Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte’s amorphous variety show aims to be a queer spectacle but is mostly improv strung together with non sequiturs.
The usually unassuming Soho Rep entrance is now flanked by giant labia glinting with gold-and-fuchsia sequins. Beyond them, a flamingo-pink-hued tunnel leads to the intimate stage, where a colossal pair of brassy legs are splayed as if for a gynecological exam in an amusement park fun house.
Much of what occurs between them during “Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month,” an amorphous, slap-and-tickle variety show, seems designed to shock audiences while gingerly reinforcing their presumed liberal politics. Once it quickly achieves both, “Snatch Adams” continues to push its crotch-in-your-face humor further over the top, but to diminishing returns.
The action onstage tests the limits of what can be described in print. So here is my attempt at a tame sampling.
The creator and performer Becca Blackwell (“Is This a Room?”), dressed for the role of Snatch in a towering vagina costume with patches of flesh-colored felt and feathers, asks an audience volunteer to locate the clitoris, represented on Blackwell’s face by a squeaky red clown nose (the crafty and audacious production design is by Greg Corbino). Amanda Duarte, who co-stars as Tainty, wears a puckered-anus headpiece and balloon-size testicles that swing from her shoulders. The getup’s missing member, she explains, was a casualty of #MeToo.
Looking like doctor’s office diagrams come to life to a patient on LSD, the performers retreat behind a pair of pink desks, mics in hand, and proceed to banter. Duarte, who also controls the sound effects (think air horns and crickets), appears to follow a run of show on a laptop. But after the initial sight gags and a steady flow of low-hanging puns, “Snatch Adams,” presented in association with the Bushwick Starr, consists mostly of improv strung together with non sequiturs.
Duarte, the creator of a recurring comedy night for discarded jokes, plays a gruff and gleefully vulgar captain to Blackwell’s gentle and almost childlike jester, who at times seems adrift. (“What do we do now?” Blackwell repeats sincerely between several bits. In an underdeveloped narrative frame, Snatch is newly unemployed from Planned Parenthood.) They are joined at intervals by Amando Houser and Becky Hermenze, who gamely act out parody commercials, or “capitalism breaks,” for products like poppers and period cups.
Directed by Jess Barbagallo, who also developed the show with Corbino, “Snatch Adams” has the freewheeling style of late-night sketch comedy and the queer, campy aesthetic of downtown avant-garde theater, where Blackwell has for years worked to expand understanding of gender diversity. But this is not a show that bristles with punk resistance, alongside its well-justified warning about the use of bodily secretions. For much of their 90 minutes onstage, Blackwell and Duarte simply seem to be riffing off each other while daring the audience to be grossed out. But destigmatizing genitals and menstruation is a low bar, especially for this crowd.
Attempts to address fraught issues head-on are uneasy and fall flat. In one early segment, Blackwell reads sobering headlines about the daily challenges facing women and L.G.B.T.Q. people on a local level. Duarte punctuates each one with a fart sound. (Cue the crickets.)
At each performance, interviews with a surprise guest promise to be a wild card. Bridget Everett’s entrance on the night I attended was like a blast of pure oxygen: finally a comedian who wasn’t overcommitted to a bit. Everett talked frankly about grief and her body in a way that cut deeper than anything that had come before.
It’s when Blackwell steps out of the act at the end, and tries to point out the arbitrary boundaries that society erects between us, that “Snatch Adams” finally seems to have something to say. If only it had been more explicit earlier.
Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month
Through Dec. 3 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: about 1 hour 30 minutes, depending on the special guest.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
