Little Lady featuring Sandrine Lafond (Photo credit Paolo A. Santos)

I can’t remember, before this show, the last time I saw an adult person unhesitatingly put their whole big toe in their mouth and suck on it with a sense of blissful satisfaction. You can marvel at the flexibility of such a feat even as you cavil at the notion of exactly how clean, now, was that toe before it went in to that mouth. This combination of awe and uncomfortable personal fastidiousness is what Sandrine Lafond, the performer and creator of Little Lady, is happy to promote. She wants to hold you in a spell of fascination as she pricks away at your comfort levels, never allowing you to lapse into a passive, carefree enjoyment of her performance. Perhaps it’s her butoh training at work, or perhaps she’s artfully channelling a sense of anger stemming from her experience as a female performer. Either way she has devised in this one woman piece a highly individual performance of peculiar distinction.

We first meet the Little Lady of the title, as lights come up on stage, in a kneeling position, head down, derriere aloft, face averted, apparently sleeping comfortably. After some don’t-try-this-at-home wakeful stretching exercises, she turns to us revealing an alarmingly wide-open pair of eyes behind buffoonish spectacles and a broad, guileless smile. But she is wearing some sort of head covering, has a stuffed, protruding stomach, and favors a cropped fur jacket that gives her a dowager’s hump. She appears a strange hybrid of Little Edie from the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens, and a kinkajou. Shortly she falls into the aforementioned luxurious morning toe suck. Is she human at all? The question seems even more apropos when she flourishes a two foot walking stick and stiffly, awkwardly rises to a posture that might be called a stand, staggering uncertainly on the balls of her feet, legs bent outward in spastic totter, emitting a sort of babyish gurgling laughter. Who she is and where she is are a mystery. There’s an animalistic unpredictability to her movements and a sort of leering carnal sensuality in her investigations; nostrils sniffing, tongue extended, she appears to appraise the male audience members in the front row. Her movements and gestures recognize no bodily decorum as she stirs up an air of possible social affront. In short, despite the open faced smile and stare, she’s a bit dangerous.

Lafond’s Little Lady is a creature of routine however, and we watch as she follows a pattern of behavior revolving around her rest, her meals, her television programs, and her bodily self enjoyment. Unseen by the audience, the television shows serve as clues to the passages in her life. Programs devoted to knitting, boxing, and warfare are relayed through the actresses enthusiastic and alarmed reactions. Physically her body undergoes a series of transformations, from the crooked, lurching movements of the opening sequence, through a grotesquely sexualized persona, to a more naturally moving, unencumbered personality. En route she seems to lose much of her animal self-satisfaction and confidence. Less bizarre and recognizably human by the conclusion, she is also clouded with uncertainty, newly timid. The final act is played out in a video clip showing the freshly formed Little Lady alone and lost in a desert landscape, buffeted by winds, scorched by the sun, pricked by thorns. Despite her predicament, and aided by a genteel parasol, she perseveres, eventually stumbling upon …

There’s a visual freshness in the presentation of all of this, both skillful and compelling. Lafond seems to be comically and ruefully evaluating her evolution as a performer, and as a woman. The formally confrontational manner in which she relates the tale partly gets in the way of making you care what becomes of her character, but she isn’t – thank goodness – asking for our sympathy here, merely our attention. Which she is quite adept at capturing, and manipulating. For all the apparent clowning there’s an evident performative maturity and poise at work. She’ll take you there alright, it’s just that, much like herself, you may end in mere bewilderment at where exactly you find yourself. Deferential nods are owed to director John Turner for following her all the way, videographer Paolo Santos for the atmospheric – dare one suggest Lynchian? – film footage, and make-up and costume artists, Elisabeth Lehoux and Nelly Rogerson, who contribute effectively in elaborating such a bizarre tale. Yves Frulla‘s musical accompaniment feels the most familiar part of the exercise and helps to frame the performance in a tradition of clowning which Lafond, happily and admirably, disposes of. Though not precisely a joyride, there’s enough surprises and  whoop-de-dooh to make it memorable. It’s a trip alright, oh yeah.

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The 2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL will run February 22-March 4 at The Kraine Theater & The Red Room (85 East 4th Street between 2nd Ave and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1st Ave and Ave A). Tickets to all shows may be purchased online at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling Smarttix at 212-868-4444.

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‘T’il Love Do Us Part is a dark play about love, life, and death, written by Andrew Hall and directed by Cameron J. Marcotte. Part absurd, part realism, and part cautionary tale, the whole of this play centers upon the relationship between John and Virginia Walker. The audience is taken on a journey through their seventy year relationship, which begins and ends with death. After a chance meeting at the same cemetery where John’s father and Virginia’s mother are being buried, the two characters find each other, each alone and lost, desperate to connect with another person. A casket holds the center of the stage as a constant reminder of death, as the two characters try to heal, to love, and to live in the fractured and flawed world between them.

The play begins with another character, an unnamed young girl, unseen by the two main characters. She enters the stage dancing and wide-eyed, and appears to be an angel or a spirit, witness to the couple’s attempts to love as they navigate the broken places inside themselves and between each other. This character, played by Marshall Louise, successfully translates the emotional terrain of their relationship, as she watches the characters fall in love, then fall and break, wanting to see them truly love, helpless to stop them from hurting each other.

John and Virginia Walker are played by Robert Latrenta and Abigail Milnor-Sweetser, who both conveyed a range of depth and emotion while attempting to portray the life-span of these two characters, who literally “love each other to death.” At their first meeting, they are both painfully awkward and shy; they struggle to open up and reveal themselves to another person. As time passes, a lively, antagonistic banter develops between them. Their sexual relationship also speaks to the development of their aggressiveness towards each other; they begin by kissing shyly, tenderly, then progress into a sexual scene which is suggestively rough and forceful, almost violent in the attempt to connect.

After twenty-seven years together, John says, “This wasn’t what I wanted.” He says that he had given up his dreams in order to be with Virginia. To buy a house for her, he took a job he hated; he had become someone he never wanted to be – his father. He resents that they are childless, and feels that he wasted his life trying to save someone who could not be saved. A terrible fight ensues and their hostility and anger, both within and towards each other, spirals into viciousness and violence. This confrontation offers an opportunity to grow closer. Virginia finally talks about her feelings about her mother, and how her mother had damaged her as a child. She did not believe herself capable of being loved until she met John. She says that her mother must have been right. John says that he loves her. He says he does not want to leave her, he can’t leave her. He has nowhere else to go.

Neither of these characters have anywhere else to go, save for the unmistakable casket that takes center stage in each scene and stage of their relationship. One wants these characters to find a path together where love doesn’t mean giving up their dreams or becoming stuck and trapped in a relationship that is broken, a dead-end, a place that doesn’t allow them to expand or grow. One wants these characters to love themselves and each other in ways that can heal instead of hurt. ‘Til Love Do Us Part offers a very interesting look into relationships symbolized by the ever-present coffin. Yes, this is a dark play. It is also a play that provokes thought into how we love, how we live, and how we die, both literally and figuratively; these threads are woven into the play in different ways that intertwine and affect us all.

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Cast (alphabetical):

John Walker: Robert Latrenta
Young Girl: Marshall Louise
Virginia Walker: Abigail Milnor-Sweetser

Creative Team:
Playwright/Composer: Andrew Hall
Director: Cameron J. Marcotte
Dramaturg: Nathan “Nati” Avni-Singer
Choreographer: Jillene Johnson
Costume Designer: Elise VanderKley
Lighting Designer: Nia L. Adams
Sound Designer: Ido Levran
Makeup and Hair: Meg Murphy
Production Stage Manager: Mackenzie Meeks
Assistant Stage Manager: Anne Ciarlone
Creative Consultants: Daniel Talbott and Alex Keegan

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The 2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL will run February 22-March 4 at The Kraine Theater & The Red Room (85 East 4th Street between 2nd Ave and Bowery) and UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place between 1st Ave and Ave A). Tickets to all shows may be purchased online at www.FRIGIDnewyork.info or by calling Smarttix at 212-868-4444.

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• ‘Til Love Do Us Part: 5 Things To Know About The Show Before You Go (2012 FRIGID NEW YORK FESTIVAL)
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