Preview
CITIZEN POCHSY
Keep Frozen: Pochsy Productions
Written and performed by Karen Hines
Directed by John Turner
Presented by One Yellow Rabbit
Runs April 13 to 24
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
If you don’t think the terms "button cute" and "black comedy" go together, then you haven’t met Pochsy.
Actor-playwright Karen Hines’s wide-eyed, pouty-lipped alter ego may look as china-doll pretty as Clara Bow and speak in the endearing baby voice of Betty Boop, but she’s also as shallow as a Petri dish, has a squid for a heart and is dying from mercury poisoning.
Oh, yes – and she is wickedly, wildly funny.
Although she sprang into winsome life in 1992 on the fringe theatre circuit, Pochsy (pronounced "poxy") only made her Calgary debut last year, with the première of Citizen Pochsy: Head Movements of a Long-Haired Girl at One Yellow Rabbit’s High Performance Rodeo. If you missed that first taste of her piquant satire – or you can’t resist a second helping – she’s back at OYR again, this time for a two-week run at the Big Secret Theatre.
So who is Pochsy?
Just a single working girl employed by Mercury Packers (a subsidiary of Lead World), who is highly susceptible to all the latest fads, from yoga and Buddhism to Starbucks and aromatherapy. All sparkly surface and relentless self-absorption, she tries to keep a bright outlook in bleak times by focusing on the future and burbling personal little axioms ("I believe there are no errands – just chances to drive!"). But like the addled songs she’s forever breaking into, poor Pochsy is as confused as she is funny – a lost soul with a scrambled brain who could be emblematic of a world of crumbling values and mind-boggling change.
Hines says the character grew out of a desire to create a solo vehicle back in the early 1990s, when she was performing with Toronto’s Second City and directing two of her colleagues, the horror-clown duo Mump and Smoot.
"Although I wanted to do a solo show, I was really afraid of just being myself onstage," she recalls. "I was embarrassed and self-conscious about the narcissism of it. So I decided to use that and make this character an embodiment of North American consumer culture. Then my director, Sandra Balcovske, came up with the idea that she would like to see me perform it in baby-doll pyjamas. It just wrote itself after that."
The first Pochsy show, Pochsy’s Lips, made its debut at the Orlando Fringe Festival in Florida and found the character in a hospital, succumbing to the mercury she’d ingested on the job. Its macabre charm scored with audiences and encouraged Hines to continue the tale of Pochsy – although there was a catch.
"Having killed her off in the first show, I knew I had to go backwards," she says. So she wrote a prequel, Oh, baby (Pochsy’s Adventures by the Sea), which made its debut a year later. Citizen Pochsy is the belated third part of the trilogy and took so long to be written in part because Hines has been, in Pochsy’s words, "super-busy" for the last 10 years as a director, playwright and actor.
"Before I did Pochsy, I couldn’t get hired as an actor to save my life," she says. "All of a sudden, after creating this strange character, I was offered a lot of acting roles." In particular, she became a favourite of ace satirist Ken Finkleman, who cast her as Karen, the love-starved producer, in his popular CBC series The Newsroom as well as in his mini-series Foreign Objects and his mockumentary Married Life.
Then there was the little matter of an extensive tax audit by Revenue Canada, which interfered with her work for some time but ended up inspiring Citizen Pochsy. "I decided I would use the notion of an audit and of reassessment as a central element (of the piece)," she says. "It branched off into all these other questions about responsibility and culpability."
The show is set in the waiting room of a government office, where Pochsy tries to think positively as she prepares to go under the assessor’s microscope, leading to her daffy reflections on, among other things, work, friendship, beauty, belief, babies, Third World children, firemen and financial plans – not necessarily in that order. Every so often, she also tries praying to God, who she treats like an inadequate boyfriend.
Although a very contemporary character, Pochsy also recalls classic waifs, party girls and ingénues. Hines says her models included silent-film star Bow as well as that tubercular hottie Camille. "My inside joke is this notion of consumption as an illness as well as an activity," she says.
Yes, what about Pochsy’s sickness?
"I wanted to give her an affliction, because I’d been studying bouffon," explains Hines, who along with Mump (Michael Kennard) and Smoot (John Turner, her former partner and the director of Citizen Pochsy), spent some time in Paris learning about that grotesque form of clowning from acting guru Philippe Gaulier. Bouffons are the Quasimodos of comedy, often sporting abnormalities to emphasize the clown as freak and misfit. "I had seen how using that in combination with parody can really cut deeply," she says.
It was Kennard, meanwhile, who supplied her character’s unusual name. "It’s an anagram for ‘psycho’ and also represents the pox, or illness," says Hines. "But it also sounds kind of cute."
Although Citizen Pochsy toured to festivals last year, Hines considers this production as the finished work. Adding to the sense of finality, all three Pochsy scripts are being published by Coach House Books. The launch of The Pochsy Plays will take place on April 13 as part of the show’s first preview performance. |
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