The Miss Vagina Pageant

By JackHelbig
7/18/91

Faith and Jill Soloway have been getting national attention this past year as the "creators" of the Annoyance Theatre's Real Live Brady Bunch, in which actual episodes of the early '70s sitcom have been transferred to the stage. I suspect Brady Bunch has succeeded because it works as both love letter and campy satire. Which is to say, the Soloways (and their cast) perfectly re-create on the stage the audience's ambivalent attitude toward television.

The Soloway sisters' newest show, The Miss Vagina Pageant (Faith and Jill Soloway produced and directed) is a similar mix of delight and disgust - with disgust predominating. It's also a surprisingly original and fresh take on the oft-satirized subject of beauty pageants.

It helps that the Soloways offer a distinctly feminist sensibility that shows itself in the way Miss Vagina never stoops to mocking the women involved in the pageant. The five contestants are presented as neither bimbos nor semidivines but as individuals. Thus Beth Cahill gets laughs because her character, Denise Wittke, is such a perfect re-creation of a tough white girl from the southwest side. The most attractive contestants are those who seem truest to themselves. The two most conventionally glamorous women-Camille Roget (Susan Messing) and last year's Miss America, Carol Ann Baker (Madeline Long) -are foolish, dishonest, essentially lost souls.

Miss Vagina is a work of such stinging satire that at times it descends to agitprop. But all concerned are usually more interested in getting laughs than in getting a message across. And Miss Vagina is a very funny show- more in the spirit of Metraform's taboo-challenging late-night hit Coed Prison Sluts (which features songs by Faith Soloway) than in Real Live Brady Bunch's squeaky-clean pokes at television culture.