GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS, LIVE ON STAGE, TOTALLY RUDE
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When Dot, a slim, pretty newcomer, applies for a dancing job at Babe’s, Chartreuse reacts with intense ambivalence–arguing on Dot’s behalf with the skeptical club owner and teaching Dot the tricks of the trade on one hand, but quivering with paranoid competitiveness on the other. But Dot has more on her mind than vying for Chartreuse’s tacky throne. A self-described “postfeminist” performance artist and photographer, Dot says she has come to this low-rent strip joint to pick up some moves for her stage work. (“I was in a performance piece once where I rolled around naked in red, white, and blue paint while singing the national anthem.”) But her real intent is to document the nightlife netherworld inhabited by Chartreuse and the other employees at Babe’s for a photo essay “examining the performance persona in a blue-collar culture.” Dot takes her photos–and the club’s denizens find them all too revealing when they attend her gallery opening.
There, in a nutshell, is the simple, streamlined story into which Evans artfully integrates a wonderful collection of characters, some marvelously funny dialogue, and a hefty dose of disturbing dialectic that could make Girls, Girls, Girls quite controversial. The clash of mind-sets and motivations that Chartreuse and Dot represent raises basic, valuable questions about sexuality, ego, money, and artistic intention, and does so in a pointedly funny way that some audiences might find uncomfortably sharp, especially in the current arts-bashing climate created by the “Gang of Fear” (as Village Voice writer C. Carr has so aptly dubbed the censorious cabal headed by Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schlafly).
