Love, Janis
By Jack Helbig
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Myler soft-pedals everything dark in Joplin’s story. He alludes only briefly to her drug use and zips even more quickly over her sex life. Even her drinking is treated as something of a joke through most of the show. True, there’s one scene in which Joplin talks about a doctor who warns that she’s damaging her liver, but she quickly dismisses that idea.
In fact Myler’s approach virtually guarantees that little of the real Janis will come through. We learn about her either through letters she wrote to her parents–quoted copiously in Laura Joplin’s book and simply recited onstage here–or through fictional interviews based on material in that memoir. And Joplin’s letters definitely sanitize her experiences in San Francisco. Even as she and the band she joined, Big Brother and the Holding Company, were rising to the top of the music industry, she was telling her mother that if this music thing didn’t work out she’d return to college and lead a more conventional life. A move clearly not in the cards–and not one Joplin wanted.
Myler seems to realize that we’ll be let down every time a song ends and he returns us to the sanitized myth that passes for Joplin’s life story here: he ends the show with a glorious three-song mini concert that leaves us wanting more of Janis. Just the way she left her fans long ago.
But if you’re not moved by the ending of this play, you’re the one with the problem. To fix it you may need to hole up in your room for a weekend and listen to old Janis Joplin records.
