The dismembered hand flew through the air and struck my date in the face. The leather-and-lingerie-clad woman who had flung it, demonstrating remarkable power considering she was using her teeth, bared her choppers to the crowd and gave one last howl before finishing Bill, her meal. Laughter erupted, fake blood spurted, someone quickly flashed the audience, and the lights went down.
Thus goes the finale to Coyote Woman, the latest show from Cherry Red Productions. Founded in the spring of 1996, Cherry Red has put on over 20 productions in Washington, most of which bear titles like Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack and Spamlet. Cherry Red has maintained a consistent position on the fringe of D.C. theater, mostly by putting on shows that range from smutty and hilarious to extremely disturbing.
Offer a vein of theater that people can’t really get anywhere else, and if you’re successful at all, you’ll invariably inspire some sort of cult. In the case of Cherry Red, the cultish draw lies somewhere between a purely voyeuristic desire to witness outlandish spectacle, and a sensation that somehow what they do is a critique. Drop the latter association and you’re halfway out of the cult; you might also enjoy the show a lot more.
For years they performed in Metro Caf? at 14th and Q Streets, until it closed; now they perform in the Warehouse Next Door Theater, near the Washington Convention Center. The building used to be a restaurant, and the sign for “Ruppert’s” is still emblazoned across the front. Waiting in line, the man in front of us was asked if he wanted to join their mailing list. He looked skeptical. “Um, I’ll see if I like it,” he said, clutching a magazine, and scooted off to his seat.
The couple behind us struggled to get their stroller up over the low step and through the door. “You can’t bring that baby in here,” said the ticket taker matter-of-factly. They couldn’t tell if he was serious, or just joking with them using an unfamiliar combination of ironic tones. The baby never made it inside, presumably because he or she was too young to handle the “adult humor” of the production, but possibly because bringing a stroller inside would have pushed the room beyond crowded to physically awkward congestion. Between the densely packed rows of chairs and the well-stocked bar next to the stage, there was little room for non-essential amenities like babies.
The audience filled out with a bizarre mix of people. Young couples nuzzled shoulders while the over-40 leather jacket crowd clinked bottles and smirked, fuzzy rock tunes blaring over the PA. Eventually, the lights went down and the announcer took the stage. After a potshot at the Washington Post for failing to show up yet again, despite their complementary tickets, he gave a quick plug for Penetrator, Cherry Red’s next show. The hooting and hollering began, and so did the play.
The lights come up on a living room in an apartment that is clearly inhabited by either normal 12-year-old girls or bitter women in their 20s. A bookshelf along the wall holds an extensive stuffed animal collection and a VHS selection which includes Pretty Woman. A man with ‘80s rocker hair, a long black frizz that reaches out well past his shoulders and down his back, sits on a couch. He is quickly joined by a woman who proceeds to complain about his TV viewing preferences, which in this case have him watching the ‘70s shlock horror Wolfman.
Coyote Woman’s story develops quickly, and it goes like this: Our heroine of sorts is Janet, a hopelessly insecure maiden in her late 20s who is quite certain that everything would be perfect if only the anal-retentive, uniform-clad Cliff would pop the question. Unfortunately, Cliff, an animal control officer, is a jerk, as Janet is frequently reminded by her roommate, the bitterly single Debbie, and Debbie’s brother Mike, the mandatory wacky gay next-door neighbor (Debbie and Mike are the couch sitters in the opening scene). Thus, the stage is set for a hilariously campy, foul-mouthed show that culminates in the abovementioned feast. The first half may not feature much in the way of gore and nudity, but from the first punch lines-Cliff reminds Debbie that they once went on a date, and things got a little hot ‘n’ heavy; Debbie then claims to have afterwards poured Listerine, ahem, “down there”-the humor tends towards abrasive one-liners that indicate far fouler things to come.
Jacky Reres is eerily convincing as Janet. Convincing to the point that her involvement in the show seems a joke in and of itself. Nervous as a hummingbird beneath her blond locks, Reres flits from the sofa to the kitchen, moping about uncommunicative boyfriend and calling her roommate fat. With campy comedy like Coyote Woman, it helps to have at least a few more conventional characters, calmer personalities that give the audience an orientation for the outrageousness to follow. While Reres wasn’t the only actress filling this role, she was easily the most successful. Afterwards, she appeared from backstage dressed in Abercrombie sweats, looking not terribly different from her character, and moved quickly to the door. Confused, I flipped through the program—her bio, while not as dirty as some of the others, did confirm that she is about as weird as everyone else involved in the show. Apparently, she enjoys both lip gloss and masturbation (not that that’s weird).
The back half is where Coyote Woman gets going. Janet makes the fatal mistake of going jogging with Debbie right in a neighborhood that Cliff had just assured her was filled with wild animals. Debbie outpaces her, and Janet, naturally, gets bitten by a coyote. Within minutes she begins to feel queasy, and soon she is showing the strange side effect of being played not by Reres, but instead by Lucrezia Blozia, a large drag queen. As luck would have it, the full moon is out that night, and that is where the ridiculousness begins. First, the Coyote Woman and her newly-impressed roommate and neighbor go out for a night on the town. Coyote/Janet returns home with the hilarious Bill, an extremely horny bachelor clad in an unflattering see-through shirt. While intensely obnoxious, Bill is also more up to the coyote’s speed. But the next morning the full moon fades, and Janet returns. She is engulfed by regret, which promptly dissipates when she is once again transformed into the Coyote Woman in time to start a gang. The gang gangs up on Bill and eats him, lulling him into a false sense of security by promising group sex. They probably should have eaten Cliff, too, but who’s counting. It’s the campy psychosexual cannibalism, presumably, that makes Coyote Woman a “classic” Cherry Red show according to cast and fans alike.
The stunning absurdity of carnivorous punk streetwalkers eating a large man is also what makes any comparison between Cherry Red and conventional theater somewhat laughable. It’s not about the acting, you might say. It’s about the leather-studded bras and the fake blood and the bad makeup and the insults engulfing the whole spectacle. But there is acting, and it’s what holds the whole thing together. It just comes from the oddest places. The three women who make up the coyote gang are delightful. They bounce around and pole dance ineptly under their hipster jet-black wigs, slugging through the spoils from a knocked-off 7-Eleven. Unfortunately, they’re also extremely difficult to keep straight. But one of them has a great interpretation of the robot dance (she kind of makes her eyes bug out), and they all get down to the beer-swilling radio anthem “I Get Knocked Down.”
While some cast members actually act, others are merely present. Blozia, who struts around with her burly torso barely contained by a skimpy red top, is definitely one of the latter, and is consequently the best example of the Cherry Red cult in action. You simply have to accept that Blozia is a diva worth worshipping for her own sake. It may sound unfair, but hey, that’s what you get with a cult. Would the show be improved without the cult mentality? Possibly, but it’s also hard to imagine something like this surviving intact for very long otherwise. This degree of weirdness requires a certain removal from reality.
Tony Greenberg, a relaxed performer, plays the jolly horndog Bill. Coyote is Greenberg’s eighth show with Cherry Red, so he is easily a full-fledged member of the cult. Oddly enough, before he got into being a really smutty thespian, he was a Georgetown student (CAS ‘86). Weren’t we all. He claimed never to have been involved in campus theater, but did admit to having performed a play once in Russian class for Prof. Valery Petrochenkov.
It’s puzzling why, in a city not exactly known for its theater, something as bizarre as Cherry Red’s avant-smut aesthetic would find a home. More than a few people involved with the production name-checked the D.C. punk scene of the ‘80s and early ‘90s as an influence, or even an ancestor of Cherry Red. Whether or not a theater troupe can even call itself “punk” doesn’t even matter—any event on Washington’s artistic fringe is invariably attributed by someone, somewhere, to punk. Room full of uncomfortable chairs with a couch at one end that indicates the stage = punk; complaining bitterly that you haven’t been reviewed by The Washington Post = not punk.
That aside, the anti-high art aesthetic is part of the production’s charm. Afterwards, Blozia emphasized the accessibility of Cherry Red’s work as a reason for its modest success, saying you don’t have to be concerned about whether or not you’ll follow the ins and outs of the message. “It’s just fun. It’s not intimidating,” she said.
But as appealing as it is to paint this as theater for the everyman/woman/coyote, any art form has its own rules, and just because Cherry Red’s method is outrageous doesn’t mean it’s not intimidating. Quite the opposite, actually. A couple sitting in the front row looked pretty tensed up during the coyote gang’s well-choreographed dance to Rick James’ “Superfreak.” As the dancers massaged themselves in the few locations where they were actually covered, the arm that the man had casually draped over the back of his date’s chair suddenly tightened around her shoulder. It was hard to tell whether he was trying to assure her that even if he was enjoying himself, he was really thinking about her, or trying to assure her that if things got any worse, he would shove her to the coyotes while he bolted for the door.
So it’s not for everyone. And beyond the show’s impressive shock value, Coyote Woman arguably has little to offer. But that isn’t the case with all Cherry Red shows; its dramas typically elicit less hollering from the audience and more reflection. It makes the success of a production much harder to gauge, but it is something the producers have kept returning to. Penetrator will apparently prove to be one such show.
A friend of mine, when she heard that I would be talking to people from the cast, asked that I talk to someone about Killer Joe, a play staged last season that featured an underage girl being pursued by an older man. At one point she appeared onstage clad only in her underwear. I asked Lucas Zarwell, the sound designer for the show, about Killer Joe and the possibility that Cherry Red might go too far in its quest to occupy the extremes of the theater spectrum. He responded that the show’s value lay precisely in its presentation of the issue. “The point is, ‘Isn’t this not funny,’” he said. “This guy was gonna lech all over this 14-year-old girl.” Either way, it seems, being shocking is the whole point.
