Nip/Tuck meets Mean Girls meets The Dumb Waiter meets Perez Hilton meets Teen Vogue meets Cinderella, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty in Redmoon Theater's wildly over-the-top deconstruction of the alternately cruel, bizarre and flat-out ridiculous forces that shape girl culture. Welcome to The Princess Club, a world where the word 'celebutard' is absolutely indispensible.___________
Photo: The Princess Club. Photo by Sean Williams
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Credit creator Jim Lasko, who co-directs with cast member Vanessa Stalling, for ensuring that the mash-up of endlessly stupid and infinitely powerful cultural influences is never overwhelming. From Brit-Brit and LiLo to crack and smack, the dangerous universe of girls takes on feverishly absurdist proportions as a quintet of aspiring supermodels and boytoys play dangerous games in an abandoned warehouse ( wonderfully evocative work by Andrei Onegin ) , where an ominously creaking freight elevator signals trouble of all kinds. This is a culture of seven-word vocabularies ( Oh, my God! Seriously! Like, you guys!' ) and desperate, do-it-yourself body modification undertaken with rusty lawn tools. Earlier this month, the Center for Disease Control reported that the suicide rate among girls 10 to 14 spiked 76 percent between 2003 and 2004. The pressures that result in such dire statistics show up in The Princess Club's subversive commentary on a culture defined by nightmarish absurdities. Only in the land of the grotesque do rich girls starve themselves to death while the likes of Kathy Griffin natters on national television about the wonders of slicing your face open in the service of a good brow lift.
Not that The Princess Club dwells in darkness—far from it. This is an often funny and always visually enchanting production as well as a comprehensive, kinetic portrait of the pernicious, insidious influences that bombard girls their every conscious moment. But for all its smarts and wit, The Princess Club stumbles in some respects. It takes forever to get going, and then becomes mired in repetitiveness, a fault that edges into pretention as points are hammered home again and again and again and again. And yet again, lest you missed it the first four times.
Take, for example, the scene wherein a quartet of Princesses teaches a new girl the proper way to walk and talk. The grotesque runway strut—butt and chest thrust outward, chin held haughtily high, arms swerving with meaningless arrogance—is demonstrated over and over, as is the almost unintelligibly exaggerated mindless Valley Speak. It's funny and insightful the first two times around; the fourth and fifth, it's merely self-indulgent.
That said, the stage pictures are knockouts. Costume designer Joel Klaff has turned cast members into living sculptures, stuffed and cinched effigies of Barbie dolls and inflatable sex dolls, complete with towering heels, Crayola make-up misshapen feet and plumped-to-extremes derrieres. As the parade of hazards winds to its horrifying ( and inevitable ) conclusion, you can't help but marvel at the superhuman strength girls need just to survive adolescence.
Playwright: Jim Lasko, developed with Kasey Foster, Judith Lesser, Molly Plunk, and Lauren Sharpe.
At: Redmoon Theater at Redmoon Central, 1463 W. Hubbard. Phone: 312-850-8440; $15-$30. Runs through: Oct. 7
