TOO TALL BLONDES IN LOVE
Written and performed by Kate Bornstein and Barbara Carrellas. Directed by Rebecca Patterson. Lighting by Jennifer Simon. Sound by Candy Bromowitz. Costumes by Honey East. Presented by The Theater Offensive at the Boston Center for the Arts, Thursday through Sunday through June 16.

It would be more generous and perhaps fairer to review Too Tall Blondes in LOVE as a two-person performance piece rather than as drama. As drama, TTBIL is a mild romantic comedy with a static second act. As performance art, it has several strengths.

The creators of TTBIL — Kate Bornstein and Barbara Carrellas — might well say that it’s impossible to make a meaningful distinction between drama and performance. In TTBIL, after all, they spend a lot of time attacking distinctions. But a dramatic text has an independent existence that always looms behind each production, whereas performance art emphasizes the unique connection between the performer and the work.

The reason I bring this up is that TTBIL touches on these issues in a slippery way. It is, to be sure, a play. It could be done in Santa Fe, Singapore, or South Jersey next month with James Garner and Hal Holbrook in drag. But it is also a partly autobiographical piece that, in this world-premiere Theater Offensive production, is performed by its authors. “Gender outlaw” Bornstein is an established writer and performance artist; Carrellas was recently named “Best Tantric Sex Seminar Leader” by Time Out/New York. In TTBIL, the two performers are playing their résumés.

TTBIL opens in virtual space with two persons at opposite sides of the stage cybersexing each other up. They’ve known each other only on-line, and they keep their real identities secret. They talk in stage directions to describe what they’re doing (“panting,” “slurping”), punctuate their lines by swiping at keyboards in their laps, and sign off with a snappy exchange (we realize later it’s a thing with them): “Never be anyone you wouldn’t want to fuck” — “Never fuck anyone you wouldn’t want to be.”

In real life, Carrellas’s character turns out to be Raven, a tantric-sex seminar leader. Bornstein turns out to be Allie, a transsexual performance artist who’s into SM (not S&M: “it’s not ‘sado-and-masochism,’ ” as she says). Allie attends Raven’s workshop but is scared off by Raven’s clumsy flirting. Soon the two are back hitting the keyboards, unaware that their real-life selves have met. Nothing if not persistent, Raven goes to see Allie’s act and makes another play for her. She thinks Allie would make the perfect test subject for her theory of genderless sexuality. Raven has their relationship all mapped out: “First we get to know each other, then we open up to each other, then the sex magic happens. . . . Tell me how you lost your virginity.”

At the end of the first act, when Allie moves into Raven’s apartment and the two realize they’ve been cyberpals, the play would seem to have nowhere to go. Indeed, the first act would make a reasonably satisfying performance piece by itself — some comedy, some pain, some instruction, a lot of identity morphing, and no ruining it by tying everything together.

Unfortunately, there is a second act. It’s about how Allie and Raven’s relationship sours and is then saved by their being reminded of the shared values that brought them together. All this comes off in a schematic, thesis-like way. It hits bottom when the two go back on-line to rehearse ideas about “holy borderlessness.” Tell it to The Journal of Poststructuralist Gender Studies, why don’t you? After a ripoff of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine, everything gets wrapped up by means of a deus ex machina that is not made a more acceptable plot device just because the authors invite us to laugh at it with them.

Bornstein is compelling and funny: Allie’s confessional performance piece, during which she lets audience members remove clothespins from her arms and chest (it hurts when they come off, not when they go on: “The pain comes from the absence”), is the highlight of the show. I found Carrellas’s upbeat workshop-leader persona all too convincing and got tired of her by the end of the first act. Rebecca Patterson’s direction keeps the dialogue flowing, but the set — a bare floor strewn with cardboard boxes — doesn’t lend itself to interesting staging.

Maybe some people want a Bornstein-Carrellas sex seminar in the form of a play, in which case TTBIL would be just dandy. The audience I watched it with seemed to find it so: they gave it a standing ovation. So what do I know?

Issue Date: June 7-14, 2001