ANNIE SPRINKLE at Club Lower Links October 20
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Sprinkle’s work is not meant to disturb–just the opposite. She isn’t trying to shock or to be vulgar. She wants to entertain, and she’s successful at this, making her audience comfortable as she talks about and shows us things that would normally make most of us pointedly uncomfortable. She simply wants to talk about sex, in a nonconfrontational, relaxed, and good-humored way. She wants to take the discussion of sex out of the usual narrow confines of “acceptable discourse” and look at it in all of its complexity, diversity, and mystery.
Unlike most of us, who worry about classifying our sexuality or hiding fetishes from one another, Sprinkle revels in sexual anarchy. No expression of sexuality is given preference over another, for as she repeatedly reminds us in her wonderful mockery of oversimplification, “We each have to follow our own path.” She shows us a series of slides chronicling her various sexual liaisons, from “straight” sex to orgies to bondage to fisting. She shows us a picture of her and a man horribly scarred by fire over most of his body. “He appealed to my alien-from-outer-space fantasy,” she shyly admits.
Sprinkle, aware of the volatility of her work, graciously takes great care of her audience. The delicate balance she was maintaining (at times tipped by a brusque question from an audience member) was brutally toppled when she was suddenly asked to put her clothes on and stop her piece. Of course the person who fell needed help, and the piece should have been stopped for that; but what were the people at Lower Links so afraid the police might see? There’s full nudity onstage at every “legitimate” theater in town. And I would lay even money there was a plainclothes cop in the audience anyway. While I applaud Lower Links’ effort to combat censorship–they’re presenting a series of works this month that some have deemed obscene–I hope that they will examine the haste with which they knuckled under to the prevailing political climate. They are rightfully proud to present Annie Sprinkle, and should sooner ask a cop to take his uniform off than ask her to put hers back on.
