POST POST PORN MODERNIST
It’s easy to talk about the crazy, sensationalistic things Annie Sprinkle is doing during her 12-day run at Theater Oobleck. In Post Post Porn Modernist, among other things, she douches and pees onstage. She also displays her cervix to anyone and everyone interested. Even the intermission has its slice of the bizarre: for $5, audience members can have a Polaroid taken of them with Sprinkle’s breasts on their heads.
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Absurd? Of course–but true, too. And that’s what is so unnerving about the show. Certainly Sprinkle exploits her own life, particularly those episodes that involved out-of-the-ordinary sex. But cynical self-exploitation isn’t really her game. Sprinkle is curiously vulnerable throughout.
Though the show has its shock value, none of the shocks seem out of place. It is, after all, autobiographical. Sprinkle’s implicit deal with us is that she won’t judge our responses if we don’t judge her choices. This gives her the license to be as radical as she wants. In the show the lines between the personal, the political, the practical, and the entertaining aren’t just blurred, they’re obliterated.
While she was douching Sprinkle looked up, eyes doelike, and said, “How about that Clarence Thomas?” It was both silly and perfect. There we were, privy to this wildly intimate moment. Were we supposed to look? Were we supposed to act as ho-hum as she was? It’s not as if we actually engaged in political discourse with her after the Thomas line, but it helped defuse the tension. We laughed. And so did she. Hell, doesn’t everyone pee?
Audience identification probably hit its zenith during “The Transformation Salon,” a slide show whose before-and-after shots revealed that thoroughly ordinary women can become–through makeup, costume, and pose–sex goddesses, dominatrixes, the very stuff of wet dreams. (Such transformations made me wonder about all my neighbors’ secret lives.)
