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Pussy on the house
Gay parodist Ryan Landry takes on Tennessee Williams, plus a new season in Providence and more



Cat’s meow

Ryan Landry and Tennessee Williams have taken out a license. The pair’s gay wedding, entitled Pussy on the House, takes place at the Theater Machine, and you’re all invited. Landry and his Gold Dust Orphans’ drag parody of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has a few built-in problems. First, Cat, with its felinely delusional sack of frustration in a slip, its flamboyantly bossy Colonel Sanders figure nursing his "spastic colon," and its bratty "no-neck monsters," hardly needs camping up. Second, under the desperate grapplings of the original there lurks an elephant of repression. And there is not a repressed bone in Landry’s lanky, rubber-pretty-faced body — here clad in layers of lavender flounce, Elton John glasses, and a beehive wig. He looks like Dame Edna channeling Blanche Du Bois.

Yet what is surprising, and disarming, about Pussy on the House, the latest of Landry’s burlesques of classic plays and films, is that it’s not just a big send-up. There is some genuine emotion and bravura acting on view in the show, which wanders grotesquely (and hilariously) away from the 1955 Williams play only in the species designation of Maggie’s frigid husband Brick’s true, closeted love. Oh, and Brick’s not a former high-school football hero in Landry’s rewrite, which excises such macho details as if by liposuction. He’s a veteran kiddie-show host, bereft, drunk, and drugged since the death of his co-star, Skipper. In Landry’s play (which really is set on the roof), he staggers around his boyhood tree house, clad in the Cub Scout-like togs that were his television costume (and, of course, a leg cast), awash in stuffed animals and Jack Daniels.

Sure, there’s the de rigueur drag element; in muscular yet shapely Penny Champagne, Pussy boasts a Maggie the Cat sporting a shellacked black wig and sailor tattoos. He is also a commanding actress. And though in Williams’s plays of the 1940s and ’50s, homosexuality had to be tucked under the rug, Landry is in the business of pulling rugs out, along with what’s under them. Thus Big Daddy becomes polyester-plantation owner Big Mamma — in the swaggering person of Equity actor Larry Coen, a tragicomic Burl Ives with a bad ’60s prom ’do. Williams’s much-belittled Big Mamma morphs into Sukey, Big Mamma’s longtime "lezzy lover." That’s Landry, babbling optimism, shooting toy daggers, and brandishing a tattered scarf as if it were a gymnastics-routine ribbon.

Though Landry likes to create train wrecks of linguistic cliché and watching Pussy is sometimes too much like watching Cat straight up, there are some hilarious set pieces, among them Big Mamma’s maudlin remembrance of the drag-queen father she buried in the parking lot of the Fort Lauderdale Copacabana. And Coen’s characterization is mesmerizing: heartbreaking and a hoot, all at once. Moreover, the crazy stirring of the gender pot ameliorates what has always troubled me in the original: its misogyny, which is writ not just in Brick’s repulsed rejection of Maggie but also in Big Daddy’s of Big Mamma.

It’s not likely that Pussy will follow Cat to win a Pulitzer Prize, but it should win the Orphans, who have been plying their Provincetown-ian trade here for at least half a decade, a few more fans. The troupe might draw a more diverse crowd if it, uh, set up camp at the Boston Center for the Arts. But evidently Landry likes his Ramrod Center for the Performing Arts at Machine. And as is oft said of machines, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Pussy on the House continues at Machine, 1254 Boylston Street, Boston, through April 25. Tickets are $25; call 617-265-6222.

— Carolyn Clay

Divine Providence

Trinity Repertory Company in Providence has unveiled its 2004–2005 season, and it begins with a Bardic bang. From October through December the troupe will present The Henriad: Shakespeare’s Kings, a three-play cycle that encompasses Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V and will be performed in rep. In other words, we may finally figure out what went on in English history during those turbulent years between 1377 and 1422 rather than just what goes on in one of the Bard’s great history plays. Of course, the style of production may prove about as smooth as the line of succession, since not one but three talented Trinity Rep veteran directors helm the productions. Kevin Moriarty, whose recent The Merry Wives of Windsor made delicious farcical mincemeat of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan-set domestic comedy, takes on Richard II; Amanda Dehnert, who has put her stamp on Trinity fare as varied as Saint Joan and Peter Pan, directs the conflated Henry IV; and Artistic Director Oskar Eustis brings the whole enterprise to a peaceful conclusion in Henry V.

Also on the docket at Trinity are two productions to be directed by Kent Gash, whose North Shore Music Theatre Pacific Overtures was among the best area productions of 2003. In September Gash engineers the sassy musical goings-on in Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby Jr.’s 1978 homage to legendary Harlem Renaissance composer and stride pianist Fats Waller, Ain’t Misbehavin’. Then, in January (after Trinity’s cottage-industry stagings of A Christmas Carol, both at home and at Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre), Gash directs Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize winner Topdog/Underdog, a dark comic fable that focuses on two African-American brothers symbolically named Lincoln and Booth.

In February, Chris Bayes directs the world premiere of his adaptation of three short comedies by the master, Moliere, entitled Backstage with Moliere: The Illustrious Theater Company. In the new work, bits of The Seductive Countess, The Imaginary Cuckold, and The Rehearsal at Versailles are woven into a scenario about the backstage intrigues surrounding Moliere and his company at the court of Louis XIV. May will bring Drew Hayden Taylor’s comedy The Buz’gem Blues, which was the buzz at Trinity’s 2002 Theater from the Four Directions festival of Native American theater, to the big stage. To be directed by Elizabeth Theobald Richards, the romantic comedy is about a Tribal elder with a very young girlfriend ("buz’gem" is Ojibway for "sweetheart"). Yet to be announced is a new play, which may in fact be a new musical by Charles Strouse, the Tony-winning composer of Bye Bye Birdie and Annie, set in Miami in 1948. Sounds like that one has Dehnert’s name all over it; Trinity’s Associate Artistic Director, whose production of West Side Story opens April 23, has her idiosyncratic way with the musicals.

— Carolyn Clay

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Issue Date: April 9 - 15, 2004
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