ONTOLOGICAL PROOF OF MY EXISTENCE
at Cafe Voltaire
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Ontological Proof of My Existence has all the potential for melodrama–a runaway teenager, Shelley, falls into prostitution at the encouragement of the charismatic Peter V., whereupon her doting father comes to fetch her home–but playwright Joyce Carol Oates is not interested in TV-movie fables. Peter V., who claims to have been reborn at the age of 25, takes the name of Pyotr Verkhovenski in Dostoyevski’s The Possessed. Shelley seems a penitent in her cell, and she has certainly mortified her flesh in obedience to her “messiah”–her hair has been shorn and her body starved to prepubescent thinness, ostensibly to accommodate the “husbands” who prefer their “wives” ambisexual. But this androgyny is also our culture’s fashion ideal. And as we listen to Shelley’s father rhapsodize over old family photographs, it becomes apparent that he too has idealized girlhood.
