Marga Gomez: 'Pound'

Pizza. Ninety-nine cents a slice pizza. Through the past two decades one would think this staple of a dyke's main food group would succumb to inflation. In the preface to Marga Gomez's hilarious new show "Pound," now running in the Hot Festival at Dixon Place, the stable price of a pizza slice is a benchmark for progress. Notable world economists have done less with more.

Maybe cheap pizza is a Gomez obsession. The comic did a stand up bit in the mid-'90s at the former dyke performance hotbox, WOW Cafe, saluting the arrival of Dominos to the island of Manhattan as another wave in the suburban chain store invasion. Acknowledging the downtown pizza stand glut of Joes, Real Joes, Joe's Real Italian, and Benny's Pizza, etc. on every corner, "another pizza joint," she quipped, "just what we needed but we didn't know it! And it delivers in 20 minutes. Faster pizza but strangely, shittier!"

When "Pound's" time-traveling dyke jumps from 1990 in San Francisco's Mission, skitters through 1996 and 2005, and lands in the 2015 downtown Manhattan modern day, she is ecstatic among other things that the current price per slice is under a dollar. She is equally psyched that the red flannel shirt, cut-off black jeans and army boots so much in vogue in the '90s dyke fashion is spotted in present day on the backs of sleek, Google glass-wearing, earbud sporting hipster cisdudes on their way to their job at Twitter. In 2015 Gomez seems less concerned with (or perhaps has never heard of) the rumored threat of a "dyke" extinction in (See Lisa Haas' "In Heat.") than for fast food at a bargain. Maybe she knows something we don't.

Gomez as a time-traveling dyke is introduced film script narrator style by a persona who sounds like Liza Minnelli but revealed later to be the dictating (and dictatorial) Dashiell Hammett. The protagonist, "Marga" in the present begins to recount her past as a womanizer that lands her in a current state of flat vagina, the diagnosis of which is the telltale sign of a "celibate."

While this pendulum swing is somewhat predictable, Gomez acknowledges that she enjoys the reputation of womanizer however inaccurate. But that "celibate" label prompts her to make an exploratory journey somewhat like Conrad's Marlow up the Congo River of her past to uncover the cinematic stereotypes that contribute to her current condition.

Working with a chair, lights and sound design and a few costume pieces, Gomez's "finding lesbo" commenced with her movie watching from an early age. She starts with a TV broadcast of the film, "The Children's Hour," Lillian Hellman's 1930's stageplay rendered for 1960's audiences with the lesbian love angle restored.

The pampered girl child's accusation of Sapphic sex riveted the child Gomez as she watched the main characters' lives wrecked by the ensuing malicious gossip. The consequent suicide by Martha Dobie who declares her love for Karen Wright in a lurid, self-loathing rant, served as a terrifying cautionary tale. "I want to be like Martha and love Karen... but I don't want to die!" Gomez cries.

A survey of lady lovin' cinema is not new. Books and docs have covered it in the past, Vito Russo seminal book, "The Celluloid Closet" was the first. But this trip is intensely personal and belly aching funny. Gomez movie-tripping takes us to all the favorites like "Basic Instinct," "Bound," "The Fox," and "The Killing of Sister George," but she ratchets up the energy when she acts out a lifelong fantasy spawned by the French film, "Therese and Isabelle," in a clandestine encounter with a French woman in the bathroom at a movie theatre. The frenzied sex morphs into Almod�varan magical realist territory, propelling Gomez into an alternate universe in which her cinematic icons flourish.

With the exception of a few off-stage sound cues, Gomez impersonates a few fairly well-known stars. Some renderings are imprecise but others are uncanny. Her Sandy Dennis imitation is founded on Dennis' "big teeth." Ultimately, it's Gomez's persona as the bug-eyed clown that wins you over with a confident physicality, a manic energy, and adroit comic timing. You should hurry to see this show.

"Pound" runs through July 25 at Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street. For information or tickets, call 866-811-4111 or 212-219-0736 or visit www.dixonplace.org.