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Holly Hughes: Polymorphous Perversity and the Lesbian Scientist. An Interview

1989; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1145952

1531-4715

Rebecca Schneider, Holly Hughes,

Diversity and Impact of Dance

Dress Suits to Hire won Holly Hughes the distinction of having authored her own genre. When the play opened in May 1987 at P.S. I22 in New York City, C. Carr of The Village Voice heralded Hughes as queen of her own Dyke Noir Theatre and broadcast her reputation as bad girl of the bad girls. She's hell on heels, a twisted sister-a character from the timeless, tasteless world of as imagined by Holly Hughes. Where is Hughes' since Dress Suits? If Carr is right, Wherever she goes it's the wrong side of town (I987:32). I found Hughes close to midnight in the East Village. She was popping out of a glaring pink, plaster-of-paris pig at performance space P.S. I22. It was I6 September I988, the beginning of World Without End, Hughes' latest work-in-progress. The pig bore the name Trojan Pig because, Hughes told me, she wanted to appear as kind of Sappho reincarnate. Hughes stood with her naked back to the audience as four lovely negligee-clad attendants helped her don a pinkish bra to complete her garish girdle outfit. The beauties guided her to a pink scallop-backed chair center stage where, for the rest of the night, like some kind of Venus on her shell, Hughes told it all-from her own version of Genesis in which Eve and Adam ride the IRT subway, to the particularly smutty Gospel According to Mona, Hughes' mother. In the course of her raunchy tales, spicy asides, and sometimes painful personal sagas, Hughes, with a winsome smile, proclaimed herself the preeminent lesbian playwright of my generation. The campy butch-femme role playing of Hughes early Well of Hominess evolved through Lady Dick and Dress Suits to receive quite a bit of critical attention, especially from those interested in ways lesbian theatre disrupts traditional constellations of gender and power on stage (see Davy I986; Dolan 1988). Hughes' latest dyke noir appears in new garb as the sinuous and long-winded monolog World Without End, a piece which pays a surprising amount of attention to the specifics of Adam's anatomy: