Northern Lights Theatre – Edmonton
By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca
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Review-SLUT-12th-Night-Blog-Liz-Nicholls-April-8-2018 2
S. L. U. T. The funniest set design of the season – and the only one (to my knowledge) that actually engages in smart-ass repartee with the character onstage – is to be found in the Northern Light Theatre season finale.
The outsized letters, 10 or 12 feet high and defined in flashing lightbulbs, spell out the ultimate deal-sealing classdismissed upstaging putdown. SLUT. They glow; they flash on and off, separately and (in peodic displays of collective moral solidarity) together, in the production of Brenda McFarlane’s solo comedy Slut directed and designed by Trevor Schmidt.
The insist on having the last word; hell, they are the last word. Sometimes, the character we meet sits balefully on the U like a swing, or retreats to the L. Sometimes she phones from the T.
You’ve heard the term “the male gaze.” SLUT is “the social gaze.” It’s on Matilda J. McHartle (Michelle Todd), who arrives onstage, hair bouncing in indignation, all in white – in a satin-and-lace corset get-up with stiletto boots – like a big beautiful disgruntled meringue.
Matilda is an accountant who, she assures us, does own glasses and flat black shoes. And, much to her exasperated incredulity she’s been arrested- for indecency and running “a common bawdy house.” How could this happen?
Dander up and nearly squealing with outrage, Matilda is happy to tell us how she’s been framed by her senior citizen high-rise neighbours in revenge for complaining about their garbage and their loud polka party music. ABBA pushes her over the edge. Her nemesis is an ancient widow who, as bad luck would have it, was an exNational Geographic Magazine wildlife photographer with a specialty in night shots. So there’s documentary evidence of our heroine having sex on the hood of her car. With a variety of guys.
Matilda has lovers Oots of them), not clients. She’s an unattached woman who enjoys sex and is generous-minded about sharing that enjoyment widely. She isn’t a madam. Or a prostitute. She’s not a nymphomaniac or “troubled” or out-and-out mentally ill. Ergo she must be a … SLUT.
That’s the sharp-eyed premise, a barbed satirical commentary on our hypocrisy about, and resistance to, liberated female sexuality. Matilda, a wide-eyed Candide in the field of social attitudes apparently, discovers it in the course of the play in which she channels all the characters in her story. Matilda’s stage partner, the light-up SLUT sign, steps brazenly up to it and undermines her confidence.
There’s a cartoon gallery of characters on display in Slut, all channelled by Todd as Matilda. We meet a cop, Detective Bruce, more of a dramatic convenience than a character. His view that males are predatory animals and women are the prey has led to a completely fallow celibate period: he’s waiting for love before he gets laid. There’s the purse-lipped old widow. There’s a sex addiction counsellor, a snazzy call girl, a ditzy girlfriend. And Todd, an eminently likeable performer, has fun with the voices.
But the play has a tendency to repeat and explain itself in thudding add-ons where it might profitably let its oneliners land lightly, for our perusal. In amassing the evidence, for example, Detective Bruce comes to a photo of an x- roommate that Matilda rejects in high dudgeon. “He’s like 22 years old! What do you think I am? Oh right, a prostitute. Because a woman can’t have a few different lovers and not be a whore, right?”
Or this: “They put me in a holding cell with a bunch of women who look like hookers to me. 0 right. They think I’m one too.”
The character we meet in Todd’s performance, child-like and blithely innocent, and pitched high toward wideeyed incredulity and fury, just doesn’t seem likely to say “maybe false bravado would work better than lame confusion.”
But having said that, I must add that Slut, which premiered at the Toronto Fringe in 2000, long before the MeToo reveals of our time, is amusing in its premise and refreshing in its insights. It’s not about women as victims of male predation. It’s not about sexual aggression or cynical calculation. It’s about our collective resistance to the idea of female sexual pleasure, outside relationship commitment. Matilda lives it, is coerced into having doubts about it, and rises again.
And you want to cheer her on.
Review-SLUT-Gig-City-Colin-MacLean-April-7-2018
L.A WEEKLY
EDGEFEST
In writer-director Brenda McFarlane ‘s thought-provoking play, one woman’s journey of sexual exploration could, by any other name, be called the adventures of a slut. Mild-mannered young accountant Matilda (Heidi Weeks-Brown) is shocked when the cops unexpectedly raid her apartment, arresting her for prostitution and lewd behavior. Following the end of an unhappy marriage, Matilda has sought emotional reassurance and pleasure within the arms of a multitude of men. But she’s no prostitute: Rather, she considers herself more like the sexual Salvation Army a dedicated volunteer. As she awaits interrogation at the police station, Matilda is forced to confront the pitfalls of her libidinous private life. In McFarlane’s brisk and intimate production, which often feels dwarfed in the cavernous LATC environs, performer Weeks-Brown proves an upbeat and entirely likable tour guide to a realm of cheerful sluttitude. However, McFarlane’s play unintentionally undermines the character’s free-spiritedness: Many of the character’s glib responses to the outside world’s harsh judgment of her lifestyle smack of unconvincing self-justification. Weeks-Brown, caparisoned in a sultry lingerie outfit hot off the rack from the Pleasure Chest, is smart, vivacious and energetic, making the best possible case for unfettered promiscuity, but the psychological portrait ultimately rings hollow. Far Fetched Productions at the Los Angeles Theater Center, 514 S. Spring St., dwntwn.; Fri.-Sun., 7:15 p.m.; thru Oct. 23. (866) 811-4111. (Paul Birchall)
http://www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=9024
A Review of Slut
by Jean Lowerison
Published Thursday, 11-Jan-2007 in issue 994
Nice girls don’t get themselves arrested for prostitution.
So what can you say about Matilda McHartle (Susan Hammons), who makes her grand entrance into the slammer wearing a red fishnet leotard under a black corset with red laces up the back and a practically invisible skirt?
Mrs. Stiletto, a former National Geographic photographer who runs the senior center next door, knows what to call her: slut. It was Mrs. S., in fact, who alerted the cops to Matilda’s habit of having sex on the hood of her car, and documented her claims with photos.
Matilda’s sister, on whom she wastes her one phone call, is in no rush to send her attorney husband with bail, either. Instead, she sics a counselor of sex addicts on her errant sister.
But is Matilda a slut or, as she puts it, just someone who is “not good at intimacy over the long haul?”
Playwright/director Brenda McFarlane’s one-act piece Slut takes humorous aim at the socially ordained “one partner for life” ideal, at least for Matilda, who asks whether being good “with little bits of intimacy” can’t be enough and why serial partnering is bad. (She has come to this after a marriage in which: “I did something no one can ever do in a relationship. I lost myself.”)
McFarlane also gives Hammons several other characters to play – a cop, a high-class girl, her friend Elena – all believably written and well-played by the versatile Hammons, who even shows off a lovely voice.
Some people really aren’t much good with one-on-one exclusivity. Matilda’s solution might not be yours, but it makes for an amusing evening of theater.
Expect to hear more from McFarlane. She is a Toronto transplant, where she wrote and directed seven successful plays. Welcome, Brenda, we can use more like you.
Slut plays through Jan. 21 at 6th @ Penn Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 688-9210 or visit www.6thatpenn.com.