Busride to Heaven
But given all the toothless cross-dressing today, both on the tube and in theater, a performer has to do more to make a point than don a dress. Sadly, no one has gotten that message to Manhattan-based Mark Dendy. He spends three-quarters of his sweetly entertaining, mildly funny one-person, four-character show in drag, playing a black transvestite hooker, an overly made-up televangelist, and a bitter old southern lady.
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Of these three characters only Pawnie, the first, has any ideological bite. She also has the most interesting entrance–she literally pushes her way into the theater through the front door dressed in torn stockings, bikini briefs, and tattered lingerie and wobbling uncertainly on spike heels, apparently high on cocaine, before she confronts the audience with her spiel. “Hey honey, got a quarter?” Only after she’s hit by a Mr. Softee truck and is waiting for the bus to take her to heaven do we learn the true complexity of her life.
But Sandy Sheets’s story is considerably tamer than Pawnie’s. She crosses no boundaries, raises no interesting questions about race or gender. The Sheets persona enables Dendy to lob a few firecrackers at the religious right, but for the most part they fizzle: these attacks are either obvious (Pat Robertson is remarkably un-Christian) or class-based (to hip urban eyes, televangelists are tacky). Dendy does tease us for a while with an idea that could have developed into a stinging critique of the Christian Coalition’s homophobia–part of Sandy Sheets’s missionary work involves converting gays to heterosexuality. But mysteriously Dendy is content to toss off the joke on his way to exploring the already well-satirized world of Bible thumpers and twangy country music. There’s one touching moment, when Sandy Sheets is convinced by God to go back to earth and preach a gospel of love, not hate, but it actually further waters down what had started with Pawnie as a pretty strong, angry message.
