PEEPSHOW
So have we come to the point where avant-garde theater can’t get arrested in this town? Not even highly pedigreed, handsomely mounted, self-consciously erotic avant-garde theater? Or is it just that Peepshow is nothing to get excited over?
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Reason number one, there’s that pedigree. Peepshow has impeccable credentials. The playwright is George Tabori, author of Brecht on Brecht, Flight Into Egypt, and the screenplays of Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony and Hitchcock’s I Confess–a man who at 77 is still referred to as an enfant terrible. The director, Henryk Baranowski, has directed Handke, Genet, Witold Gombrowicz, and adaptations of Kafka and Joyce, both in his native Poland and more recently in Berlin. The Eastern European connection alone would make this a hard show to dismiss. But these are also serious, acknowledged men of the theater.
Until the big payoff, that is, when she gives him a pair of presents to unwrap: a big rubber phallus and a fetus in a bottle. “He didn’t want to be born,” she tells him. “Your spitting image.”
Willie’s women all have fine moments, and they all sing well. I was especially taken by Kimberly Bruce’s style–warm and bluesy with a feeling of abandon. It’s hard to say how it fit in with the rest of the production, but it was a pleasure to hear.
