Throws Like a Girl: Festival of Intimate Performance by Outrageous Women (review)

Now in its third season, the Throws Like a Girl festival is a biennial celebration of virtuosic feminist performance art produced in a small blackbox theatre in East Austin, appropriately known as the Off-Center. In past years, local audiences have gathered to see and discuss Marty Pottenger's City Water Tunnel #3,Holly's Hughes's Preaching to the Perverted, Deb Margolin's O Wholly Night and Other Jewish Solecisms, Peggy Shaw's Menopausal Gentleman and To My Chagrin, and Terry Galloway's Lardo Weeping. Coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversaries of both the Women's One World (WOW) Café and the Split Britches Theatre Company, this year's festival featured founding artists from both companies, as well as those artists whose feminist and antiracist voices continue to redefine American theatre. Varied in structure, tone, and style, each piece employed humor—ironic, parodic, erotic—as performative means to political ends.

Founding Split Britches member Deb Margolin kicked off the two-month stretch of events with her latest "performance novel," Index to Idioms (dir. Merri Ann Milwe). The play opened with Margolin seated stage right, half-lit, in a black velvet dress, maroon cotton pullover, and black, soft-soled flats. With closed eyes, she listened intently and privately to an aria. The sharp screech of children's voices demanding "Mom!" soon interrupt her solitude, and her eyes open in acknowledgment to meet our own. These voices will prove central to Margolin's multiple-character solo performance about nascent sexuality, motherhood, loss, and unconditional love. The twelve episodic monologues that make up Index provide snapshots of

Margolin at various stages of her sexual and emotional life, traversing what Margolin claims is the "collapsible boundary between fiction and memoir." The monologues are strung together through their shared relationship to various English-language idioms: "Mind your P's and Q's" presents a woman with a "writer's habit," moonlighting as a typesetter and in search of the perfect font; "Cut it Out" explores a pregnant mother ready for birthing; "Keep Under One's Hat" looks at a woman battling Hodgkin's disease and hair loss. Upstage center the idioms are projected on a white scrim before and after each vignette, bracketing the monologue and reminding the audience of the multivalent ways in which language can signal meaning and stories can serve as an index to affective life.

While Margolin delivers the text with her signature brand of unrelenting and captivating hilarity, one feels an undercurrent of melancholy throughout. In "Know One's Own Mind," for example, Margolin positions herself as marginalized by the old beater station wagon in which she drives her three-year-old to school—replete with dragging muffler and graffiti-tagged with the words "TOTAL CHAOS"—while the other moms drive Mercedes and Lexuses and wear fur coats and Estée Lauder perfume. This outsiderness is highlighted as Margolin delivers a tour de force re-enactment of the school's holiday (read "Christmas") recital in which her daughter, costumed as a penguin, creates her own brand of total chaos, leading a gaggle of preschoolers in the very public and embarrassing toppling of the school's holiday tree. In "Come Alive," Margolin describes the "fancy ladies" in her neighborhood who refuse to show emotion or acknowledge her, calling this refusal a "contract with mortality." When one such woman has fallen in love and unexpectedly gets "deep" with Margolin in the frozen foods section of the local supermarket, Margolin is touched; when Margolin describes the way in which the same woman ignores her the...