A Talk Show Host by Day, a Soul Eater by Night
Alexis SoloskiDecember 12, 2014: Hey, remember that heroic myth where a thought springs fully formed from a Marie Antoinette wig, befriends a beached whale and does deadly battle with Ellen DeGeneres? Me neither. Kristine Haruna Lee’s lively, haphazard War Lesbian, at Dixon Place, whirls together Hesiod’s poem Theogony with daytime talk shows, horror movies, nature documentaries, lesbian pulp fiction and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. It is a show so full of impulses and ideas and splendid, fractious energy that it’s an hour or so before you begin to suspect that it may not be about much of anything at all. On a stage lavishly cluttered with sheets of crumpled paper, a womb (Jessica Almasy) in an elaborate headdress births a thought (Erin Markey). The demigod Ellen DeGeneres (Ms. Lee) names that thought Sedna. Despite the cropped hair and masculine tailoring, this demonic figure may not be the Ellen you know and supposedly love. “I’m ripping your tiny little souls in half and eating it on a silver platter with other fine expensive animal guts and grapes,” she says cheerily.
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