THE STATE I’M IN: A TRAVELOGUE
Wherever she’s performing, whatever project she’s involved in at the moment–whether one of her mainstream acting gigs, a performance piece, or a performance variety show (Big Goddess Pow Wow, Wac-A-Go-Go, 11 Minutes Max!)–Killen has a knack for attracting ink. Even when her work is uneven or flat-out bad (like A Cocktail of Flowers, her dreadful late-night follow-up to Music Kills a Memory), Killen attracts the kind of press attention most performers would die for.
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Of course it helps that she gives great interview. Warm, witty, intelligent, articulate, Killen always leaves a writer with plenty of fascinating, extremely quotable sound bites. It also doesn’t hurt that her intensely self-involved shows–she nearly always plays characters in the midst of some devastating personal crisis–never raise any difficult philosophical or political questions. Instead she fills her performances with hip, glamour-obsessed, mildly cutting-edge references of the sort life-style journalists depend upon to fill the pages between the ads. In this show we get tattoos, coyotes, and lesbian chic.
Not that it really matters. There’s something about Killen’s story-telling technique that makes even moments clearly grounded in reality–as when she wistfully describes her youthful bravado moving from Seattle to Chicago to get married and start a career as a performance artist–seem like total bullshit.
