Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – The ninth installment of Diana Oh’s uncompromising {MY LINGERIE PLAY} at the Rattlestick is messy, invigorating

• By drediman
• October 21, 2017
• No Comments

Diana Oh in “{my lingerie play} 2017: The Concert and Call to Arms!!!!!!!!!” at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

Last night in the West Village, I caught {my lingerie play} 2017: The Concert and Call to Arms!!!!!!!!!, a genre-blurring piece (is it a musical? a concert? an autobiographical solo show? performance art?) from the fearless Diana Oh. The show at the Rattlestick is the ninth and penultimate installation in Ms. Oh’s cycle of passionate rant-cum-lovefests celebrating the body, consensual sex, and queer culture, while condemning the patriarchy, rape, and the gender binary. Sounds like a messy, perhaps exclusionary, stew? Well, it is. But {my lingerie play} is also an invigorating experience, unapologetically uncompromising in its grandiosity and generosity. I applaud Ms. Oh for striving to create authentic experiences rather than simply making theater in the conventional sense (but it’s all theater, really).

In terms of Ms. Oh’s aesthetic, the closest artist who comes to mind is Taylor Mac, another fiercely intelligent and pioneering permanence artist with a queer agenda (I’m still reeling from Mac’s life-changing 24-hour “experience” at St. Ann’s Warehouse this time last year). Like Mac, Ms. Oh uses music – mostly of the glam punk variety – to communicate to her audiences. In reality, Ms. Oh and her band are, as are their songs, serviceable at best. But what I found truly disarming about Ms. Oh as an artist is her clarity of purpose, as well as her onstage persona that’s a fascinating combination of vulnerability and bad-ass conviction. No one puts Diana Oh in the corner.

RECOMMENDED

{MY LINGERIE PLAY} 2017: THE CONCERT AND CALL TO ARMS!!!!!!!!!
Off-Broadway, Musical
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in association with Rosalind Productions, Inc.
2 hours (without an intermission)
Through October 28