CANNIBAL CHEERLEADERS ON CRACK
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Last summer Torso Theatre did a bawdy little comedy about three bored west-coasters trying to perk up their sex lives, but critics were quick –almost too quick–to dismiss it as just another bedroom farce. So Torso decided to get more elementary. Instead of the relatively mature pleasures of sex, Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack revels in an earlier obsession–bodily secretions. Under our present laws it is apparently permissible to depict blood, vomit, urine, spittle, and breast milk, along with a man being microwaved into what appears to be mostaccioli, a woman being artificially inseminated with a kitchen baster, and several hapless victims having their adrenal glands forcibly removed with a cocktail fork. But no sex, that motif upon which Torso has built its dramatic reputation. The only nudity in this latest offering consists of one artificial penis and three flashes of bare breasts. When, after making love, a male character attempts to rise from the couch, he is given elaborately contrived instructions on how to put on his underwear onstage without exposing his genitalia. “Now that’s realism!” his partner declares. “That’s not the way Steppenwolf would have done it!” he grumbles.
Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack is more than a two-hour bathroom joke, however. It is set in a future (“sooner than you think,” warns the program) where the temperature has stood at more than 120 degrees for five years but the greenhouse effect is never mentioned. Where abortion has been declared illegal, resulting in a surplus of third-world babies, who are synthesized into various foodstuffs under such names as “Kentucky Fried Chicano” (it gets worse). Where the only women permitted to live in the U.S. are those conforming to an idealized cheerleader persona, that icon having been established by the revolutionary government of white male republicans who deposed the female president and overturned her ban on red meat and organized sports and restored “traditional values.” Where intercorporeal sex has been outlawed in favor of “sim-sex,” an exercise in joint masturbation during which neither partner touches anything but inanimate objects (the most arousing being replicas of natural foods). And where a plentiful supply of drugs keeps everyone serene and compliant–until two infinitesimal particles of the environment (conveniently shaped like human beings) arrive to bring enlightenment. Chaos and carnage accompany this radical change of consciousness, and few survivors are left. The final tableau reflects an acidly cynical indictment of American society.
