‘Honey’ explores the way American women work
The way women work is intimately explored in an immersive new theater piece making its world premiere in Oklahoma City.
Cultivated by Fresh Paint, an aggregate of Oklahoma City performing artists, “Honey” is being staged at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and Thursday through June 23 at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, as part of the nonprofit organization’s Women in Performance series.
“In both its unique creative process and subject matter, ‘Honey’ is a groundbreaking experimental project that engages with issues of labor and gender,” Oklahoma Contemporary Artistic Director Jeremiah Matthew Davis said in a statement. “Oklahoma Contemporary is proud to create the space for Oklahoma artists to collaborate with artists from New York and contribute their perspectives to the national conversation.”
Chelcy Harrell, Fresh Paint artistic director, and “Honey” director Katherine Wilkinson said the new theater piece was developed collaboratively from scratch by a group of artists interested in giving a place for voices that have typically been marginalized.
“Last year, Chelcy gave me a call and told me about the project. She’d been really interested in the way the female bodies in entertainment have been used or abused or looked at, and we started talking about sex work and we started talking about the parallels between sex work and a lot of other labor in the world. Domestic labor, entertainment labor, physical labor, we specifically started looking at the ways in which women use their bodies to make money — and not just be it sex work, but every single day, how do we use our bodies to get what we want. So that conversation led us to different women, people, organizations,” said Wilkinson, a queer director and creative producer based in New York City.
“I feel like as a woman I spend 90 percent of my life worrying about my body in phases: Whether it’s working, whether it’s dealing with other people, whether it’s dealing with men, I feel like our bodies are essential to how we are seen in the world, whether we like it or not and whether we are being objectified or not.”
Inspired by interviews conducted in 2017 and 2018 with Oklahoma sex workers and patrons, the play explores the ways in which women’s bodies and work are valued in America. Commissioned by Oklahoma Contemporary, “Honey” features an all-female-identifying ensemble, and most of the creative team are women.
Harrell and Wilkinson spoke in a conference call about what people can expect from “Honey.”
Q: This is something that for a lot of reasons — cultural, religious, legislative — is a fairly pretty taboo subject.
Wilkinson: Totally. So, I think that’s, for us, why we had no interest in getting up there and having a bunch of women, like, stand up and speak narratives from sex workers’ lives and talk about sex. There’s no sex in our play; there’s no nudity in our play; there’s like one curse word. There’s no overt sex work on stage. We don’t even really talk about it. We are way more interested in looking at the people, people who engage in this type of labor and a lot of other types of labor.
The whole thing is really based around ... the central character, who engages in a form of intimate labor, which you don’t know necessarily. But you see her interacting with all of these other women who are doing all of these other types of labor. We have a domestic worker, we have a massage therapist, we have a security guard, we have people who are coming and going who are engaging in more societally respected forms of labor, but are doing very similar things as this particular woman. So, it’s very taboo — and that’s why we also wanted to be careful not to just get up there and talk about it in a way that would have it really easily dismissed and have people going, ‘Well, they’re talking about sex; I don’t want to talk about that.’ In fact, we’re talking about work, and everybody across the nation, particularly the United States, has some sort of frame of reference for talking about work and the work that they do.
Q: So, what can people expect from the show?
Wilkinson: Things to expect: singing, dancing, lots of paper money, fake money, real money, money, lots of money. You can expect to see a lot of really thoughtful singing work from very talented artists. You can expect to see something that is about people trying to relate even when their professional choices or the way that they live their life create obstacles for them to connect.
So, the play is really about people trying to connect with one another in spite of a situation that creates difficulty for them to understand one another beyond the choices they’ve made for their professional work. … It’s a play. There’s scene work and singing and dancing and moving and music and they’re all the things that make live theater so exciting and exquisite and joyful. … People are expecting it to be some sort of strange avant-garde look at the mysteries of womanhood, and it’s like a bunch of women having a really amazing time connecting with one another on stage.
Q: Do you think the Women in Performance series is an important thing to have in the community?
Harrell: Definitely. … In Oklahoma and in this region, I thought it was really important for the audiences here (where) there’s a lot of classical theater, which can always be problematic. Those things that kind of were written in the early 20th century and before tend to be a little bit problematic in the way that they present women, so I think it was a really exciting thing to have the opportunity to bring a new voice to a story that might be misconstrued historically. … For me, as an artist, I always have been fascinated by looking at the other side of the story and hearing the story about someone who is not heard as much.