BIG BUTT GIRLS, HARD HEADED WOMEN
Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women is Jones’s tribute to the women she met in prison. In a series of monologues and dancelike segments, this versatile performer impersonates various people she met in her classes: the naive Doris, the crackhead Lena, the hard-bitten Regina, and the wise but cranky Mama Pearl. Where some performers might be content to create characters by changing their voice, the tilt of their head, and perhaps some key article of clothing, Jones throws her whole spine, pelvis, and soul into her performances. What else would you expect from a trained dancer? When Jones plays the elderly Mama Pearl she gets her right down to the slight shake in her palsied left arm. And when she plays tough Regina Brown–“Bigger and better bitches have tried to beat me”–you know from the way she stands, both feet planted deep, that this is not a woman to mess with.
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I think there are greater forces at work here than mere technique, however. It’s clear from the first moment in the show–when Jones enters carrying a candle and singing, “Charlie, I’m pregnant, living on Ninth Street above the dirty bookstore. . . . Everyone I used to know is dead or in prison. . . . I wish I had all the money we used to spend on dope”–that the people she plays in this show mean the world to her. The depth of her connection to the material is underscored at the show’s end, when she steps up to an altar at one corner of the stage draped in black cloth and decorated with masks, candles, and hundreds of Skittles and Hershey’s Kisses and lifts up a bowl of sterilized water, calling it “a spirit catcher for one Regina Brown, who was murdered in the winter of 1989.” Then, by way of explaining her ritual, Jones jokes, “It’s a California thing.”
