"There's no place like..."
Feb. 3rd, 2006 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidLast night I went to see Home (Jess Martin and Queer Soup) at the BCA. The play is an exploration of gender and gender roles, as well as looking at religious faith.
It all starts when Lulu comes home to find her grandfather (her grandparents raised her) dead... of ovarian cancer. Which makes her flip out, pretty much, as she tries to deal with this person, her grandfather, the preacher whose footsteps she was following in his church, now shown, in her eyes, anyway, to be a liar. She lashes out at her grandmother, and doesn't listen to her girlfriend Kai, either. Kai has gender issues of her own, describing herself as "gender fuzzy with a cock ring on top." She's a person who'd rather not have pronouns applied to her, as far as I can understand, wanting to be a person, but not a particularly gendered one. Despite her gritty exterior, it's Kai who has compassion for Lulu's grandparents. Lulu is too much in the middle of her own maelstrom to see anyone else's pain. And she's the one who will give the eulogy. Will she remember the grandfather she knew, or the born-female person she didn't, but she feels is 'the truth' (and let the congregation rip memories to shreds)?
There are four actors, because the grandfather is there the whole time, watching and sometimes talking with one other person, in memory or in spirit, it doesn't really matter.
It's an intense performance, 90 minutes straight through without an intermission to let off steam. It left me with a number of questions. In the play, it's confirmed that Lulu's biological grandparent is her grandfather, and her grandparents met after he'd become a preacher. Did he take a year off from preaching to have a child? Or was there already a child? (Wouldn't it be difficult to be a single father preacher in those days? In the moral example sense, not practicalities of time and so on.) Why couldn't Lulu, who'd been raised in the church even as she'd been sheltered in the church, have foreseen any of the destruction Kai told her would happen? Why did Lulu see it as her job to find repentance and forgiveness for her grandfather? If her grandfather was so unable to talk to Lulu about it, why didn't he write a letter for her to get after his death (he knew he had some kind of cancer, and refused medical care)? Why didn't her grandmother tell her what she could tell Kai about this (though family dynamics can make things difficult, I do know that)?
Toni Amato plays the grandfather; I finally remembered why the name seemed familiar, from one Writers With Drinks. Oddly, though, the actor who seemed to ring bells by face was playing Kai. I'm still not sure why that would be.
Oh, and this will likely be the only play I see this year with such casual use of silicone and a removable soul patch.
It all starts when Lulu comes home to find her grandfather (her grandparents raised her) dead... of ovarian cancer. Which makes her flip out, pretty much, as she tries to deal with this person, her grandfather, the preacher whose footsteps she was following in his church, now shown, in her eyes, anyway, to be a liar. She lashes out at her grandmother, and doesn't listen to her girlfriend Kai, either. Kai has gender issues of her own, describing herself as "gender fuzzy with a cock ring on top." She's a person who'd rather not have pronouns applied to her, as far as I can understand, wanting to be a person, but not a particularly gendered one. Despite her gritty exterior, it's Kai who has compassion for Lulu's grandparents. Lulu is too much in the middle of her own maelstrom to see anyone else's pain. And she's the one who will give the eulogy. Will she remember the grandfather she knew, or the born-female person she didn't, but she feels is 'the truth' (and let the congregation rip memories to shreds)?
There are four actors, because the grandfather is there the whole time, watching and sometimes talking with one other person, in memory or in spirit, it doesn't really matter.
It's an intense performance, 90 minutes straight through without an intermission to let off steam. It left me with a number of questions. In the play, it's confirmed that Lulu's biological grandparent is her grandfather, and her grandparents met after he'd become a preacher. Did he take a year off from preaching to have a child? Or was there already a child? (Wouldn't it be difficult to be a single father preacher in those days? In the moral example sense, not practicalities of time and so on.) Why couldn't Lulu, who'd been raised in the church even as she'd been sheltered in the church, have foreseen any of the destruction Kai told her would happen? Why did Lulu see it as her job to find repentance and forgiveness for her grandfather? If her grandfather was so unable to talk to Lulu about it, why didn't he write a letter for her to get after his death (he knew he had some kind of cancer, and refused medical care)? Why didn't her grandmother tell her what she could tell Kai about this (though family dynamics can make things difficult, I do know that)?
Toni Amato plays the grandfather; I finally remembered why the name seemed familiar, from one Writers With Drinks. Oddly, though, the actor who seemed to ring bells by face was playing Kai. I'm still not sure why that would be.
Oh, and this will likely be the only play I see this year with such casual use of silicone and a removable soul patch.