SMOOCH MUSIC
Still, novels, films, plays, and TV shows continue to put forth the party line. And the propagandists make no distinction between love and morbid dependency, for example, or mere sexual attraction. Yet no one has been willing to speak out and label this propaganda for the nonsense it is.
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No one, that is, except David Cale. In Smooch Music, his ingenious solo performance at the Goodman Theatre Studio, he treats romance with refreshing irreverence, blending fantasy, dreams, and anecdotes into a painfully graphic picture of love’s real face.
Another theme Cale returns to again and again is the sheer weirdness of sexual behavior. An adolescent boy wanting to impress his friends uses a vacuum cleaner to produce “love bites” on his neck. “Jesus! He’s had sex again! How do you do it?” they exclaim. And he–or is it another chararcter?–describes a girlfriend who, for no apparent reason, dubbed her diaphragm “Donna Summer.” “Slow down–I have to get Donna,” she would say to him.
The music, by Roy Nathanson, is the ideal complement to Cale’s monologue, because Smooch Music is an antilove song that Cale “sings” with mischievous glee. Yet this is not a song that’s really against love, and it certainly isn’t another maudlin ballad about unrequited love. Instead Cale exposes the dark underside of love–an area scrupulously avoided by the propagandists of romance–and has a good laugh at what he finds there.
