Staceyann Chin: girl's got pipes.
Live: Staceyann Chin
and
Gaggle
Created and performed by The Humberlights
Directed by Karin Randoja
Both part of Buddies in Bad Times’ Hysteria 2009
Festival runs until October 31 @ Buddies in Bad Times
By Kerry Freek
First up on Friday night of Buddies’ Hysteria Festival was Staceyann Chin. In pre-show research mode, I had my doubts: poetry slams run deep in her bio. However, this poet (and author and performer and activist) is well-deserving of a second look. About halfway through her show, I learned an important lesson: you can’t always judge a girl by her web presence (nor by her involvement in poetry slams).
First, Chin warmed up the audience with a couple of racially and sexuality-driven (yet good-humoured) jokes, doing her best to make the PC contingent squirm in their seats. Then, easing us into her content, she read a few funny stories from her memoir, The Other Side of Paradise, including frightfully embarrassing, juicy stuff from the pages of cologne-scented letters sent to her by a hormonal boy named Randall in her early teen years, and the story of discovering her “cocoabread” and subsequently ending up inside of an outhouse toilet.
Chin is a great storyteller, weaving even the most serious, sad stories with a comedic thread. Even a story about finding her disappointing biological father across town demonstrated that she was a precocious, plucky young girl. Adult-Staceyann, it seems, can find the humour of that sort of child, a smart little girl fumbling to find and create her identity. But Chin’s poetry is a little darker. As she moved from the memoir to surprisingly (and not annoying) sharp-witted haikus about monthly bleeding, things got heavy, culminating in an epic poem about being a woman who refuses to accept being a victim of man. By the end, Chin was entirely worked up, screaming into the audience with her hair on end, while we sat more or less stunned. Pretty powerful stuff.
A gaggle of gossipy girls.
On the other side of the theatre, there was Gaggle, a comedic yet manic commentary on rumours and the wicked ways girls treat their own kind.
Dabblers in existentialist literature will recognize the play’s similarity to Sartre’s No Exit—for the entirety of the show, 15 young women are trapped together in what looks to be a large storage closet, much like Sartre’s three characters wait in the Second Empire drawing-room. Instead, these young women are part of a singles club. One day they might learn how to bake a souffle, another day could feature a focus on sock-mending. When we meet them, they’re waiting for the “representatives,” not quite sure what this means, but they all assume their big meeting will result in something special, and that whatever it is will require competition between them all.
One by one, the girls take the stage to introduce themselves and their issues. Elizabeth is clearly the boss; her tight, perfect ponytail bobs as she orders the others around. We meet the fat one, the slutty one, the nosey one, the angsty one, the weirdo, the butch, the bimbo, the naïf and the secret-splurger. Using these stereotypes, the Humberlights touch on all of the ways girls can be horrible to other girls.
For instance, as punishment for “breaking the rules” of the club, which include NO SWEARING, one girl must reenact scenes from the movie Carrie. This several-minute dalliance is actually quite funny, and choreographer Alisha Stranges should receive major props for staging it (and the other two dance numbers) all quite brilliantly. From here, the madness escalates. The girls learn they’re trapped rather than waiting, and the mounting tension between them comes to a head. The place becomes a madhouse, complete with screaming, hair-pulling, garbage-throwing and a bizarre scene from an unexpected character that involves a paint/blood metaphor on her otherwise pristine beige skirt.
This chaotic scene wasn’t the only one that took things off-track. Gaggle’s mandate is clear (girls are mean, we shouldn’t be mean), but it tries to deal with too much. Promiscuity, sexuality, gender. Judgement, competition, angst. Not to mention constant references to an overseeing, absent patriarch (the head of the club, Mr. Pancock). The audience itself might go crazy analyzing everything boiling over in this production.
For the most part, however, the acting is pretty decent. The girls are especially good at comedy—they have perfect timing and really play up the stereotypes. Until things go bananas, the play’s dialogue speaks directly to its audience, which is (not surprisingly) mostly female. No matter what we say, we’ve all been mean girls, and we’ve all been their victims, too. Where most of us grow up and out of it (or at least I’d like to think), Gaggle takes us to a place where women remain insecure with themselves and shows us what might (but probably won’t) happen when girls hate rather than support other members of their kind.
Though Gaggle may have left the audience behind with its heaving hysteria, festival director Moynan King did a great job juxtaposing these two shows. Chin’s poetry, especially her final piece, encouraged a sort of solidarity among the female of the species, while Gaggle reminded us that we create a special kind of hell when we pit ourselves against each other.
