Playwright: Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy
At: Awaken! Performances at the Viaduct, 3100 N. Western Ave.
Phone: (773) 275-2036; $15
Runs through: Dec. 20
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
If a campus sorority heavily into Women's Lib were to stage a show for Rush Week, it might sound like this two-character sketch comedy revue. Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy's Kathy and Mo Show, later published under the title Parallel Lives, might have garnered an Obie in 1989, but in 2003, its collegiate humor comes off as quaint as the stereotypes it proposes to ridicule.
Take the episode in a rural bar where a drunken cowboy, played at full hee-haw honk, pays clumsy courtship to a woman who speaks in the refined locutions of a smart, introspective, articulate cosmopolitan cognizant of her feelings and goals, even to apprising us of why she tolerates such attentions. Or the scenario focusing on a pair of elderly matrons sporting Long Island accents and wardrobes from circa 1946, attending a performance art concert at the 'chemical-free, meat-free, man-free' Las Hermanas café as a class project for their Women's Studies extension course. After mocking these crones for their gaucherie, the authors allow one of them to—aaaw—accept her nephew's admission of homosexuality.
On the other hand, a scene that scoffs at euphemisms for menstruation—while never itself departing from them—is redeemed by its speculations on the possibilities if MEN had periods (tampons marketed under the name 'Stud,' for example—'I need the SUPER-PLUS size!'). A woman's grooming rituals mimed to a score of classical music from the Bugs Bunny canon—Flight of the Bumble Bee, Hungarian Rhapsody, etc.—is a cute slapstick turn. And the Las Hermanas interpretive-dance presentation in praise of Sisterhood ('Oh, golden labia of goddess love!') skewers the clichés of an aesthetic now thankfully passé.
Many of those same clichés mar the universe of Parallel Lives. (Straight men are assholes, gay men are sweeties, and the world was created by two ANGELS—isn't that adorable?) But under Jennifer E. Cox' direction, Lisa Samra and Bev Spangler embrace their mothball-scented material with winsome gusto, projecting wholesome charm with all their might while bumping chests and yelping in girlish glee. If the opening-night response is any indication, their industry should satisfy audiences for whom these giggles are fresh news.
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