Stereotypes are skewered, races reversed, sexes switched and roles subverted in ”Womandingo,” City Lit Theater Company`s gender-bending tragicomedy.
Both scathing and silly, Sterling Houston`s travesty, conceived and directed by Arnold Aprill, spoofs the phony antebellum fantasies of films like ”Drum,” ”Mandingo,” and even ”Gone with the Wind.”
But it doesn`t stop there. Houston`s chief target is our culture-bound expectations-of dominance and sex, submission and race. ”Womandingo” wants to mock them to shame, to deconstruct these sexual/racial cliches by making the men passive, the women violent and the slaves white.
Ripe for rebellion, the Lily White Oaks Plantation teems with subversive stereotypes: Missy Annabellee, a 6-foot-5, sex-crazed, cracked belle (Michael Shepperd); Rufus, a doomed runaway slave (Maripat Donovan); the much-desired Womandingo (Kristie Berger); the sassy, suffering Mammy (Lee Kanne); the bullyboy Governor (Bridgett Williams); and, in a brazen cameo, scrappy Scarlett O`Hara, a nightmare in crinoline (played by Joan Jett Blakk.)
But ”Womandingo” founders on inconsistency of tone and on one-joke humor; gags that could fill a sketch wear thin fast when stretched into two acts.
Worse, by trying to make a rape or a whipping funny, Aprill`s cartoony staging only clouds the issues.
Perplexingly, ”Womandingo” sporadically turns serious, veering from a spoof of 19th-Century melodrama to the real thing. The final scene, which caps a stupid massacre, is a sober homily on liberation. Delivered by Blakk, an African-American actor who plays a slave rebel, it clumsily reverses the reversed casting.
Steve Key does a hilarious takeoff on Butterfly McQueen that`s a rare case of unforced humor in an overwrought satire.
`WOMANDINGO`
By Sterling Houston; directed by Arnold Aprill, with a set by Maripat Donovan and David Csicsko; City Lit Theatre Company at Victory Gardens Studio Theatre, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; at 8:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays and 7 and 10 p.m. Saturdays; open run. Running time: 1:40. Tickets: $10, $15. Phone
312-871-3000.
