The small lobby of Soho Rep looks much like it usually does. The glass storefront window. The small box office door. The stairs leading to the basement restrooms. But to enter the theatre itself, you step through a sequined vulva; walk down the ribbed, plush pink tube of a hallway. You then emerge into the black box space where you might notice the two desks and the video screens that hint at a television talk show set. Or the hot pink fallopian tubes painted on the walls. But what will give you pause are the giant golden legs, spread eagle and held aloft by invisible stirrups, revealing the golden naked vulva upstage center in this womb, this theatre, this temple.
The show is Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte’s Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month, so you should know from the jump that you’re in for some vagina discourse. But still, visually, this set by Greg Corbino is a lot to take in. And Snatch and Tainty haven’t even entered yet. Oh, but when they do…
Blackwell last played an FBI agent in Is This a Room on Broadway. For this newest piece, they play Snatch Adams, a 6-foot-tall vagina who has recently lost her job clowning at Planned Parenthood, so she’s now got this talk show gig with her sidekick Tainty (Duarte), a coarse, hairy butthole. Production photos won’t prepare you for Snatch dragging her ovaries behind her or Tainty tossing his testes over his shoulders as they take center stage. For the next hour or so, the two follow a basic talk show format as they interact with the audience during the opening monologue (full of off-color jokes about women), play games (two audience members who have never had a period have to figure out how to put on a sanitary belt), read actual headlines about women’s health and government, and interview celebrity guests. It’s sarcastic, silly, informative, rude, enlightening.
And, at the end of the show, when Blackwell comes on in a black tee and jeans and addresses the audience as themself, a trans person, and talks of living in the world as both man and woman, it is lovely. It is so simple and so complex at once.
And that’s kind of the point. These bodies—so complicated in their functions, so argued about and interfered with in our society and government, so gross and so miraculous—are just bodies. Everyone has one. So, get over it. Whatever it is that’s hanging you up about a body. Herpes? Bleeding? Farting? Who has what parts and what those parts are allowed to do? Get over it. And maybe just talk to the actual person sitting next to you.
“Sometimes we all think we’re just heads, and we forget that this body is carrying our souls and is actually a great tool for participating in the world,” says Blackwell. Simple, right? Not really. Because to get to that point, there has to be a certain sense of equality first. And we’re way off.
Blackwell was first inspired to create Snatch Adams (a play on the Robin Williams clown doctor film Patch Adams) in 2013, when Texas state senator Wendy Davis filibustered for 13 hours in the Texas legislature to prevent a vote on an abortion ban. Blackwell remembers thinking that the people in the room with penises seemed very unaware of what the people with vaginas might be feeling.
“It’s like when Black Americans say, ‘It’s hard to hear all this noise,’ and white Americans were always like, ‘Oh, God! I didn’t even think about that.’ Yeah. Because you don’t have to. You’re not in that place,” explains Blackwell. “If heterosexual cis women aren’t being taken care of, or revered, or even seen as equal, then my status as a queer, or especially trans person, is going to be completely invisible. It’s shocking that people don’t understand how we’re all interconnected.”
The only way Blackwell knew to combat that anger was to attack it with humor and silliness. “Because to me, everything they [those opposing abortion] stand on is silly, so, let’s counter it with a fart. What is that? It’s a release of pressure and gas,” says Blackwell.
Blackwell had just won the Doris Duke Award, an $80,000 financial prize dedicated to individual performing artists, and used the money to commission the Snatch Adams costume. It fits around them almost like a taco shell, with holes for their arms to go through. The prepuce stands about 12” above their head and the labia goes down to their knees. The vulva matches Blackwell’s flesh tones with patches of sequined fabric and sparse ostrich feathers fluttering. Blackwell wears a red clown nose. At one point in the show, Snatch asks an audience member to point out the clitoris. (In the show I saw, a male-presenting person fumbled around touching Blackwell’s stomach area until it was suggested the female-presenting person sitting nearby lend a hand…with a boop on the red nose.)
After Blackwell had the costume, they came up with the show. “I was like, ‘Who knows when I’ll have this money again? If I have this costume, I’ll do something with it.’ That’s kind of how I’ve always been with my work,” admits Blackwell. “I’ll book a gig and then I’ll write it.” (So real.)
Blackwell loved Duarte’s online acerbic, aggressive “men are idiots” humor, and the two partnered up to create the show. Duarte’s Tainty is the masculine id, while Blackwell’s Snatch is the feminine. “There’s a beautiful, fun playfulness of yin and yang, the two sides that are in all of us,” Blackwell says.
Over the years, it’s run as smaller pieces, but this co-production with Soho Rep and Bushwick Starr is its premiere as a full-length theatre work. It wasn’t an easy sell and Blackwell had a hard time getting funding for it. “I think people loved the idea, but no one could handle it. But now that people are seeing it, they’re like, ‘This is what the world needs.’ I think people are afraid to take real risks on something that isn’t traditional,” says the artist. “Industry people don’t always think outside of the box.”
Soho Rep is a good home for Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month. It’s the most uptown theatre in the downtown theatre scene—with a little more money to put behind avant-garde and boundary-pushing ideas. Previous works staged there include plays by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, David Adjmi, Hansol Jung, Annie Baker, Anne Washburn, Young Jean Lee, and Jackie Sibblies Drury.
Yet still, as Blackwell has experienced, some of the ideas in Snatch Adams—primarily the social construction of gender—are still challenging to even liberal audiences. “A lot of people think being a man is one thing and being a woman is another. You’re not even understanding that you’re socializing people,” Blackwell says emphatically. “When I talk to men, they talk to me differently when they think I’m a man. Then you realize that they’re the same as any woman…they just want to connect. But then they’re also not understanding how they’re talking to women in a different way.”
Snatch Adams (and Blackwell by extension) is a gentle, loving guide for her audience. She is soft-spoken and silly and possesses a sense of wonder. For every small lesson, there is a giggle. She is the antithesis of the didactic reprimand Blackwell has often seen in theatre. “I feel like a lot of artists from more marginalized communities do a lot of finger wagging and making people feel guilty about stuff,” says Blackwell. “But we can’t ever deal with stuff until we’re actually talking with each other.”
At the end of the show, after Blackwell has done just that, come to the audience as themself and just talk, they turn away from the audience, walk to the back of the stage, and gently embraces the golden vulva. A moment of acceptance, of love, of worship. An exhale.
“I hate shows where it’s like, ‘Everything sucks. See you later!’ We all know that. We don’t have to go to the theatre to know everything sucks. That’s all I’m trying to do in my own self…is ask ‘How do I change? How do I expand? How do I love myself?’” explains Blackwell. “I don’t make art because we know all the answers, right? That’s why we make stuff.”
Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month is written and performed by Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte and directed by Jess Barbagallo. It was just extended until December 10. Click here for more info.
