Each week Justin Juul highlights a rad upcoming local sexy event.
Who Penny Arcade is a performance artist/playwright who, as a 13-year-old girl, would climb out of her bedroom window to do LSD with queers, junkies, prostitutes and the crème de le crème of New York’s art world. When that got boring, she began doing theater, which, to her surprise, she found more exciting than drugs and bottom dwelling. Her first big role was in the John Vaccaro directed Kenneth Bernard play, The Moke Eater. After that, she starred in a number of plays and then moved on to acting in movies. Or at least, that was the idea. By the time her first film, Andy Warhol’s Women in Revolt, began to attract mainstream attention, Arcade had become a bona-fide teenage starlet. Not a good thing. Arcade was so freaked out by the sudden stardom that she ran off to Amsterdam for 10 years. When she returned to the states in 1980, she immediately resumed her theater work, starring in plays and eventually turning her attention to writing. She’s been producing, directing, and starring in her own shows (Bad Reputation, Based on a True Story, La Miseria, etc.) around the world ever since. And you thought your grandma was cool because she used to smoke pot! Pssssh.
What Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! is Penny Arcade’s super ballsy (har har) take on censorship, feminism, and a life less ordinary. A series of semi-autobiographical monologues punctuated by go-go dancing, nude performance art, and audience participation, the piece touches on hot topics like gays in the military, the marketing of “bad girls” in pop-culture, and the politics of rape. Local dancers and freaks are contracted for every performance, so expect to see some familiar faces.
Where Brava Theater Center (2781, 24th. SF). Tickets ($20 – $45) available here.
When February 25th – March 7th.
Why Because you’re “a little bit of everything, all rolled into one.” –M. Brooks, I’m a Bitch.