Review
CITIZEN POCHSY
Keep Frozen: Pochsy Productions
Written and performed by Karen Hines
Directed by John Turner
Presented by One Yellow Rabbit
Runs until April 24
Big Secret Theatre (Epcor Centre)
With the Pochsy plays, writer-performer Karen Hines has taken a classic shtick, the vacuous cutie, and elevated it to the level of stinging satire.
Her ditsy Pochsy is a pinup girl for the age of skin-deep values and moral ambiguity, when compassion can be "explored" as though it were a trend like feng shui, and gods are there for the choosing, like eligible men waiting to be picked by TV’s Bachelorette. (I’d go for the guy who offers you reincarnation.)
One of the most ruthlessly funny segments in Hines’s new show, Citizen Pochsy, has our vacant working girl revealing how she once sponsored a Third World foster child – chosen for her big-eyed adorability. In response to the little girl’s letters, filled with tales of violence, despair and sweatshop drudgery, Pochsy offered perky platitudes – "There are no problems," she assured her. "Only challenges."
But then something happened. "I just got super-busy," says Pochsy, and they lost touch. "Or one of my cheques bounced, I think."
Happily, she reports, it didn’t affect her credit rating.
At that point, you may have decided that Pochsy is about as cuddly as a teddy bear stuffed with razor blades. But she does deserve a dollop of sympathy. The girl’s a product of North American society – another victim of corporate greed, working on contract in a hazardous chemical factory, and brainwashed by advertising into believing that the hierarchy of needs begins with a good car, a better long-distance provider and the best of all possible financial plans.
Finances are much on her muddled mind in this, the third part of the Pochsy triptych – you see, she’s being audited and we’re catching her just as she’s arrived in the waiting room of a government office, bearing a banker’s box full of files. As the title suggests, this leads her to ponder her role as a citizen, such as it is. "I mean," she says, "I never even vote."
But Pochsy never ponders long on anything and, as she skitters about the stage seeking designer Cimmeron Meyer’s fugitive spotlights like a suicidal deer, she also offers us pithy comments on everything from her spiritual growth ("I am still searching for a deeper level of meaning and blahdedyblah…") to having a baby ("I don’t want to be life-giving. I want to be breath-taking!") And there’s even the occasional fashion tip: "A little fresh lipstick never killed anybody," she says. "Well… anybody human."
When the spirit moves her, she’ll also break into song, purring mock cabaret numbers and spoof show tunes with irresistibly bizarre lyrics ("I’ll be your Fraulein Frankenstein/I’ll be your calming calamine") to the sensitive piano stylings of composer Greg Morrison.
Hines’s physical model for Pochsy may be Clara Bow (the original "It" girl), but in Citizen Pochsy her heart-shaped face is framed by long auburn tresses – whose significance is revealed late in the show – that give her a striking resemblance to another silent-screen babe, America’s Sweetheart, Canadian-born Mary Pickford. And I’ve previously described her as sounding like Betty Boop, but I’d like to strike that. Her breathy, tremulous delivery is much more like Marilyn Monroe with a bad case of nerves.
Yet for all the influences, she’s one of a kind, like her clown cohorts Mump and Smoot, whose work she directs (and who here return the favour – this show has been directed by Smoot, a.k.a. John Turner). By coincidence, she is performing her show at One Yellow Rabbit at the same time as Alberta Theatre Projects presents Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things. While the latter play comments on our culture’s obsession with the sexy image, Hines’s Pochsy is the embodiment of that superficiality in all its alluring, appalling glory. A toxic tart, a charming little package filled with all that is callous, selfish and stupid about western life, she proves that Mump and Smoot aren’t the only clowns of horror. |
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