FRIENDS WITH FIRE ARMS: A FAREWELL TO FEMINISM
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Maguire’s films, which usually alternate with Killen’s performance but sometimes run simultaneously, are a wonderful addition, acting almost as a visual percussion line to the story. Especially successful is a short film in which a child or children are beseeching their mother to get up and make breakfast: while we see an adult’s hand toasting and serving a frozen waffle, we hear on the sound track a child’s cries repeated and magnified into a deafening cacophony. Sturm’s ethereal and stunning presence–she’s onstage and playing throughout–and her compositions and performance lend the show weight and beauty. This piece, billed as a work in progress, has great potential, provided the story is tightened up and Killen finds some silent places within her monologue. Particularly brilliant is Killen’s understanding of the insidious power of popular culture’s concept of feminist, emancipated women of the 70s, seen in Playboy and television shows like Charlie’s Angels.
Interestingly, Mona was educated not in college but by reading other people’s mail as a clerk in the college mail room. This seems almost a metaphor for the way Killen herself develops her monologues, which are bits and pieces of many lives, many characters, juxtaposed to create a whole. In this postmodern era many performance artists appropriate and collage concepts and images from other media and from popular culture. Appropriation is certainly evident in Killen’s work, but mainly of a general filmic sort. Because her strokes are so broad, and because she has so often given her characters in other shows the qualities of a world-weary, much-burned woman of another era, one cannot always ferret out the true or the real. Her young audience, however, gobbles it up eagerly. Lines that made me smile produced belly laughs in those around me.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Carolyn Macartney.
