THE WELL OF HORNINESS
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The title, a not so gentle takeoff on Radclyffe Hall’s classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, is the first of this romp’s many in-jokes. Staged as a radio broadcast from “WLEZ,” the play includes hilarious sound effects, cardboard cutouts, corny commercials, an intrusively officious narrator, and the occasional temper tantrum from a sensitive artiste.
Set in a town “where men are men and so are the women,” the shamelessly silly tale is the “saga of one woman’s sojourn in a cesspool.” Its embattled heroine is the ingenue Vicki, a “would-be word processor with a past she can’t outrun” (her profession only the first of a string of anachronisms). Vicki is engaged to dumb-as-a-boulder Rod, a salesman at the House of Shag ‘n’ Stuff (“where tomorrow’s carpets are here today”). What Rod doesn’t suspect is that Vicki is a member of the Tri Delta Tribades, the “sorority of sin.”
Does Garnet rescue Vicki from the slammer before Babs can plug them both? And will Garnet give in to the “wake-up call to her crotch” that Vicki increasingly inspires? Well, let’s just say that a plot is a terrible thing to waste.
