McManic Productions, Chicago Fringe Festival, at the Organic Theater.
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After Joy’s education is abruptly curtailed by her mother’s seduction of the principal, the young pilgrim sets forth for Toronto, where she’s mugged for the first of many times, then taken in by a convent but soon after rejected as a bride of Christ. A private conversation with Jesus offers no more enlightenment: “Are you coming back again?” she asks, to which he replies, “Would you?” A job as a go-go dancer called “the Sniper” lasts until an overexcited customer (“Invade me, baby–I’m Grenada!”) drops dead during her act and she’s sent to prison. There she meets Snow, a radical militant lesbian feminist, and the two of them live in blissful/smothering togetherness until Joy tires of being a femme housewife drone and decamps for San Francisco–a prefab theme park where the brownies not only contain no hashish, they don’t even have any real chocolate. It’s here, however, that an immigrant pickpocket provides Joy with the wisdom she seeks.
