Lilly
Abby Schachner at Live Bait Theater, through August 2
Schachner’s appearances at the Voltaire fund-raisers in May and June also illustrated the sheer fecundity of her mind. Even when she’s performing her own tried-and-true material, such as the killing bit in which she paints a Hitler mustache on an anorexic supermodel and proceeds to skewer the fat-obsessed fashion industry, she can’t help but interrupt her routine to make new comments. And often these are as funny and pointed as her script–hardly surprising, considering that she has an extensive background in improv.
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Even though Schachner clearly favors Lilly and puts her struggle for selfhood and independence in the most favorable light, she doesn’t neglect Lilly’s mother. Rather she takes pains to show us the full woman, the scars and the claws, the vulnerability and the homophobia–the result of her husband’s having come out as a gay man just prior to deserting the family. The most resonant scenes are those in which Lilly’s mother, poised at a mirror preening, stares at her reflection while she speaks to Lilly–at once Narcissus transfixed by her own image and Snow White’s resentful stepmother, wishing the worst for her beautiful daughter.
This is especially true of Anna Wagner, whose personal reminiscence “One Up,” about her first experiences with tampons, is little more than one of those funny, embarrassing stories we tell over dinner. And that’s pretty much how Wagner tells it, embellishing it slightly with appropriate movements, though “One Up” still lacks the vividness and economy of a well-told personal anecdote. Similarly, Milwaukee-based performer Kristi Lynn Johnson doesn’t yet have the chops to bring to life her sometimes intense experiences as a white teacher in a mostly black school. Instead she gives us mostly stage busywork (filling a flowerpot with black, black soil) and a host of important ideas to ponder (homophobia is bad, racism is not good, murder is awful).
