Discovering power after predation
In “Spanking Machine,” the body is threatened by sadistic nuns. It’s spat upon and squirted by water guns. It’s bitten by vampire fangs. It’s hindered by Parkinson’s disease. At one point, it’s “impaled.” It’s spanked and threatened by spanking, which is even worse — the scariest thing of all, says performer Marga Gomez, is the threat you haven’t yet seen.
But in the solo show, which is ostensibly about reconnecting with the first boy Gomez ever kissed 40 years ago, the body is a site of excitement as well as danger: the way a waitress at a Cuban restaurant in Miami can recite a dessert menu as if she herself is the delicacy; the way a ceiling mirror promises to multiply the delights of a onenight stand; the way being tall on the right day in third grade can get you seen anew, maybe even get you a whole new life.
In her catalog of onewoman plays,
Gomez always shows, never tells. She makes associations; you infer. In “Spanking Machine,” whose Brava Theater presentation premiered Sunday, Sept. 13, on Zoom, a mention of “tropical fish” might veer her back to childhood trauma. A debate over a scab on St. Theresa’s earlobe might segue into a memory of a poppersfueled violation by a nunturnedlayperson.
On opening night, Gomez occasionally seemed to lose her assurance at the helm, which could make her zigzags feel like justbecause, ofthemoment tangents, rather than deeply purposeful thrusts forward.
But hang tight. As each new memory bleeds in, the watercolor that gradually emerges portrays sexual pleasure as hard won against a backdrop of sexual violence. Here, to be a woman is inevitably to know a pattern of predation — the clicks of all the locks locking, then the confusion, which is really only a wish that it’s confusion, then the purposeful grab.
But the violence here doesn’t follow familiar tracks. It’s inflected by the sexuality of Gomez as narrator and her longlost childhood friend, Scotty, both of whom later came out as gay. Almost every character of the many Gomez embodies turns out to be both perpetrator and, in at least some small way, victim. Adult life here looks a lot like third grade’s schoolyard: How do we learn all the ways we might trigger and scar others?
The attacks that Gomez recounts sneak up on you as they must have her. How can you help but fall for her mad skills as comedian? The way she makes like she’s not telling a joke, like she’s trying to shush the joke, but, hey, the joke just won’t be kept at bay, so what’s she going to do, stifle the poor thing?
Even her throwaway lines in this mode slay: Her mother was “a dancer who could not walk in flats.” Living with your wife and your motherinlaw is “a gay Cuban Catholic thing.”
But Gomez — interspersing live performance with a dress rehearsal recorded in March, so you occasionally get a simulacrum of an inperson audience — is equally adroit at summoning dread. She zeroes in on just the right detail (the smell of rust, say) to conjure a whole nightmare scenario, or she stokes her own fightorflight response in her delivery, as if somehow her character could escape by the cool, measured way her performer related the tale.
Gomez makes the camera into her shapeshifting accomplice. Sometimes it’s her scene partner. Sometimes it’s you. Sometimes it’s a world builder. When, as Scotty, she types an introductory email from an AOL account with her furious fingers in overwhelming closeup, she suggests a man with no more grasp on electronics than a novice surfer has before the curl of a massive wave.
Gomez’s narrator in this story is not defined by her attacks. She’s a ceramicsshattering, pleasureseeking, curiositygratifying observer with quick wit and a sharper tongue. She’s learned how to take herself out of a bad situation. She’s learned how to ask for what she wants.