From: owner-chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org (chakram-refugees-digest) To: chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org Subject: chakram-refugees-digest V2 #55 Reply-To: chakram-refugees@smoe.org Sender: owner-chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk chakram-refugees-digest Thursday, February 28 2002 Volume 02 : Number 055 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [chakram-refugees] Vagina Monologues [cr ] Re: [chakram-refugees] RE Fan Club Kit [BElannafan@aol.com] [chakram-refugees] All but impossible trivia question ["H.J.J. Hewitt" Subject: [chakram-refugees] Vagina Monologues I guess, having seen it, I should describe it for the list. Trouble is, I'm not very good at describing such things. So, I'll cheat and quote the Herald review (which I think is a pretty good and accurate description). <<<<< http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?thesection=entertainment&thesubsection=&storyID=939528 Madeleine Sami, Lucy Lawless and Danielle Cormack bring to life the many women's stories of The Vagina Monologues. Trio capture vast range of experiences 16.02.2002 By FRANCIS TILL The Vagina Monologues: Three barefoot actors, 21 scenes, at least 100 characters, 32 orgasms, and one ubiquitous anatomical feature (with about a thousand names). First, the play is so well and deeply written that it deserves extraordinarily talented actors and the kind of insightful, transparent direction provided by Oliver Driver in this production. Because it is part-tract, it sometimes needs them. It gets them here. In the beginning, the stage lights go up before the house lights go down, putting us all in common space. We are confronted with three of New Zealand's finest actresses in street clothes, sitting in unremarkable chairs, looking out at the audience. There is a very long silence. "I bet you're worried," says one. The house erupts in laughter because, yes, we were. We shouldn't have been. Brilliantly conceived and realised characters begin tumbling out from that first moment, sometimes in isolation, often interacting, making exotic and challenging issues one might have thought were settled with the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves. They weren't. In one scene, the women toss dozens of living euphemisms (pooki, Gladys Siegelman, toadie) across the stage at one another in a ribald contest - in another, they discuss what their vaginas might wear, were they to dress up (a beret, a pinafore). But it is the core monologues - the dozen or so stories told under solitary spotlights - that are the main focus here. Danielle Cormack and Madeleine Sami were made for these parts - so much so, it almost seems the roles were written for them. Each monologue is a vignette and each vignette is a life, complete and distinct from any of the others, with one exception: the vagina. Cormack's rendition of a very old virgin talking reluctantly about her "down theres" is a performance that puts even the text in shadow, and the repertoire of orgasms she displays as "The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy" elevates the moan from punctuation to language. Sami's tough-kid encounter with a seductive secretary is a production of its own, as well, and she takes the house away during a scene called "Reclaiming C-" - to the point that the audience not only chants her power word, but sings it, happily. If Lucy Lawless came third in the trio, it was not by much. Yes, she can act. No, there was not a single trace of Xena. She handled the lighter bits with obvious relish, and when she took on the character of a Bosnian woman who had been raped with a rifle, the death on her face, the emptiness of her voice, were shattering. When author Eve Ensler first started performing the 80-90 minute Vagina Monologues off-Broadway in 1996, she did it solo. She still does performances that way sometimes - in a special Valentine's Day documentary/performance on HBO that debuted in America last week, for example. But the play is more often (and perhaps more rationally) performed by a trio, as here with Cormack, Sami and Lawless, who morph from one persona to the next as they live out the stories Ensler developed out of interviews with more than 200 women about, well, their vaginas. Glenn Close has famously undertaken performances of this play, as have such wildly diverse women as Winona Ryder, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Calista Flockhart, Cate Blanchett, Gillian Anderson, Kate Winslet and Ruby Wax. Overall, the play is hugely comic even though some horrifying material surfaces now and again - the monologues are interspersed with painfully explicit asides describing the ongoing practice of female circumcision, for example. In the end, though, those moments prove critical to the dramatic structure, fitting within the weave of the play as a series of hard, tight knots. Structurally, the play can be seen as a kind of rolling triptych, the central monologues leavened by frothy dialogues on one side and underpinned by recitations of appalling fact on the other. >>>>>>>>>>>>>> What she said. OK, OK, I'll add a very few comments..... There were the 3 of them on a bare stage, sitting in chairs. Madeleine Sami was on the left, in a white plastic chair with arms (like garden furniture); LL in the middle, in a rather high narrow armchair; and Danielle on the right, in a big armchair that gave her room to sprawl around. The 3 of them seemed very relaxed with each other. They were lit up by spotlights - sometimes all 3, sometimes just one or two of them, depending who was talking at the time. Madeleine Sami sat fairly upright on her chair the whole time. Lucy at time pulled her knees up under her, or shifted around a bit, but looked quite comfortable. And, umm, visbly pregnant but not obtrusively so. DC flopped all over her chair as the mood took her. Probably the most dominant outgoing one was DC, as I'd expect. Her collection of moans was really funny... her 'bisexual feminist moan' was a muted variant of the Xena yell and got a grin from LL (and a laugh from the audience). LL didn't look in the least bit Xena-ish, she's wearing - well, see the Listener article (probably on MaryD's site) for her current hairstyle. As for what she was wearing, I think it was something like a large T-shirt under a jacket, and jeans. Or something like that, I'm _no_ expert on clothing. I was sitting well back in the theatre, and they were speaking in a conversational tone, and the sound system was not turned up very high - I'm not good at hearing what's said in those circumstances so some of it I missed. What I did hear was good, and mostly very amusing. When I say that - it is _not_ a comedy! Most of the stories are told with a dry wit and an excellent characterisation that makes them humorous in themselves. For example DC's rendition of the Scoittish lady who was told by her mother that 'it' looked ugly, so she never looked at 'it' and preferred to imagine it furnished with little sofa cushions and the like. Then one day she met Bob, who was a very ordinary guy - had nothing special about him at all - 'he wasnae even an alcoholic' - but it turned out that what he liked most was to look at 'it'. And because he thought it looked so nice, she started to believe it must be rather special too. But you really have to hear Danielle performing it to appreciate the story fully - it's all in the timing and the delivery. Actually, the performance would make a very good TV / video - with a close-up camera on each actor and one overall camera..... because this sort of performance is so dependent on little nuances of expression by the actors. I could appreciate them from the rear of the theatre, but I think they'd have more impact in close-up. I'll echo what the Herald article said - DC and Madeleine Sami seemed to take the most prominent role, with LL just a little bit less prominent. But she was still good in the part. I have no doubt if it was performed as a one-woman show, any one of them could do a very good job of it. The show lasted a little over an hour and a half, IIRC, and the time seemed to go quicker. It never dragged. Oh, and just two 50-ish people (probably a married couple) walked out when Madeleine Sami started getting the audience to recite the 'C' word. T ========================================================= This has been a message to the chakram-refugees list. To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe chakram-refugees" in the message body. Contact meth@smoe.org with any questions or problems. ========================================================= ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 10:33:58 EST From: BElannafan@aol.com Subject: Re: [chakram-refugees] RE Fan Club Kit I'm not picking on cande here, just using her comments to bounce my response off of. I also wanted to respond to someone else's previous post about the Kit #5 but lost the post. In a message dated 2/25/2002 06:22:43 PM Eastern Standard Time, cande@sunlink.net writes: << I'm always impressed with how hard the Xena people work and their dedication to their work.>> So am I. << I loved FIN and felt Rob was unjustly maligned by the FIN haters.>> There was some maligning that I could Not get behind such as the folks who wished Rob and others the worst and other horrible things and called them horrible names. However I DEFINITELY disagreed with those who thought that Rob was a genius for FIN. I neither thought FIN was a work of genius nor did I think FIN was a truly respectful way to end the TV show Xena; Warrior Princess; for the fans or for the show. I truly felt that FIN was much more of a self-serving insult from Rob and RJ, done for the shock value. Whatever the reason that TPTB did FIN, I did NOT like it. And if this is maligning than I accept that. << I hope they watch this tape and see the effort he, Lucy, and Renee put into this effort. >> Oh, I understand that they put a lot of work into the production of this episode. But that doesn't help me to respect the Episode any more than I did when I first saw it or than I do now. And there is especially nothing that Rob could say that would make me feel any different. Don't get me wrong, I am actually glad and even a little envious of those who have said that the explanation given helped them to come to terms with FIN. As for me there is nothing that could undo the damage of FIN, not Lucy and Renee's hard work, not Rob's reasoning. I took my fan kit #5 and put it in a drawer with the rest. I will one day watch the coffee talk and the making of Gurkan. But as for Rob's interview in Chakram and on the tape... I have no interest. ============================================================ Consideration is given, Respect is earned, Jan. You know you're a redneck Jedi when Darth Vader says' "Come with me, Luke. I am your father and your uncle." ========================================================= This has been a message to the chakram-refugees list. To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe chakram-refugees" in the message body. Contact meth@smoe.org with any questions or problems. ========================================================= ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 20:11:29 -0600 From: "H.J.J. Hewitt" Subject: [chakram-refugees] All but impossible trivia question Mirrordrum noted-- >during the coffee talk, lucy says that she actually did the fire-breathing >scene in herself because it was the last episode and she thought >the fans deserved it. My trivia question is this-- What is the earliest documented instance of Lucy having seen the fire-breathing trick? TEXena ========================================================= This has been a message to the chakram-refugees list. To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe chakram-refugees" in the message body. Contact meth@smoe.org with any questions or problems. ========================================================= ------------------------------ End of chakram-refugees-digest V2 #55 *************************************