seductive spell of a true mind-game-playing bad boy. “My teen angst bullshit has a body count,” writes Veronica in her diary after the duo poison Heather Chandler and later shoot jock heads Ram and Kurt (played with excellent

frat-boy idiocy by Andrew Carson and Thomas Williams) for spreading false rumors about their sexual escapades with Veronica. In the new musical version of Heathers, it’s the Ram and Kurt plotline that steals the show with testicular numbers like “Blue,” in which the boys whine about their thwarted attempts at sexual assault and their funeral scene in which their homophobic fathers declare, “I love my dead gay son!” to the audience’s cheers. Here Shay Roger’s go-big-or-go-home choreography and Marley Wisnoski’s darkly comedic direction, solid throughout the show, bring down the house. After all the amped-up fatal frenemy fun we’ve been having, a little turn for the serious is a welcome breather, and we get it with three numbers in the latter half of the show. “Seventeen” is a hummable ballad expressing Veronica’s and J.D.’s wish to lead a stress-free

could be the ruins of an old church with broken stained glass at her feet; and Janny & Nuria, seated in an ornately carved gilded alcove, crossed legs entwined, with their breasts echoing the design on the Ionic columns. Through May 14. 2242 Richmond, 713-520-9988, mcclaingallery.com. — ST “Deco Nights: Evenings in the Jazz Age” Listen. It’s the bounce of a jazz beat through the shimmer of a 1925 night — not the meandering, languorous stuff from later on, but jazz with verve and rhythm. Jazz that demands you dance and drink Champagne till dawn. You can almost hear it as you walk into “Deco Nights: Evenings in the Jazz Age” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a glittering little show intended to give a sense of what it was like — the look and the feel — in those wild, romantic days of flappers and bobs and headlong living. It’s not by any means a major exhibition: only 20 or 30 beautiful objects made in Europe and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, but it sparkles nonetheless. It may be the dresses,

in Paris. And watch out as you head over to MFAH: You may get a glimpse of Gatsby’s fatal yellow roadster as it flashes by through the shimmering night to the sound of jazz on the way to another midnight party. Through June 5. 1001 Bissonnet, 713-639-7300, mfah.org — RT “High Society: The Portraits of Franz X. Winterhalter” may make even butch guys think about putting on dresses and waltzing in the flicker of candlelight. Dressing up would certainly be worth it to be remembered the way Winterhalter’s sitters are depicted — but even in 19th-century Paris, where he flourished, his brush was reserved for kings and queens, emperors and empresses — and occasionally for the merely very, very rich. Though he was born a humble German provincial with a shady background, by mid-century he’d become the virtual court painter of Emperor Napoleon III and his beautiful Spanish Empress, Eugénie. He’d already painted scores of portraits for Queen Victoria of England and her family. He joined a rare group of ultimate portraitists that includes Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Velázquez and, more recently, John Singer Sargent and maybe Andy Warhol — artists whose portraits defined their age. Painting after painting in the exhibition makes clear why, especially those flowing with miles of satin and silk, ribbons and lace, flowers and jewels, executed with a near magical brush, able to make even the — as some might say — plain Victoria, if not beautiful, at least charming. It was an ability that left him much in demand in all the royal courts of Europe. And what becomes a Winterhalter sitter most? A gown by Worth, of course. That would be Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman who moved to Paris in the 1850s and founded haute couture fashion. The two foreigners worked in tandem, if not quite hand in hand, to give royalty (and wealth in general) a look befitting its status; how nice that their creations are being shown together in the galleries. It’s worth noting that a Spanish

empress, a German painter and an English dressmaker gave the look to the French Second Empire. Just goes to show that globalism isn’t anything new, and has never looked better. Through August 14. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonnet, 713-639-7300, mfah.org. — RT “We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art” The Cultural Revolution is “so last week,” at least as far as the young (born after 1976) artists featured at Asia Society Texas Center are concerned. For these creatives, the (recently lifted) one-child policy was the norm, the skyline of their cities is continually evolving and Mao Zedong was a Communist Party leader from history books. No Man City, a massive 25-foot-wide sculpture of white Tyvek on acrylic, is sublime perfection. Morphing from a three-tiered symmetrical city to a deconstructed and geometric inverted cone, it’s all shadows and light. Artist Jin Shan has a great back story (he once installed a life-size fountain, a replica of himself, standing and peeing into a canal); this piece is decidedly more traditional, paying homage to his father, a classically trained painter who made backdrops for Chinese opera. Liu Chuang dabbles in conceptual art, and for his Love Story (1) installation, the artist was moved by the loneliness and longing found in the migrant workers of Chenzhen. At a street corner lending library, Liu discovered that people wrote all kinds of things in the margins of romance novels. The books are displayed on a table, with color-coded rocks giving clues to the translated-into-English messages written on the wall. Graffiti-esque pieces by Sun Xun feature anthropomorphic animals as allegories (a movie camera represents government surveillance, while a gas mask references Beijing’s pollution); and Ma Qiusha’s video reveals a razor blade in her mouth, symbolizing her pain at being labeled an artistic talent in kindergarten, and the ensuing years of rigorous training. Through July 3. 1370 Southmore, 713-496-9901, asiasociety.org/texas. — ST

VISIt HOuStONpreSS.COM FOr aDDItIONal art aND Stage COVerage by haute couture legends Jean Patou, Paul Poiret, Lanvin, Fortuny and others, that are best. Or is it the perfume bottles, tiny sculpted marvels of elegance and vanity, with names like Fête de Nuit, Ce Soir ou Jamais, Les Ailes de Paris (Festival of Night, Tonight or Never, Wings of Paris)? Or maybe the photographs by Brassaï, Aaron Siskind and André Kertész, whose “Satiric Dancer” is an angled, upended marvel? No, definitely the dresses. But no need to choose. They’re all here and more. The show is a great reason to reread F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — Fitzgerald gave the name to The Jazz Age — and to re-watch Woody Allen’s Midnight

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and happy teen life. “Lifeboat” is Heather McNamara’s hauntingly emotional portrayal of her fear and loneliness as she struggles to remain afloat in popularity. Most affecting is “Kindergarten Boyfriend,” loser-girl Martha’s (a sweetly mousy Casey Gilbert) suicidal lamentation of romantic/ social dreams not realized. In the end, after Veronica breaks up with J.D. and his murdering ways and after she saves the school from his final vengeance, O’Keefe and Laurence smooth off one last corner for us. Despite his attempt to blow the whole school to hell, J.D. is allowed some redemption in his number “I am Damaged.” It seems we’re to believe that J.D. — rather than being a bad seed bent on violent destruction at all costs — is simply a lost soul in need of TLC. How very, as the Heathers would say. Through May 8. The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby, 713-558-8887, tutsunderground.com. — JG

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