Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real

Everyone wants to believe that the human mind and spirit can transcend in a Samantha Stephens twitch the degradation of being a porn performer, that somehow if the body in the skin flick decided to make a change (say, become an artist or a parent or a politician), that change would happen. Such belief brings many of us to Annie Sprinkle's theater pieces, and to Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real, her second theatrical foray into the mainstream.

For the first few minutes of the show (which I saw in its original run at New York's Performance Space 122 last fall), Sprinkle skips close to what-might-have-been: a dangerously funny and irreverent send-up of our most sacred hang-up, sex. The concept of Herstory has potential: this now overweight, surgically enhanced, middle-aged woman in the leather-and-lace French maid's outfit stands on stage and narrates, in a squeaky little-girl voice, with occasionally ironic asides, a video anthology of 20 years of her peep-show hits that's projected onto a large screen beside her. Although most of her comments on the porn reels tend to be banal sit-com one-liners (after congratulating herself for coming up with the idea of masturbating on camera with a toothbrush, she quips that she brushes after every meal), there's at least one riveting moment: in another projection of the twentysomething Sprinkle masturbating, the actual 45-year-old buries her face between the legs of her youthful image, purring how happy it makes her to make herself happy. It's a bizarre, dizzying moment of dramatic intrigue.

Unfortunately, Sprinkle's presence on stage ranges from self-congratulatory to didactic: when she isn't reminding you what she's accomplished, she's instructing you on how much more she knows about pleasure than the hoi polloi. Worse, she's humorless. And when you consider the nature of Herstory, that qualifies as a crime.

-- Christopher Millis