| Alanis debuts off-Broadway By PAUL CANTIN Senior Reporter, JAM! Showbiz NEW YORK -- In one of her recent songs, Alanis Morissette expressed a simple wish: "That I would be good." Tuesday night, in her debut on the dramatic stage, in an off-Broadway production of Eve Ensler's play "The Vagina Monologues," her wish was granted, with interest. Before a small crowd of 300, which included many of her fans (including one woman who said she travelled from Ottawa especially for the show) and her parents Alan and Georgia, the Ottawa native proved she was good, and then some. Although the production is the singer's first shot at stage acting, it's not her first dramatic role. As a teen, she performed slapstick skits on the kids show "You Can't Do That On Television," and during her first brush with fame as a dance-pop diva, she appeared alongside Corey Haim in a probably best-forgotten high school cross-dressing comedy known variously as "Anything For Love," "Just One Of The Girls" and "Boys Will Be Girls." More recently, she appeared as a beatific, mute God in Kevin Smith's irreverent "Dogma," and has taken a shot at acting in her own videos. So Morissette is not a complete novice, but "The Vagina Monologues" is her first shot at serious acting, and although expectations seem to have been managed down -- there was no advance press beyond an initial announcement and no flashy opening night festivities -- this is New York, and the tiny basement Westside Theatre is just a few blocks west of Broadway's Times Square epicentre, so the stakes are high. Early in the production, it seemed Morissette was to be consigned to junior partner status, edged out of the heaviest dramatic portions of Ensler's text by her two more seasoned co-stars -- Tony Award winning stage veteran Shirley Knight and Second City alumna Andrea Martin. Yet by the end of the 90 minute performance, it was Morissette who provided the evening's most powerful and affecting moments, something that bodes well for her planned foray further into acting. "The Vagina Monologues" was created by Ensler in 1997, based on hundreds of interviews with a wide variety of women -- everyone from a six-year-old girl to women in their 70s -- speaking on the topic of their vaginas. Although that sounds like a recipe for an evening of squirming in your theatre seat, the piece is often riotously funny and deeply poignant. The play casts a different trio of actors every couple of weeks. Knight, Martin and Morissette replace Cynthia Nixon, Rita Moreno and Marlo Thomas, and will themselves be replaced in the coming weeks. The austere production -- three chairs and three microphones, actors barefoot and dressed in black -- doesn't allow the cast enough latitude to ham it up or chew scenery, and that's a good thing. Ensler's text provides plenty, and credit should probably go to director Joe Mantello for some superb choices, dividing up the parts among his three actors, casting to their strengths and against type. Knight -- the senior member of the cast -- was believable speaking in the voice of the six-year-old (who believes her vagina smells like snowflakes) and as an older woman who has come to think of her sex as a padlocked, musty basement. Her show-stopping turn, though, came when she articulated (I'm not kidding) the "angry vagina," enumerating the indignities visited upon women, and eliciting the kind of response from the audience usually reserved for gospel preachers. Martin's comic timing and gift of mimicry is well-known to SCTV fans, and the ensuing years have only sharpened her talent. She conjured an appropriately stuffy British accent for an inhibited woman who discovers the wonder of her own body during a hopelessly new-agey "vagina workshop." She was at once tragic and hilarious recounting the story of a homeless woman's gradual sexual awakening and delivered a fiery monologue about pubic hair. But Martin's piece de resistance came as she portrayed a lesbian sex worker who enumerated the different sounds women deliver during sex -- the elegant moan, the right-on-it moan, the mountain-top moan, the machine-gun moan and even the Alanis Morissette moan, customized by Martin from Ensler's original text, which labelled it the Grace Slick moan. For much of her time onstage, Morissette seemed content to wring laughs out of her lines with deadpan delivery. But the play's most emotionally challenging monologue, a Bosnian woman recounting her time in a "rape camp," fell to her. As she haltingly described to the hushed audience the woman's experience of being raped by a soldier's rifle barrel, Morissette wept and then loudly sobbed, making her character's unimaginable agony almost tangible. Later, she recited a monologue from a woman intent on reclaiming ... let's just call it the "C" word, and Morissette luxuriated in the character's relish for the very sound of it, milking it for all its phonetic and linguistic potential. When Morissette concluded by loudly, repeatedly declaring the word in question with orgasmic elan, a clearly-impressed Knight announced: "That's it. I'm going home!" The two monologues highlighted underappreciated aspects of Morissette's talent. The latter demonstrated her skill at phrasing and her undervalued ability to use her voice as an instrument (something she occasionally uses to great effect on her records). The former echoed a performance Morissette gave at a small Ottawa club, just before "Jagged Little Pill" was released. "You Oughta Know" was then a fresh song, undiminished by saturation airplay or a million copycat singers and songs. That night, Morissette tore into the number with palpable fury, and by the end of the song, she seemed to likewise be on the verge of tears. She is an artist who seems incapable of resisting climbing way out on an emotional limb and is happy to run the risk of seeming sappy or melodramatic (which occasionally happens). The same courage to abandon herself to the peformance, to put herself emotionally on the line, charges the best of her work. What audiences responded to then, and what the audience for this opening performance of "The Vagina Monologues" likewise responded to, is Morissette's fearless honesty. |
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