RENO ONCE REMOVED
Now pacing back and forth, Reno speaks to us about the fact that the English language is skewed toward a male perspective. Take the words “wo-man” and “per-son,” she says. This particular brand of feminism seems a bit standard, however, and the capacity audience is not quite there with her yet. She paces, looking almost searchingly at each face as she tries to bring the crowd around to her universe. It happens when she insists on being called a “wo” or a “per.”
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This is performance art, but this is also funny. It’s not slapstick or pratfalls, it’s not what has become in most cases the predictable comedy of HBO. Immediately her body moves call to mind vaudevillians like Ed Wynn, yet her at times dark delivery also recalls such performance artists as Eric Bogosian. In an adoring Village Voice review she was called “a shaman,” and indeed she seems a self-deprecating, vexed, hexed sorceress/lightning rod of the disenfranchised 90s, transforming the hurts of the 80s with her humor. Walking to a can of Diet Pepsi perched on a black stool, she pops it open, and the familiar “pssssht!” makes the audience giggle. She tells us that when she took drugs she never touched the stuff–“I wouldn’t want to put all those chemicals in my body!” She laughs, takes a swig, and her one-woman show is now going full tilt.
Reno’s a town crier, a news reporter having a nervous breakdown, a friend, a sister you hate and love, your friend’s mother who confides in you, your friend, your own mother, your aunt, someone you met on a bus once, an exorcist. She’s an intriguing combination of personae, of opposites: her hair is tipped blond, yet her roots are dark and appear to be graying; her Hispanic features could as easily be those of an Italian, Greek, or Russian Jew. In terms of appearance alone, I can imagine her swathed in mink at the cosmetics counter of Saks Fifth Avenue and as a street urchin. You can imagine her as your fifth-grade math teacher or the class clown–she’s that familiar and accessible.
