KEEP YOUR PANTS ON!
Tight & Shiny Productions
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Karge’s ability to find beauty in this seems distinctly European. His play is loosely based on the true story of a woman in the city of Mainz who assumed the identity of her dead husband during the Depression in order to keep his job and the income it produced. Usually gender switching is used as a premise for a good chuckle, but Karge avoids cliches and jumps headfirst into the issue of sexual identity, and the result is a play rich in paradoxes and poetic imagery.
Lizz Holmes has been working with this one-woman tour de force for more than two years. She first began studying with the play’s translator Carl Weber at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, staged an experimental version of it last year at the Bailiwick Director’s Festival, and then gave it a full-scale production at Seven Stages in Atlanta. She seems to have an intimate knowledge of her character, which she wears like a second skin, bringing out Ella’s femininity and at the same time persuading us that she could easily have passed for a man.
The production also suffers from a lack of conceptual development. The German society von Horvath portrays has some striking similarities to our own; lines like “Whatever happened to the affluence of yesterday?” and “Without an address, I couldn’t find a job” could easily be spoken by a large number of Americans. Yet Tight & Shiny doesn’t develop this similarity.
