The happy provocateur

http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=theatre&article=495

Penny Arcade personifies ‘Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!’

Published 02/26/2009
by Richard Dodds

The name she chose for herself suggests nostalgic frivolity. The name she chose for her signature show suggests anything but. And so we have Penny Arcade starring in Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, a show that has played around the world since its creation in 1990, but has somehow missed San Francisco.

That omission is finally being rectified at the Brava Theater Center through March 7, where the New York icon and a troupe of locally recruited dancers are encouraging audience members, in Penny Arcade’s words, to “be yourself, be even more yourself, be outrageous in your selfdom.”

The diminutive but combustible performer, born 58 years ago as Susana Ventura, was sitting in a chilly office at Brava before beginning rehearsals. As a gritty New Yorker with a haughty disdain for all things Californian, she had never even visited the city until about 10 years ago. “Now that New York is totally gentrified,” she said, “San Francisco seems wild and untamed and endlessly huge, with so much diversity.”

Calling herself “a working-class intellectual,” Ventura spent her adolescence both in reform school and on the streets of New York where, guided and protected by drag queens and gay men, she was calling herself a fag hag before she was legally allowed to buy a drink. In the pre-Stonewall world of Greenwich Village, that didn’t stop her from finding her muses in gay bars.

“My goal every night was to get to sit at the table with the old queens,” she said. “They were sophisticated. They had the fiercest wit. Sadly, we no longer live in an intergenerational world, and I’m kind of a bridge between the 1960s and 2000s.”

Her teenage contacts led to work with John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous and a role in the Andy Warhol-Paul Morrissey movie Women in Revolt. She went on to work with many underground theater artists including Jack Smith, Charles Ludlam, and Hibiscus’ Angels of Light. She was also a close friend of Quentin Crisp, and the two created a long-running performance/interview piece.

Ventura is working on a new solo show titled Old Queens, and as with Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, it is being developed through improvisational performances. “What people will see in San Francisco is the organic result of five years of improvised work in front of audiences,” she said. “It all started in 1990 when I submitted it to the NEA during the Sen. Helms censorship crisis. It was me kind of saying, ‘Fuck you’ to them.”

Penny Arcade did not receive a grant from the NEA, but Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! has taken her to Australia and Britain, where the show was embraced by the mainstream press, as well as a long off-off-Broadway run in the 1990s. She returned to the piece in 2006 as a live event presented by the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

“I added six sentences, at the most, and much to my shock and chagrin, people thought it was written that year,” she said. “A goodly portion of the audience was over 40, and you could feel how they felt about their experiences being acknowledged. Anyone under 43 years old came of age in an era of entitlement, that you are entitled to respect. People over 43 came of age in an era when you had to earn respect and authenticity.”

A lot of those people, Ventura’s friends and mentors, died of AIDS, and she broke into tears as she talked about the loss. “I believe I have a duty to the young people to talk about those people who were so brave and created the possibilities that exist now, and for what they did for me. My great achievement is that I’m a real person and not just some lame diva, so I’m proud that I can cry.”

She waved off the offer of a tissue, and quickly composed herself. “Lest anybody get the wrong idea,” she said, “Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! is a comedy. You’ll laugh and you’ll cry, and we have real erotic dancers, boys and girls, who are in the audience and who the audience gets to know very well. This is not just some cheerful burlesque.”

In several of the scenes, Ventura portrays characters who work in the sex industry. “The show opens with a phone-sex girl, which is based on real conversations I had with clients when I did the phones in whorehouses. And I play a prostitute named Charlene who was a friend of mine and who is extremely funny, and she talks about prostitution in ways that whores talk
about prostitution among themselves.”

The production also includes Ventura stripping while a video of the late actor Ron Vawter reading from Lenny Bruce’s monologue about obscenity is projected behind her, and a segment in which she moves through the audience improvising on current events in her life and in the world. And then there is what she calls “a big dance break” in which the audience takes over the stage.

“It happened spontaneously one night in 1992, and now we make it happen,” she said. “But this is a safe space. I tell the audience that if they do not feel like dancing, that is fine with us. However, if the reason you’re not getting up to dance is you’re afraid that people are going to look at you and judge, well, that’s what people do.”

Ventura calls herself “a bisexual fag hag,” terms she knows haven’t always been embraced by others. She is currently married, though living separately, from musician Chris Rael of the band Church of Betty. “I fell in love with him,” she said, “because of who he is as a person, and not because he is a male.”

While the performer known as Penny Arcade happily claims descriptions as a reformer and provocateur, she insists that, despite a reputation she acknowledged that follows her, she is not confrontational. “I’ve often wondered what it is in expressing my opinion that makes some people think I want them to agree with me. They think they’re being bullied, and I don’t give a shit whether anyone agrees with me or not. I want to be free to express my opinion, and I think, by maintaining my position in my work and for doing it for so long, I’ve earned that right.”
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Richard Dodds can be reached at BARstage@comcast.net.

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great show! we are going back tonight!

In Freedom,
Frank Moore

when we got home last night from penny’s show, we watched 20 to Life: The Life and Times of John Sinclair (2007)…a great documentary! it was fitting because it was john [a frequent guest on my show, a luver dj, an elector/endorser of my presidential campaign, and who donated his whole music library to luver] was the one who forwarded me penny’s email about her show. after i forwarded it out, i put it in my trash. but i kept thinking about inviting her to be a guest on my show…it was a long shot…but fuck it!…i went into my trash and emailed her. she wrote back! she knew my work! this week has been a process of penny, her director steve, and i trying to get her here, working against the flu, time, etc. it still may happen late sunday night or monday night. but the process revealed we 3 share the same life and philosophy as art outsiders, using the same tactics and performance tools, facing the same issues and boxes. anytime such outsiders meet one another, THINGS HAPPEN!

last night’s show was even better than opening night. the dancers were more relaxed, hence even hotter and sexier. penny’s riffs were expanded, deeper, more intense…partly because there was more of a p.c.-uptightness undercurrent in the audience that she could play with. even more satisfying!

and again miss muffy danced with me during the dance free-for-all! but this time the other dancer nina and one of the guy dancers krowe joined our steamy circle as did a hot babe from the audience. really during the show whenever the guy dancers needed someone to play with, they came to me…because i’m always ready to play. that’s a secret of getting hot babes of whatever gender!

DA BOYZ:

From the very beginning of the show, it was just so much fun. Watching all the great sexy dancers, guys and girls, dancing throughout the theater, rotating their positions as people filed in … taking turns, one by one, doing a kind of solo to each new song … Linda pointed out Miss Muffy to us, who was going to be on a future Shaman’s Den … all of the dancers were amazing, but she was definitely one of our favorites!! Everything was just exciting, turned on, fun … And all this before Penny even came into the room …

It was really neat the way that Penny interacted with Frank throughout the performance … there were some moments that were intensely deep and focused between them that just gave us chills. Linda had handed her Frank’s book of poems and Art of a Shaman before the show, and she had already started reading it … you could feel the real affinity and connection that she and Frank have, and the whole performance really showed that too … there was a lot that reminded us of Frank, and of the feeling of us, and of our performances … a feeling of being on the edge with her, taken on a journey with her, having fun with her in the moment, the way she “jammed”, improvised … and the way she kept driving things, ideas, concepts home …. and the way it felt like she brought everyone together in the process ….

It was really fun to dance with the dancers, and everyone else in the audience up onstage, and watching Miss Muffy, Nina and others dance with Frank. He was busy!! The way that the dancers were with the audience was really neat, soft, personal, direct … totally changing, transforming the standard perception of an erotic dancer … And it was really neat to see them all in their street clothes at the end … it humanized everything, and made you feel like all of us were sexy dancers, and anyone could be … and all the next day we wondered who, in the course of a day, walking around in their street clothes, might be an erotic dancer?? It felt like it melted a lot of things together …

Alexi said he had tears in his eyes from almost the very beginning, because everything Penny was saying was so deep, direct, personal … We loved being in the dark theater with her! There is so much we have been talking about in the performance, its hard to remember all of it … Penny is so funny too!! And we were saying afterward that, like Frank, she weaves a powerful message nonlinearly and is sneaky … using the fun, the dancing, the nudity, the eroticism, the skits and personal history to carry these ideas into you … It was really neat the way Penny talked about pc, self-censorship, the way she likened the climate in the U.S. to the way things were in Germany before the Nazis came to power … the way she really got underneath a lot of different eras and the current state of things …

It was really neat talking with Steve after the show … how again you could feel such a deep affinity between him and Penny and Frank … how much he and Penny valued the consistency, the long term relationships, staying “outsiders” … very similar experiences. It was a trip to hear about what has happened in New York City, and how they see the Bay Area as having the last cracks of freedom in the corporate take-over, the gentrification of everything …

And then Frank talking with Krowe, Nina, Muffy … lining up shows! What an amazing fun night, and a feeling of very deep connections … We were some of the last to leave.

JEN:

The boyz were waiting for us at the theatre which was also decorated with a mix of the place it used to be and what it has become. We got in and waited for the show to start. Penny saw us and said hi then ran out to get false eyelashes. When she came back she had already been reading Art of a Shaman which we gave her and she was loving it. We were told that there were seats right up front for all of us. When the stage music came up loud we entered and saw all the erotic dancers doing their thing. It was awesome! We were figuring out where our seats were but I couldn’t stop looking at all the beautiful bodies writhing around. We got settled in and really soaked the dancers in. All different body types colors sexes juicing the place up. They rotated and everyone of them had center stage for a song. They humped the stage, the poles, each other. They touched themselves and teased, shook and jiggled in joy. It was so much fun! They interacted with the audience dancing into them. It was great. And then Penny came down the aisle and she stopped at Frank. They communicated without words for a while giving each other meaningful looks and gestures. Then she got up on stage and started. She’s a fireball, funny and smart, getting her ideas across by letting the audience in. She’s direct and honest talking about sexual energy being the only one energy, talking about aids and the loss that created, talking about the gentrification of NY. She hits on so many things that need to change by exploring basic topics of being a bitch, dyke, faghag and whore, but all is entertwined into the bigger picture of life. She connects everything together with her wit and vulnerability. When she goes through the audience in the dark it feels good like we’re friends with her just rapping about life together. She’s so cute and sexy. She does a strip tease and then a political rant which is very powerful. All the time I’m thinking how sexy, how intense, how affective. And then I realize that we do that too, we bare all and Frank weaves everything into a sexy powerful experience. It is the same, and so I’m struck again with how lucky we are, how amazing this life is. The energy in the place was sexy and most of the audience got up to dance during the 3 song break. Frank had 3 babes getting down with him. People let loose and shook their stuff, inspired by the performance. When the erotic dancers came onstage at the end in their street clothes it really drove the fact home that all the sexy juicy energy was in everyone. All came full circle. It was a really great show.

When it was over we made our way out to the lobby. Penny talked to Frank telling him that she loves the part of his book she read that talks about following. She said that not many people do that anymore, but they do that. Kindred. We went out to the lobby and talked with several dancers and with Steve, Penny’s partner. Everyone was warm and open. Frank asked Krowe to be on the Shaman’s Den. Miss Muffy also confirmed that she’ll be on the show soon. He told Nina that he liked her dancing and she was thrilled. Steve talked about the ‘art scene’ and how gross it all was now because the people are all careerists so it isn’t about the art anymore. It was neat to hear the similar experiences Penny and Frank have had with that world. We were buzzing from the energy of the night, but we were getting tired and hungry. After most people left we made our way to the cars. Had a long wait to get on the bridge and talked about this and that during the traffic jam. Got home and had our pizza talking about how great the performance was and then we all passed out.

Was thinking about the performance last night all day today. How the sexy dancers really blew my mind because they blew away any pictures of what sexy looked like. It was a feeling, a juicy openess and vulnerability. And all that Penny said and did was there too, telling us her stories and weaving them into our lives when on the surface they could seem remote.

In Freedom,
Frank Moore