PAT’S PLATFORM
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The audience–if it’s willing to deal with the shows lasting forever and sometimes spotlighting performers who shouldn’t have been let out of their performance classes–benefits from being able to sample local talent and trends. Besides, every now and again something wonderful happens. Paula Killen might pop by and sing a torch song, as she did a couple of weeks ago at Lower Links for one of Lawrence Steger’s programs. Or D. Travers Scott might do a delicious little bit that wouldn’t fit in his longer solo shows, on the political implications of who’s top or bottom in a gay male sexual relationship. Or on a really lucky night Iris Moore, one of the city’s most powerful and provocative performers, might make one of her rare appearances.
Nothing so wonderful happened last Wednesday night when Pat O’Donnell, a young and promising performance artist, hosted “Pat’s Platform,” a revue show organized around a 1970s-nostalgia theme. O’Donnell certainly had the right idea. She planned to run a performance piece of her own throughout the program, interrupting performances by her guests. And she invited only five of these–a diverse group that included a poet, a video maker, and a singer. Everything should have run smoothly. But it didn’t.
Douglas followed that with a long, violent piece about beating his mother to a bloody pulp. In a torrent of disconnected imagery, mixed metaphors, and exaggerated description, he wandered aimlessly from one subject to another. None of it covered up the hollowness at the core of his work.
