Playwright: The Performers
At: Clove Productions, Peter Jones Galley, 1806 W. Cuyler
Phone: 773-914-3330; $15-$17
Runs through: Sept. 22
BY Jonathan Abarbanel
Michael Martin and his Great Beast Theatre Company created Beast Women in 1997 as a showcase for female artists. He asked participants to 'be bold, be original and do not bash the men folk,' according to Michelle Power, who emcees the present performances. Managed by Jillian Erickson, Beast Women continued until 2002, when Great Beast disbanded. Now Erickson and Power have revived Beast Women on Friday and Saturday nights at the informal Peter Jones Gallery. From a roster of 20 singers, dancers, monologists, musicians, performance artists, poets and martial artists, each 90-minute variety show offers some eight or 10 of them. Erickson and Power say Beast Women will do other projects in the future.
The performance I attended opened and closed with contrasting love songs ( love triumphant and not ) played and sung by Diana Lawrence. She was particularly pleasing because ( a ) she rendered the only live music of the evening and ( b ) she was good, closing the night with an unexpected musical comedy turn. The acts in between included four monologs, a striptease, a dance duo and a silent physical performance piece. The strength of each ebbed and flowed with the degree of novelty, the connection made between artists and any given audience member, and the increasing closeness ( even with fans running ) of the unventilated room.
Sarah Bendix—with pushed-up décolletage and masked face—charmed us with her silent performance piece in which she passed around cookies and encouraged the audience to comment and talk. JT Newman ( who, with colleague Beast Woman Nikki Patin, produces the Wednesday night Dyke Mic 2.0 at the Center on Halsted ) surprised us with the evening's only multimedia piece. It began as a lament about motherhood and separation and ended as a strip performed to a totally soulful version of the Broadway song Feeling Good.
The evening's most erotic act belonged to a courtship dance between Gilliam Weston as Siren Jinx and Lindsey Marks as Lady Jack. Dressed, respectively, in clinging white and black outfits, the youthful Weston and Marks were lithe, lovely and sensual.
The monologists offered varied styles and themes, reaching conclusions unanticipated from their opening gambits. Kelsey Huff commented on religious hypocrisy ( effective, but she could edit more ) , while Jillian Erickson used her beater car to underscore man's inhumanity. Kendra Stevens, in a little red dress, was pleasing in presentation—although her tale of a child with an alcoholic parent was a familiar one. Mannish Kelly Anchors made the best impression with her highly physical routine about a police scanner and a homeless woman on Christmas Eve. However, four monologs out of eight acts was one monologue too many. A martial arts act or more live music would have made a better mix on this particular evening.