Whore ~ a theatre review

Whore
Written and directed by Melissa Fergusson
Produced by Natalie Tozer and Charlatan Clinic
Staged at Lot 23 café and bar, 23 Minnie Street, Mt Eden, Auckland 1021
11 – 12 July, 2014 at 7.30pm
Reviewed on Saturday 12 July, 2014

First impressions are lasting impressions.

My first impression of Melissa Fergusson was that she is passionate about what she does and totally committed, in a very smart way, to developing that work, her brands – personal and professional – and her company’s marque.

In the 3 years since I first met with her in a café in Kingsland I’ve had absolutely no reason to change this view.

What has changed is that I have now had the opportunity to experience three of her extraordinary works, namely ‘Motherlock/pURe’, ‘salt’ and her latest piece entitled simply ‘Whore’. Fergusson has evolved a unique socio/cultural voice addressing the pique and anguish of our age, often from the shadows, in ways that are as exciting as a box of mixed, but unnamed, seeds to an inventive gardener. We know the route we’re on but the landscape is, as yet, a fantastical mystery.

What better, after all?

Melissa Fergusson – writer, director, producer

Like all innovators working in a heavily gendered – I’m avoiding using the term ‘feminist’ – sphere her work hasn’t always pleased the critics. Men who are even slightly misogynistic and who enjoy, without necessarily recognising, their privileged status are, and continue to be, challenged by the ‘in your face’ nature of Fergusson’s work and I can only say that, in my view, this is an extremely good thing.

On the other hand, the audience for her latest production ‘Whore’ was made up of more than your average smattering of hetero, homo and metrosexual males and they all seemed engaged and supportive of this exciting and challenging new work. It could be said that the work of Charlatan Clinic is an acquired taste but it’s a palate I’m very happy to experience again and again – and promote!

Which brings me to something else that Fergusson does exceptionally well, she markets her work in a stunning array of very effective modes. Her social media presence is exceptional, her sponsor stable is striking and she does media nights like nobody else – the opening of ‘Whore’ at Lot 23 was a case in point with performance artists Vanya Essin and Pandora Cherie dressed in polythene wrap, ink and duct tape and not a curl-cornered asparagus roll in evidence anywhere. To say I was impressed is the understatement of the decade!

Lot 23 is an inspired choice of venue.

Fergusson has a gift for choosing non-traditional, intimate venues and Lot 23 is the latest in a line that includes the Williamson, a bar in the old Ponsonby Fire Station. They’re not only great venues but all have adequate parking nearby and really clean loos.

The gathering area at Lot 23 is great. Preshow drinks, somewhere to sit, great facilities and excellent food make for a most enjoyable experience.

The performance space – essentially a warehouse-like classic black box – is good too and with more shows and some extra practice will be even better. The auditorium is set up in proscenium-style (minus proscenium arch) and laid out like this is a most useful space. The floor is on two levels with a viewing area on stairs to the left where audience can stand if they wish. The larger audience area is all on one level which presented a few viewing issues if you happened to be at the back where I was but overall it was very functional. I’m sure that future shows will address this minor concern perhaps by working in the round or traverse.

The acoustic in the venue is happily neutral which is excellent but actors need to be conscious that sound dies slightly in this space and audibility can be a bit of a challenge. Pulling a performance back to draw the audience in works a treat – and did so in this production – but becoming inaudible as a result should be avoided. It’s worth remembering that a house full – or over-full as happened on Saturday evening – of comfortable human bodies soaks up a lot of sound and audibility is essential for a show like this.

The stage itself consisted of a single raised rostrum with a classy leather couch at each edge, the whole kit and caboodle exuding an air of New York glamour. The minimalist, but tasteful, lighting and some great music contributed to this feel as well.

‘Whore’ consists of six beautifully structured monologues performed serially by three actors. The text was constructed by Fergusson from extensive interviews with sex workers and it’s exceptional. She has consulted with the New Zealand AIDS Foundation and  the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective and the entire show has a sense of authenticity that is at the heart of its success because successful it truly is. I habitually measure a show by the response of the audience and in this case nobody in the house moved for the full 80 minutes and the silence was often so deep you could almost drown in it. It’s not often a piece of theatre can engage so fully for quite so long but ‘Whore’ did and it’s to the credit of actors, director and writer that this was achieved.

Don’t be misled by this though, because I’m not saying that the audience sat transfixed because the nature of the content was angst-ridden, salacious or turgid stuff, quite the opposite. If anything it was mundane, commonplace and often quite funny, simply six people talking about their lives and cataloguing what happened to them at work, the difference being that these six people exist outside the framework of most people’s lives and in potentially dangerous, shadowy and sinister places. It’s to Fergusson’s credit – and that of her actors – that the performances are devoid of melodrama, preachiness and fuss and are delivered with a pragmatism that allows us to feel the agonising pain underlying their experiences without the actors having to signal this at all. It’s in the excellent text too, and each of the three fine actors has created a brace of multifaceted personal realities rooted in a level of acceptance that most in the audience would have found especially horrific. Six characters in extraordinary situations and each presenting with dignity and no sense of their own victimhood is courageous stuff especially given the nature of the narratives that emerge but this small team achieved it seemingly without effort.

Rebecca Parr’s first character is listed in the programme as simply Married Woman. She’s an innocent who is so in love that everything else seems irrelevant and unimportant. She’s the ‘breadwinner’, she tells us, and her man, the love of her life, is violent and beats her ‘but he doesn’t mean it’. She sleeps rough or in shelters and never knew her parents, growing up in foster care. She’s had three abortions, prefers circumcised men and disconnects when she’s with a john – ‘just another cock’ she tells us unemotionally, and we get that, we surely do. She loves date nights with her man and shares with us the smell of working – and why she’s obsessively clean. It’s harrowing stuff but Parr delivers it all as though she has the coolest life in the world, an admirable actor/director choice.

Rebecca Parr

Next up is Lee Ah Yen Faatoia and the programme, ever enigmatic, tells us that this is Rent Boy. He’s attractively dressed, tells us he prefers the younger ones and I’m immediately reminded of the brilliance of ‘Black Faggot’ and ‘Young Faggots Come to Life’ which signalled the coming out – and coming of age – of a raw and immediate Pacific theatre. Faatoia is a class act, attractive and smart, he takes us on a journey through childhood sexual abuse, a mother in denial and a man ‘who always found me’.  He’s doing this until he can get a job, finds it hard to be told what to do and likes the ‘money in the hand’ – it’s what makes the world go round, after all. He’s not gay, he tells us, he just does it for the money – in alleys, public toilets, the back of cars. He doesn’t feel anything, has four older brothers and their mother worked in a brothel to look after her kids. His johns only speak to him when they have to. He tried reading the bible but to no avail. His eyes well up but he hides it behind his phone. When he’s sucking them off he thinks of KFC, money, smoking gear but, if he had a choice he wouldn’t be ‘doing this shit’ because it leaves you empty. He’s staunch, but before he leaves he tell us he doesn’t forgive, ‘sex is cheap’ he says, he simply fucks for money and his sublimated anger appears, momentarily and for the first and only time, before he strides off into the night.

Lee Ah Yen Faatoia 

Geraldine Creff is Illegal Migrant. She just happens to be beautifully turned out too – sun glasses, a pretty gold lamé dress, great shoes – and she’s waiting for a client who, it seems, is always late. She has seven regulars, one for every day of the week. She’d like to charge more, have less sex – she gets ‘a sore pussy sometimes’ – but it’s her job so she takes whatever comes. Her body is a commodity, she says, and reminds us that the only difference between us is that she sleeps with men for cold hard cash. She came to New Zealand for a new life after talking to a man on Facebook for a year but when she arrived he never showed up. Gone was the dream of sweet domesticity in Herne Bay. She has to watch herself, she’s an overstayer, so she’s alert to police cars. She keeps to herself, goes to church, practices her English. She’s grateful, she tells us, and wants to work in a brothel because it’s safer. She’s a contradiction. Her john works in a library and his nurse girlfriend only does vanilla sex. He likes BDSM, she doesn’t do that, so she settles for anal. She’s coquettish, alive, doesn’t hang with the other whores and the tranny’s hate her. She goes to the art gallery, doesn’t smoke or do drugs, wants a family and hopes to wake up tomorrow and be someone else. There’s a deep, aching sadness in this woman. She asks ‘do I look like a whore?’ It’s a great question. I ask myself ‘what does a whore look like?’ Not like you, I decide. I’m shocked by the speed at which I can make such a negative judgement. There’s a bleak moment. ‘I sell my body to make money. Men penetrate my body but I never forget my worth. I’m a whore today, I’m a whore tomorrow.’ Her john arrives. ‘I don’t know why he keeps coming back’. It’s a fabulous performance, rich and nuanced and the text supports it all the way. Her narrative is harrowing for us but to her, not so much. It’s her life, and she just gets on with it.

Geraldine Creff 

Rebecca Parr returns as Refugee – and she’s angry. She’s angry about everything. She’s hugging her knees and her body language says it all. As though it needed reinforcement she tells us ‘I wish I was dead’. She’s from Russia, was forced into marriage and here she is, just out of the emergency ward with multiple stab wounds on her inner thighs. She talks about being raped, about being pregnant twice before ‘he (her husband) fucked off’. Her husband never touched her unless he wanted sex, otherwise they were ‘perfect strangers’. That line hits home, hard and deep. Parr’s accent is superb, accurate and consistent. She puts Vicks around her nose so she doesn’t have to smell her johns. She lives in a single room with no windows. ‘It’s OK, though’, she says, ‘I’m used to it. Really.’ She confides that she has a teddy bear, her only friend, the one she tells things to, and she also likes The Really Hungry Caterpillar because the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. She can’t fuck, she tells us, ‘without being high.’ She adds that she ‘fucks her dealer for free.’ She segues into ‘sex is over-rated’ and tells us that it’s her income, her choice, that she has four or five men a day, that it’s better than working in a shop and there’s no tax She’s free, she says, to do whatever she wants but, frankly, I’m not buying that. It’s a stunningly good characterisation, all that anger yet no self-pity. Wonderful work, all round.

Rebecca Parr

It’s Geraldine Creff’s turn again and this time it’s Underage Sex Worker.

Her Mum’s a bitch, she tells us. There’s always police at the door and screaming and shouting. She does three jobs a day and earns about $260.00, sometimes more. She did her first handjob at age ten and her first blowjob at eleven. I become aware that I don’t know any of these characters by name. It’s a powerful tool. It denies intimacy while yet discussing the most intimate of subjects. Her first sex was with her mother’s boyfriend. She sniffs some glue, takes a longish moment to reflect. It goes on forever yet the moment holds. This is great actor courage. With extraordinary kidlike enthusiasm she tells us how he called her his PYT, his pretty young thing, and now, in a month she’s going to be sixteen. She wants pineapple lumps, new heels, perfume and mushrooms for her birthday. Suddenly she’s sucking her thumb and holding a kid blanky in her hand. It’s a powerful – and authentic – image. Creff is physically loose, in control, and she tells us that her girl is only working the streets until she’s old enough to work in a brothel. Sex work is ‘sick’, she says, and ‘sick’ from her doesn’t mean what we all want it to mean.

Geraldine Creff

Lee Ah Yen Faatoia returns, flashily dressed, as Transgender. This is my comfort zone. I know this woman and dozens like her. It’s accurate, truthful, precise and at the same time flippant and vacuous. Her ‘regular’ took her shopping, bought a lovely hand bag. She really wants a ready-made family. She’s not interested in football and wants to know if we think she looks fuckable. She’s concerned about aging, skin products, ‘looking good’, she says, is important in her job. She has her own corner and works 10pm to 6am, a regular job I think to myself. She ran away from Samoa, started hormones but can still get a hard on. ‘Born in the wrong body’ she says. She feels isolated and trapped and nobody takes her seriously. I get that. You lose all your privilege when you transition and that can be the hardest thing. We all want to be credible after all. ‘Sex work is freedom’ she says and I know I’ve heard that before. I don’t believe it now either. She can be whoever you want – Pamela, Portia – whatever you pay for and everything has a price. She’s being picked up in five, she says, in a white Merc with red leather seats. She feels like the Queen of Sheba sitting in that car. She reflects. She likes Philip Seymour Hoffman but he’s dead just now and so she quickly moves on to dream about an apartment in St Benedict Street. She doesn’t currently have a place to stay, she tells us, but she loves Friday’s because everyone is happy.

Lee Ah Yen Faatoia 

It’s hard to believe – as these actors take their thoroughly deserved curtain call – that there are only three of them. Each has painted a brace of portraits vivid in their authenticity, raw in their seemingly futile grasp on hope and glued to the life-affirming need we all have to dream. Parr, Creff and Faatoia have created work that is bereft of victimhood, rich in dignity and courage while at the same time denying us nothing of the horror of life on the street. It’s pragmatic and wonderful and I loved – and admired – every minute of it.

Embedded, of course, in this paean of praise, is the exceptional work of Melissa Fergusson as conceiver, interviewer, scriptwriter, dramaturg, director, social commentator and creator of seriously exceptional socio/political theatre. She holds the mirror up to the parts of our human nature that may not be that easy to look at and she does it, uncompromisingly, in ways that really hit home.

I’m loathe to say that I loved ‘Whore’ because I know I should be saying serious-minded things about the ills of our society and how we must all care for each other. I think these things too, and I do my bit, but right now I just want to celebrate damn good theatre, spectacularly good performances and absolute quality direction.

A toast to Charlatan Clinic – with the finest champagne, of course – and the best of good luck for whatever comes next because, history suggests, it’s going to be very good indeed.