PERFORMANCE CHICAGO
Paula Killen and Sharon Evans, the two Chicago artists featured in the first weekend of “Performance Chicago,” have widely varying styles and diametrically opposed theatrical agendas. Killen wants to confront and at times shock her audience, ripping her way through an unsettlingly intimate monologue. Evans uses a quieter approach, presenting a series of thematically linked images and ideas in a rather formal, emotionally detached manner, asking her audiences to make their own inferences.
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Killen performed Road Kill, a three-part original monologue in a traditional theatrical vein that chronicles the journey of a burned-out Valley girl through a series of horribly abusive relationships. We first encounter this nameless woman at a roadside motel, where she and her boyfriend Jason have stopped on their great American road trip. She speaks to the unseen owner of the motel, slowly revealing to him a litany of Jason’s abuses, from physical beatings to emotional neglect to brutal rape. All the while she seems ready to collapse, or perhaps explode, as she clings to her Diet Coke and fifth of Seagrams, repeatedly pleading to her listener that she is, at bottom, a good girl.
The third section not only repeats the performance style of the earlier sections but is thematically unfocused. The woman is now in a hospital ward, speaking to an unseen doctor and summing up everything that happened in the second section (so why include the second section?). Then she flies into a hallucinatory discussion with yet another unseen listener, this time an incestuous father figure. She eventually sets him on fire, and ends with a gratuitous impersonation of a black woman in a lengthy jive on “her man.” I couldn’t connect this monologue to the ones before, except perhaps that this woman’s final escape from a cruel world is insanity–which is a rather cheap conclusion. Also, Killen’s energy remains so frenetic that I was hardly able to listen to her anymore, longing for a quiet, focused moment that might have afforded some insight into this disjointed piece, which seemed meant to form a progression but did not.
