Thirty years after Andy Warhol lost the only typed manuscript, Valerie Solanas' satire, Up Your Ass: From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck or Up From the Slime, makes its New York debut Feb. 7-25 at P.S. 122.
Solanas gained her fame as creator of the feminist "SCUM Manifesto" (SCUM is an acronym for the Society for Cutting Up Men), but tarnished her reputation (and won even greater fame) by later trying to kill Warhol, whom she felt had worked against her. Up Your Ass is her only work for the stage. In the satire, she depicts a sharp radical named Bongi Perez who, in a normal day, encounters a pregnant middle class housewife, two drag queens, a teenager discovering his erection, a bimbo and - of course - several chauvinist pigs.
George Coates Performance Works, who brought this all-female production from San Francisco, stages the piece in a sidewalk cafe on karaoke night. The theatre company has been seen at Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kennedy Center and the American Conservatory Theatre in such productions as The Way of How, Nowhere Now Here and The Architecture of Catastrophic Change.
Tickets are $20. P.S. 122 is located at 150 First Avenue at Ninth Street. For reservations, call (212) 477-5288. P.S. 122 is on the web at http://www.ps122.org.
— By Christine Ehren