Michael Dale’s Theatre Crawl – Jill Sobule’s F*ck7thGrade Rocks Out On The Struggles Of Being A Junior High Outcast
Kristen Ellis-Henderson, Jill Sobule and Nini Camps in F*ck7thGrade (Photo: Eric McNatt)
By Michael Dale
This week…
Jill Sobule’s F*ck7thGrade at wild project through February 11. Tickets $45/$55.
How To Live at The Theater at the 14th Street Y. Closed.
Inexpensive and recommended…
The Wildly Inappropriate Poetry of Arthur Greenleaf Holmes at The Tank through February 9. Tickets $25.
Modern Swimwear at The Tank through February 12. Tickets $25/$35/$50.
On my second visit to Jill Sobule’s rousingly kick-ass autobiographical rock concert with a plot, F*ck7thGrade…
…(which itself is making a second visit to the cozy confines of wild project), something stood out to me that didn’t before. It’s a scene taking place at a chance meeting between Sobule –whose rise to music stardom fizzled quickly after executives chose to market her 1995 queer anthem, “I Kissed A Girl”, as a novelty song about straight women experimenting – and a one-time adolescent tormentor, decades after their junior high years. The now middle-aged mother, who became a fan of her former classmate’s music after seeing how her lesbian daughter connected with it, is surprised to hear that she was regarded as a bully by the singer/songwriter.
“Do you remember telling everyone that I was a satanist and a lezzie and that I didn’t wash my hair?,” asks Sobule. “And you got the other girls to stop hanging out with me, too.”
The classmate is thrown at her assessment of their adolescent years and apologizes, noting, “All I remember thinking about is how left out and ugly and not smart enough I felt back then.”
And it got me thinking about how some of my own school-age tormentors, who teased me for being shy, overweight and unable to sing pitches accurately, were probably also dealing with their own insecurities. Yeah, f*ck 7th grade.
I didn’t realize how popular Sobule was with women of my generation until I wrote about the show’s original run and started hearing from friends on my social media feeds who loved the sardonic wit of “Happy Town” (about the numbing effects of anti-depressants) and the social commentary of “Soldiers of Christ”.
F*ck7thGrade, which is directed by Lisa Peterson, has a narration book by Liza Birkenmeier and has its star joined by musician/actors Nini Camps on bass, Kristen Ellis-Henderson on drums and music director Julie Wolf on keys, rocks out on issues like longing for a cool bike (“Raleigh Blue Chopper”) initial sexual awareness (“Forbidden Thoughts Of Youth”) and learning the mechanics of kissing (“What Do I Do With My Tongue?”).
Arrive early and enjoy painter Marykate O’Neil’s lobby art display, which includes these clever homespun depictions of 1970s suburban life.
“How did it happen that you lived?”
In Mindy Pfeffer’s How To Live which just completed a short premiere run as part of the 14th Street Y’s LABA (A Laboratory for Jewish Culture) program, the admissions officer of a university’s school of psychiatry asks that question to every prospective student.
They’re in Krakow, Poland in 1949, and the university is concerned about irreparable emotional scars impeding the scholastic progress of their Jewish students.
Pfeffer was inspired to write this drama of survivor’s guilt on a visit to Krakow, where she found the gravesite of Dr. Maria Pfeffer Orwid and started researching to see if the woman was related to the part of her family that migrated to Brooklyn. While certainty on that has yet to be determined, the playwright mixes fact and fiction for this exploration of the emotional state of European Jews who managed to live through the Holocaust.
James Hallett and Danielle Delgado in How To Live (Photo: Basil Rodericks)
James Hallett and Danielle Delgado in How To Live (Photo: Basil Rodericks)
It begins in 1941, when young Maria (Jacqueline McCarthy) witnesses her father (James Hallett) being beaten on the street by Germans. He endures the incident and retreats into silence, instructing her to do the same.
From there, the play continuously jumps back and forth between the 1940s and 1980s in a series of short scenes, most less than a minute long. We see adult Maria (Danielle Delgado) giving a university lecture on survival and guilt and also see her, and her younger self, undergoing psychoanalysis. We see scenes with her mother (Christine Bruno), both during and after the war. Most disturbing are scenes in the 80s when Maria has sessions with a Jewish medical doctor (Hallett) who is tortured with the memory of surviving Auschwitz by performing autopsies, only to learn after the war of the heinous experiments being performed there.
Director Jean Randish’s ensemble of actors did a fine job, but the quick scenes – perhaps intended to serve as an exploratory collage – keep the play from reaching full dramatic impacts. But How To Live is a thoughtful piece and I look forward to seeing what the playwright does with it next.
Found this in the Metropolitan Opera House gift shop. Great for getting out all your damned spots…
Curtain Line…
Living in New York means that any night of the week, if you’re willing to do a little bit of research, you can find an event where someone is willing to put a free plastic cup full of wine in your hand.