for context visit www.mickeefaust.com
My dissertation is concerned with performance and space. How do people perform their identity and how does the presence of a stage signify a body is acceptable? How does the performance of identities not welcome on traditional stages challenge our ideas of beauty and who gets to be looked upon? How is physicality and knowledge of what constitutes a theatrical body challenged not only by those who can’t physically perform in standard theater, but deliberate decisions to use non-normative bodies- the fifty year old woman who plays a sorority sister, the fat graduate student who plays a lesbian hottie, the elderly man in a wheelchair who plays an army general.
in this self professed weird theater for the weird community I feel at home…a freak among freaks. a young rat among the old rat divas I love to sit and listen to stories about the company…tales that attest to the weirdness of this space. The time deaf performer Terry Galloway missed her cues as the cast raced around the back of the stage trying to find her…calling her name in a panic…forgetting she couldn’t hear them. Discovering her blissfully unaware, slowly putting on her Mickee Faust rat persona. The story of a well respected professor in a Madonna sketch, dressed in leather crawling across stage to lap from a bowl of milk. The days when the company operated out of a bar and each person in the small cast played ten characters.How do I write about the intersecting identities of this group, so anxious to push the boundaries of performance…to exploit their difference for comedic laughs. To fuck with the audience by blurring gender, age, sexual desire. To develop a “going to hell piece” where the audience is uncomfortable…the company has had cancer clowns, black and white face…things we view as taboo that we feel compelled to stage.
We escape definition deliberately with our mascot that is not human but rat…our company that is community theater but would rather die than perform typical community theater shit like The Sound of Music. Yet, as the company grows, how important definition becomes. We need moolah, this rag tag group of social miscreants. We write grants where we define ourselves as an underrepresented group…where we play with identity politics in an attempt to beat the man at his own game. We trot out our gimps, our dykes, our older cast members…see how diverse we are?!!! Yet we struggle, chaffing at the picture we painted of ourselves. This spring we received a Christopher Reeve grant and pledged to do a show with a disabled theme- we called it Mixed Abilities…that eventually morphed into a show about struggles with the body…with one what the fuck piece where adam and eve discover Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and overthrow patriarchal god. Reflecting back we are a bit abashed at our inability to produce a show paying homage to disability….while we glory in putting one over on the grant committees that want us to be a good disabled troupe.
