Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast (1982)

A post modern vaudeville that tackles the binaries of beauty and beast and takes on subjects such as Reagan, religion, the arms race, Johnny Cash’s face, queer love and father-daughter relationships. Based on the classic fairy tale, influenced by the long rule of republican politics, and informed by the Christian agenda that dominates the US scene up till the present, Beauty and the Beast combines the stories of an unlikely troupe of characters: the personal journey of a Salvation Army woman who plays the good and beautiful daughter who secretly wants to be bad; a Rabbi in pink toe shoes who is relegated to the role of the father and longs to be a stand-up comic; an 86-year-old lesbian vaudeville freak who embraces the role of the Beast and comments on politics by forgetting which play she is in. With this performance, the company began to develop the use of the flaw in theatrical construct . 

Beauty and the Beast employs the loose knit and episodic structure of vaudeville and the conventional story line of the fairy tale to piece together individual performance pieces that exploded the conventional binaries of identity: beauty, beast, Jewish, Southern Baptist, gay, straight, butch, femme, father, daughter. Each character is multilayered and performs both in and out of scenes and of character. For example, Deb Margolin plays a reluctant member of the vaudeville troupe, the father in the fairytale, a stand up comedian while also performing her desire to locate both a Jewish Rabbi and a ballerina in the same body. All of these aspects of character functioned as transparent personae rather than opaque character masks so that the personality and the points of view of the performer were always visible. Aside from this use of episodic structure and approach to acting and character, employed makeshift scenic elements were employed to reveal the mechanics of theatricality and present a fractured rather than seamless version of reality. 

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This piece was developed at WOW Café Theater in 1983 and toured primarily in the US and UK in venues such as the Theatre Project in Baltimore; Boston Centre for the Arts, Boston; Oval House in London; the CCA in Glasgow and the Green Room in Manchester.

Footage of the performance can be found here.