MUSIC KILLS A MEMORY
at ‘Od’s Blood Theatre
–Jim Carroll
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Music Kills a Memory takes the form of a lounge act, meandering its way with songs and stories through the lives of three women who meet at a Sex Addicts Anonymous session and form a singing group with silent, mysterious accompanist Monty Carlyle (Chuck Larsen). Each of the women has a wildly different personality and musical style. One is a refined, spangled and feathered torch-song heroine, the toast of gay bars throughout the country (Shane Taylor). Another is a rough, tough, only-wears-black type (Karol Kent) who sings a lot of Janis Joplin and Cher. The third (Paula Killen) is a would-be songbird whose desire outweighs her lack of training and whose songs tend toward country and soft rock.
In order to escape retribution, and to truly set herself free, she hops in an RV with the two other women and Monty the accompanist (who always knows what to do), and they begin the Easy Does It Tour–all love songs, all the time. Each evening ends with a rendition of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”
The Performers Under Stress production of Dead Soldier Walks Home, which protests the war in the gulf, is a reminder that (as Norman Mailer says about Brett Easton Ellis’s new book) “attempts to create art can be as intolerable as foul manners.” Dead Soldier Walks Home is more than the artistic equivalent of talking with a full mouth. It’s the artistic equivalent of spitting out the food on the table and then passing out on top of the hostess.
