Paula Killen has been to hell and back.
“OK, it ain’t your HBO special,” says Killen. “But it says to other people that follow the national theater scene that hey–I’m here.”
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This is no news to her largely underground audiences–who have literally descended to her shows at the subterranean Smart Bar, Lower Links, the old N.A.M.E. They’ve followed Killen in her various guises: endearing chanteuse in Music Kills a Memory, dead yet curiously logorrheic bimbo in A Cocktail of Flowers, goddess at the Big Goddess Pow Wow, and exorcist of personal demons in Loose Cannon: Bitching to Cure the Planet.
Killen says “As transcendent and fantastical as some of the pieces get–I mean, I go to hell, I pick up hitchhikers in wheelchairs, all this crazy stuff–nothing has the whisper of a clue compared to the reality of going back west for Jesse’s funeral–how it ultimately opened my life up again to experience. I had always imagined going back there successful and with all my dreams and aspirations fulfilled. But it wasn’t like that at all at first. No. I went back like the pieces of a broken teacup: my divorce had happened, none of these people bad seen me since I’d left to get married and famous and together, and after hearing of Jesse’s suicide I had gone on an immediate bender.”
“Look, I know myself well enough to say that I don’t care about being politically correct. I don’t. Most of us have crossed the line of right and wrong so many times that it becomes blurred.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Cynthia Howe.
