PSYCHO BEACH PARTY
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Now a new company–the Red Bones Theatre, located in an appropriately edgy Uptown neighborhood–has produced Busch’s Psycho Beach Party. The play begins as a simple parody of beach-party movies–all but parodies to begin with–but quickly becomes more complex and perverse. Busch adds to the original mixture parodies of Hollywood psychological melodramas (The Three Faces of Eve, Spellbound) and plenty of camp humor, including a protagonist written to be played in drag.
Originally entitled Gidget Goes Psychotic, until Busch found the title “too specific and limiting,” Psycho Beach Party tells the story of an underdeveloped 15-year-old surfer girl named Chicklet (played with fitting perkiness by Jerry Skagerberg). She has a Gidget-like tendency to address the audience in cute monologues: “My name’s Chicklet. Sort of a kooky name and believe me, it has nothing to do with chewing gum.” And she shares Gidget’s desperate longing to be accepted by the beach-bumming surfer guys.
The theater space, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired. It was thrown together in little more than three weeks, but that doesn’t redeem the auditorium’s PTA-style seating arrangement–eight or so rows of simple folding chairs–which virtually guarantees that there’s not a good seat in the house. (I was in the second row and still had my view of the stage partially obstructed by a man who rudely insisted on wearing his head throughout the performance.)
