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Chicago’s promoter’s ordinance: What the city wants, the city gets?
Published on 5/9/08
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Busch’s parodic homage to hag-centric thrillers and lurid melodramas of 1960s cinema seems a natural fit for Hell in a Handbag Productions. The company specializes in affectionate, pitch-perfect spoofs of Hollywood grotesqueries, including an ingeniously layered version of Hitchcock’s The Birds and a musical parody of women-in-prison films. Here artistic director David Cerda—who wrote and appeared in both of those shows—stars in drag as Angela Arden, a has-been entertainer and desperate matriarch of a family resembling the House of Atreus as it might have been imagined by Jacqueline Susann. Late-career Bette Davis and Joan Crawford films are obvious reference points (think Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?), but Busch also alludes to several other female performers of fact and fiction who met grim fates after 40: Judy Garland, Norma Desmond, Mama Rose. Salacious soap operatics aside, the play is ultimately a kind of defiant salute to growing old gracelessly.
With his world-weary smirk, unplaceable mid-Atlantic accent and striking resemblance to Joan Crawford, Cerda delivers a wonderfully hammy performance, exaggerated and campy but also well-defined and precise. The problem with Snodgrass’s production is the supporting cast. With the exception of Merrie Greenfield’s solid turn as a Bible-thumping maid, they lack a sure command of the style, without which the comedy is indistinct and less effective. Broad and frenzied, these performances belong more to farce than trashy melodrama.
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