Playwright: Stephanie Shaw
At: Live Bait Theatre
Phone: (773) 871-1212; $10
Runs through: Aug. 29
You probably never have drawn parallels between the medieval science of alchemy, the film The Exorcist, and baby poop; but you will after viewing Stephanie Shaw's Materia Prima, one of the featured works in this year's Fillet of Solo Festival at Live Bait Theatre. Fillet of Solo also offers one-person works written and performed by a dozen other artists in a rotating schedule through the end of the month. At $10 a ticket, you probably can't go wrong with any of the programs, several of which feature the work of gay artists, among them David Kodeski and Edward Thomas-Herrera.
Indeed, Thomas-Herrera has directed Ms. Shaw in her one-hour excursion into the world of transformations, in which primary matter—sulphur, mercury, food—is stewed into redolent garbage, whether the putrefaction of the alchemist or the 'poo the size of Rhode Island' of Ms. Shaw's three-year-old daughter. More significantly, Materia Prima is about the spiritual search for life's sense, if not life's meaning. Ms. Shaw is too sharp to go for the meaning of life, which she understands is as much a chimera as the Philosopher's Stone, the long-sought and never-found universal panacea of the alchemist. 'Is a scatological journey any different than a spiritual one?' she asks. 'Is psychosis that different from satori?'
One thing alchemists claimed they could do, but dare not in the face of religious authority, was cook up a homunculus; a little humanoid being. Of course, that's exactly what would-be parents do, and a babe or small child is, indeed, homunculus-like; a little creature not yet fully formed or completely human. However, Shaw accepts the alchemist's principle that no one thing can be viewed in isolation, but only in relationship to everything else. Shaw's daughter's poo is proof of God as surely as alchemists believed that changing lead to gold would be proof of God. 'If you cook all the loose ends long enough, you will have a spaghetti dinner,' Shaw concludes in a domestic reductio not-quite-ad-absurdum.
So, Shaw packs a lot of wit, thought and entertainment into her one hour, appearing before us in a nightgown and bathrobe, the slightly blowzy, sleepy Mom in the kitchen, the TV flashing blue in the background.
Herrera-Thomas keeps the presentation simple and direct. In a one-person show, the performer either is talking to unseen people on stage, or to the audience directly, which is the case here. The pre-show music (selected by Thomas-Herrera or sound designer Blayne Greiner) features goofy rejects from The Annoying Music Show, including the worst rendition of the Lord's Prayer I've ever heard. Be sure to take your seat early.