Monday, December 15, 2025

Natalie Palamides offers herself in sacrifice in "Weer" at the Cherry Lane Theater

This is not a review. Why not? Because it's fast and furious, and a review (I've written them too) takes time and thinking and researching.
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Last night I saw Weer at The Cherry Lane Theater in New York City. Natalie Palamides plays both the woman and the man in this comedy, each half of her body mascarading as a gender.
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The word that came spontaneously to my mind after experiencing this show was propitiation. This according to the dictionary is the act of satisfying God's wrath against sin through a sacrifice. I was puzzled myself, and here's how I make sense of it:
I had definitely witnessed a sacrifice on stage, just as I might have seen one 2500 years ago on a Peloponasian stage. It might have been a lamb or a calf and the audience watched breathless as the creature went from being alive to being dead, something that awaits us all. In Weer, what was being sacrificed? That was fairly easy to answer: comfort, modesty, decency, ego, elegance, feminine dignity, masculine dignity, all these things that constrain my life (OK, not so much masculine dignity unless it's to avoid challenging it) on a daily basis, and clearly also constrains the life of the other people in the audience from their reaction to the bacchanale going onstage. In the French school of clowing with which she apprenticed, our fear of failure is staged for the benefit of the audience. This comes into play here as well as a brilliant mind.
Palamides sacrifices all these goals we usually strive for particularly in the company of others, for our benefit, with generosity and courage, and an astounding flow of energy. She repeatedly dousee herself in what must be cold water and other unidentified liquids on a freezing winter night, she fell, she banged her head hard on the floor, she whined, she strutted, she stripped, she fondled her own breasts, she faked sex and orgasm.
Weer is a deformation of the word deer. Sounds like dear too. Her lover has a speech impediment he tries to hide. All these attributes which she trampled on for our sake might obstruct the true expression of love, as a kind of speech impediment. In the end he is able to stutter: I wove you, I wove you.
Yes, the story is that of a romcom: girl meets boy, there are lies, there is seduction, there is deception, and a man who will not commit enough emotionally to his partner to tell her he loves her. Every aspect is taken to extremes as in a greek tragedy where Medea will kill her own children to exact vengeance on the man who has betrayed her. It's a romtradjcom. A new genre. Some of her speech and actions are improvised as she interacts with the audience which she involves in the performance. The audience is haphazardous and by consequence the performances will slightly differ every night. There are no safety nets here when she walks the tight rope.
She wrote, directed and acts in the show, which was conceived with an astounding richness of imagination. The scene where she hits a deer with her car is just about one of the funniest, most imaginative scenes I have ever seen in the theater.
Palamides is a Greek name, and her performance is truly Herculean. Greeks were big on sacrificial rituals. Propiation is a concept both in Judaism and Christianism - whichever religion Palamides grew in. But who is the God that she needs to propitiate? Maybe the god of norms and of TV shows and of social media where one flaunts one's best side and one's successes and best looking photos and sexy photos and enviable vacations and glamorous parties and tender love. Weer is no Instagram fodder with its smudged makeup, its menstruation coming out of the mouth, its sperm spouting into the audience.
We left exhilarated and liberated after the show. Maybe we'll carry into our daily life a bit of that freedom for which Palamides sacrificed herself on stage.
As the audience stood up for a well deserved ovation, she stayed just for a few minutes before disappearing backstage. I imagine she collapsed, completely drained from her mental/physical/emotional blood (there was a lot of raspberry colored blood throughout the performance). She does this 6 times a week. (Clearly) not written with AI by Arabella Hutter von Arx
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Friday, July 11, 2025

Smurfette and the Eternal Gender Gap (Now with Rihanna!)


A more simpaticx queer smurf

Back in 1959, Belgian comic artist Peyo gave the world the Smurfs—those little blue communitarians who all looked the same but had one defining personality trait. One was Clumsy, one was Grouchy, one was Lazy, and so on. 

Then in 1967, Peyo had a real lightbulb moment. He introduced… Smurfette. What was her defining trait, you ask? Was she Witty Smurf? Scientific Smurf? Existentialist Smurf? Nope. She was Female. That’s it. Her entire personality boiled down to: Girl Smurf. Revolutionary.

Man, de Beauvoir says, is the norm whose superiority is normal as expected, and even required; woman, on the other hand, is the        Other, excluded from the site reserved only for the norm by being obliged into occupying the usually negative place of non-normality.

Smurfette’s existence in an otherwise all-male Smurf village perfectly illustrates this: male is neutral, female is the anomaly.

Flash forward to 2025. Surely we've progressed, right? There’s a new Smurfs movie on the horizon. Smurfette is still the one and only gal in the gang, voiced by Rihanna, which is cool, but still—doesn’t fix the fact that she’s the only female blueprint in a whole sea of blue dudes.

And still no Queer Smurf. No Trans Smurf. No Nonbinary Smurf. Just one lonely Smurfette, holding down the gender fort since LBJ was in office.

So maybe think twice before taking your kids to see a movie that’s recycling gender stereotypes thriving since the Cold War. It might be animated, but the messaging isn’t exactly… revolutionary.

La Schtroumpfette et l’éternel fossé des genres (Maintenant avec Rihanna !)

En 1959, le dessinateur belge Peyo a offert au monde les Schtroumpfs — ces petits communistes bleus qui se ressemblaient tous, à un trait de personnalité près. Il y avait le Schtroumpf Maladroit, le Schtroumpf Grognon, le Schtroumpf Paresseux, et ainsi de suite.

Puis, en 1967, Peyo a eu une vraie illumination. Il a créé… la Schtroumpfette. Quelle était sa caractéristique principale, vous demandez-vous ? Était-elle la Schtroumpf Spirituelle ? La Schtroumpf Scientifique ? La Schtroumpf Existentielle ? Non. Elle était... une femme. C’est tout. Toute sa personnalité se résumait à : Schtroumpf Fille. Révolutionnaire, non ?

L’homme, dit Simone de Beauvoir, est la norme dont la supériorité est attendue, voire exigée ; la femme, en revanche, est l’Autre, exclue de l’espace réservé à la norme, contrainte à occuper la place (généralement négative) de la non-normalité.

L’existence de la Schtroumpfette dans un village de Schtroumpfs exclusivement masculin illustre cela à la perfection : le masculin est neutre, le féminin est l’anomalie.

Avançons jusqu’en 2025. On aura sûrement fait des progrès, non ? Il y a un nouveau film des Schtroumpfs à l’horizon. Et vous ne devinerez jamais : la Schtroumpfette est toujours la seule fille du groupe. Elle sera peut-être doublée par Rihanna — ce qui est cool, mais bon, ça ne change rien au fait qu’elle reste l’unique être féminin parmi une mer de mecs bleus.

Et toujours aucun Schtroumpf Queer. Aucun Schtroumpf Trans. Aucun Schtroumpf Non-Binaire. Juste une pauvre Schtroumpfette isolée, gardienne du genre depuis que Charles de Gaulle était président.

Alors réfléchissez à deux fois avant d’emmener vos enfants voir un film qui recycle tristement des stéréotypes de genre qui ont survécu à la guerre froide. Le film est peut-être animé, mais son message est monolithique.
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Wednesday, February 26, 2025

 


Safe House at St. Ann’s Warehouse: A Safe House that turns into a Doll House

Walking into Safe House at St. Ann’s Warehouse, I didn’t know what to expect, but within minutes, I was completely drawn in. The young performer on stage was electrifying, Kate Gilmore—her presence crackled with emotion, switching between despair, vulnerability, and outright provocation with astonishing rhythm and volatility. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

As someone who lived in London in the early ‘90s, the raw authenticity of it all immediately struck a chord. It felt like an echo of a past I had experienced—gritty, beautiful, unsettling. And for a while, I was completely on board.

But then, something shifted. Or maybe it didn’t, and that was the problem.

The show’s musicality was striking—contemporary opera meets raw performance art—but I struggled to decipher the lyrics, which made it hard to grasp the protagonist’s journey. From what I could gather, she was an Irish woman haunted by childhood dreams of being a princess, still wearing that imagined crown into adulthood. A dangerous aspiration in a world filled with imperfect men. This seemed reinforced by fragmented video projections behind her—disjointed, evocative, but hard to piece together.

She was obviously struggling. Financially, emotionally. At one point, she found a decaying sandwich in a box, drank wine from another. There were hints of a mother, but no clear father figure. Maybe she grew up in a home for children? Birthday parties flashed by, but they weren’t exactly joyful. I kept searching for a clear story arc, a sense of who she was and where she was going, but it remained elusive.

Then, near the end, she turned to the audience. A confrontation. Were we responsible for her suffering? Were we complicit in her circumstances? It started to feel like the creators of the play were playing with a doll:

"Hey, maybe, she could take her clothes off."

"And then, she could have blood dripping from her face."

"She could open a fridge, and the barking of a dog would come out." What was that dog anyway, Cerberus?

"She could lie down in a coffin like Snow White."

"She could return to a childhood bedroom, a stage-set recreation of something lost."

These striking images were powerful, but without understanding the lyrics, they felt more like symbols floating without a clear anchor. The music was strident, the singing amplified—some audience members left, others dozed off.

Visually, the video projections were aesthetically effective, but I struggled to connect them to the protagonist’s unraveling. Was it chaos by design? A dreamscape of trauma and longing? Or was I just missing a crucial piece of the puzzle?

Safe House was a visceral experience—one I admired but couldn’t fully grasp.

Until March 2, 2025

https://stannswarehouse.org/show/safe-house/

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