Slut
written by Brenda McFarlane
Published by Original Works Publishing and available on Amazon.
I guess I just think that sex is a gift from a benevolent Universe and all we’ve got to figure out is how to unwrap it
Matilda Mchartle
Matilda is a woman who gives of herself freely. So freely in fact, that the senior citizens from the complex next door have her arrested for running a brothel. During an endless night of booking at the police station, Matilda runs a gamut of emotions: joy, regret, remorse, anger, despair and love. Brenda McFarlane’s witty and fast paced play pries apart social stereotypes and stigmas in an insightful, light-hearted and comic examination of love and sex.
EDMONTON, MANITOBA, CANADA
Produced by
Northern Light TheatreEdmontonFeaturing: Michelle Todd
Director, Set & Costumes: Trevor Schmidt
Lighting Design: Beth Dart
Stage Manager: Elizabeth Allison
Production Manager: Tyler Herman
Review by Liz Nicholls
April 8, 2018
(Note from Brenda: Please support this articulate, smart and very valuable theatre reviewer based in Edmonton. Her descriptions are delightful, her criticisms are dead on and her appreciation for theatre alive and well. She was the writer for the Edmonton Journal for 30 years and now she is running a website called 12thNight.ca hosted on a website that lets you decide how valuable a contributors work is to you. I don’t live in Edmonton yet I believe we need great reviewers like her. Please visit her site and consider becoming a patron. https://12thnight.ca/home/ )
Review-SLUT-12th-Night-Blog-Liz-Nicholls-April-8-2018 2
S. L. U. T. The funniest set design of the season – and the only one (to my knowledge) that actually engages in smart-ass repartee with the character onstage – is to be found in the Northern Light Theatre season finale.
The outsized letters, 10 or 12 feet high and defined in flashing lightbulbs, spell out the ultimate deal-sealing classdismissed upstaging putdown. SLUT. They glow; they flash on and off, separately and (in peiodic displays of collective moral solidarity) together, in the production of Brenda McFarlane’s solo comedy Slut directed and designed by Trevor Schmidt. They insist on having the last word; hell, they are the last word. Sometimes, the character we meet sits balefully on the U like a swing or retreats to the L. Sometimes she phones from the T.
You’ve heard the term “the male gaze.” SLUT is “the social gaze.” It’s on Matilda J. McHartle (Michelle Todd), who arrives onstage, hair bouncing in indignation, all in white – in a satin-and-lace corset get-up with stiletto boots – like a big beautiful disgruntled meringue.
Matilda is an accountant who, she assures us, does own glasses and flat black shoes. And, much to her exasperated incredulity she’s been arrested- for indecency and running “a common bawdy house.”
How could this happen?
Dander up and nearly squealing with outrage, Matilda is happy to tell us how she’s been framed by her senior citizen high-rise neighbours in revenge for complaining about their garbage and their loud polka party music. ABBA pushes her over the edge. Her nemesis is an ancient widow who, as bad luck would have it, was an exNational Geographic Magazine wildlife photographer with a specialty in night shots. So there’s documentary evidence of our heroine having sex on the hood of her car. With a variety of guys.
Matilda has lovers Oots of them), not clients. She’s an unattached woman who enjoys sex and is generous-minded about sharing that enjoyment widely. She isn’t a madam. Or a prostitute. She’s not a nymphomaniac or “troubled” or out-and-out mentally ill. Ergo she must be a … SLUT.
That’s the sharp-eyed premise, a barbed satirical commentary on our hypocrisy about, and resistance to, liberated female sexuality. Matilda, a wide-eyed Candide in the field of social attitudes apparently, discovers it in the course of the play in which she channels all the characters in her story. Matilda’s stage partner, the light-up SLUT sign, steps brazenly up to it and undermines her confidence.
There’s a cartoon gallery of characters on display in Slut, all channelled by Todd as Matilda. We meet a cop, Detective Bruce, more of a dramatic convenience than a character. His view that males are predatory animals and women are the prey has led to a completely fallow celibate period: he’s waiting for love before he gets laid. There’s the purse-lipped old widow. There’s a sex addiction counsellor, a snazzy call girl, a ditzy girlfriend. And Todd, an eminently likeable performer, has fun with the voices.
But the play has a tendency to repeat and explain itself in thudding add-ons where it might profitably let its oneliners land lightly, for our perusal. In amassing the evidence, for example, Detective Bruce comes to a photo of an x- roommate that Matilda rejects in high dudgeon. “He’s like 22 years old! What do you think I am? Oh right, a prostitute. Because a woman can’t have a few different lovers and not be a whore, right?”
Or this: “They put me in a holding cell with a bunch of women who look like hookers to me. 0 right. They think I’m one too.”
The character we meet in Todd’s performance, child-like and blithely innocent, and pitched high toward wideeyed incredulity and fury, just doesn’t seem likely to say “maybe false bravado would work better than lame confusion.”
But having said that, I must add that Slut, which premiered at the Toronto Fringe in 2000, long before the
MeToo reveals of our time, is amusing in its premise and refreshing in its insights. It’s not about women as victims of male predation. It’s not about sexual aggression or cynical calculation. It’s about our collective resistance to the idea of female sexual pleasure, outside relationship commitment. Matilda lives it, is coerced into having doubts about it, and rises again.
And you want to cheer her on.
SLUT: Let’s talk about sex
By Colin Maclean
Gigcity.ca
Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt announced his 2017-2018 season as three plays that explore women’s identities with regards to sexuality, religion and the Christian morality of the societies in which they had been raised. “The Virgin, the Whore and Something in Between,” was his tongue-in-cheek subtitle.
The Virgin was the ultimate unspotted female, Mary the Mother of God – as an embittered old woman in The Testament of Mary. The “in between,” was Do This in Memory of Me, which had a 12-year-old girl trying to navigate the rapidly changing moral scene in the Montreal of 1963.
Now comes the third female exemplar – Slut. That’s the title of Toronto playwright Brenda McFarlane’s work that questions the modern validity of the Freudian view that all men see women as either saintly madonnas or degenerate prostitutes. Slut plays in the Studio Theatre in the ATB Financial Arts Barns in Old Strathcona though April 14.
The first thing that strikes you is Schmidt’s set. It’s the word SLUT spelled out in illuminated letters – eight feet high. It is an eye-grabber, and the director ingeniously turns it into an extra character in this one-person show.
Matilda – played with a surprising innocence and an effervescent spirit by Michelle Todd – is a young lady given to the pleasures of the flesh. She pursues them with such abandon that the disapproving residents in the senior citizens’ residence next door have her arrested for running a brothel. The fact that she is photographed having sex on the hood of her car in the back alley doesn’t help matters. Nor do the endless shots of her having it off with all sorts of men in her apartment (sometimes two a night) – secretly photographed by a one-time African wildlife photographer for the National Geographic.
McFarlane has a lot to say about the sexual roundelay between men and women, but she doesn’t miss the human comedy that goes with it. Matilda is booked by a menacing cop for,among other things, prostitution and lewd behaviour in a public place. The poor constable doesn’t know how to cope in the face of Matilda’s bubbly good spirits, along with her obvious discomfort and lack of understanding of why she’s been arrested.
The ingenious use of the impudent SLUT sign is a hilarious (and often ironic) commentary on her efforts to explain her behaviour. Each assignation she breathlessly outlines causes the sign to flash with the simple commentary: SLUT. She sees sex as “a gift from a beneficent universe.” When the photographer’s pictures turn up, she wails, “This is my life. They weren’t johns – they were lovers!”
While the droll team of director, designer and playwright conspire to keep us chuckling, Slut has some meaningful things to say about gender stereotyping. McFarlane has her macho cop slowly melting under Matilda’s good humour, and her belief that sex is more than either lustful rutting, or something to be shared only with your one true love. A product of his time, the cop articulates all the accepted (and even legal) attitudes toward overt sexual behaviour – even as he begins to see Matilda as a human being with something of an open-minded attitude toward casual sex. Yet even Matilda is left questioning by the booking process. That pesky sign keeps telling her that she is indeed a SLUT – and the forces of all that is right and good bring in a therapist, who suggests to her she is addicted.
“Maybe,” she wonders, “I am a sex addict.”
No matter where you stand in the age-old sexual wars, Slut is a refreshing and entertaining way to take your old attitudes out of the closet, shake the dust off them and see if they still fit.
Schmidt’s fine directorial fingerprints are all over this one even if he remains subtly hidden away behind the smart ideas and energetic pacing.
Todd, with her rebellious afro punctuated by some jaunty white flowers and contagious exuberance, is marvelous throughout. Playing all the characters, switching accents and attitudes instantaneously and with a complete lack of cynicism or shame, she is an excellent spokesperson for the idea that sex is, indeed, “a gift from a beneficent universe.”
Toronto, Los Angeles & New York
Produced by
Far Fetched Productions
L.A. Weekly
by Paul Birchall
In writer-director Brenda McFarlane ‘s thought-provoking play, one woman’s journey of sexual exploration could, by any other name, be called the adventures of a slut. Mild-mannered young accountant Matilda (Heidi Weeks-Brown) is shocked when the cops unexpectedly raid her apartment, arresting her for prostitution and lewd behavior. Following the end of an unhappy marriage, Matilda has sought emotional reassurance and pleasure within the arms of a multitude of men. But she’s no prostitute: Rather, she considers herself more like the sexual Salvation Army, a dedicated volunteer.
As she awaits interrogation at the police station, Matilda is forced to confront the pitfalls of her libidinous private life. In McFarlane’s brisk and intimate production, which often feels dwarfed in the cavernous LATC environs, performer Weeks-Brown proves an upbeat and entirely likable tour guide to a realm of cheerful sluttitude.
However, McFarlane’s play unintentionally undermines the character’s free-spiritedness: Many of the character’s glib responses to the outside world’s harsh judgment of her lifestyle smack of unconvincing self-justification. Weeks-Brown, caparisoned in a sultry lingerie outfit hot off the rack from the Pleasure Chest, is smart, vivacious and energetic, making the best possible case for unfettered promiscuity, but the psychological portrait ultimately rings hollow.
Far Fetched Productions at the Los Angeles Theater Center, 514 S. Spring St., dwntwn.; Fri.-Sun., 7:15 p.m.; thru Oct. 23. (866) 811-4111. (Paul Birchall)
A CurtainUp Report
2007 New York International Fringe Festival
Slut à la Carte (we produced using this title to avoid confusion with the Musical with Slut in the title)
One-woman performance pieces about women and their sexuality have been around at least since the 1970s, but there is always room for more. Writer/director Brenda McFarlane’s Slut à la Carte is an amusing, pointed take on a culture that still views the sexual woman as the slut next door.
The Piece starts out with Matilda (Heidi Weeks) being arrested for supposedly running a whorehouse. Wearing fish-net stockings, high heels and a short, pink, satin robe, Matilda waits in jail to be bailed out and along the way talks about the frustrations of her love life. To her dismay, both women and men have trouble understanding how a woman can like sex and even fall in love, at least temporarily, with many lovers. Piece gains ground as it goes along, primarily because Weeks adeptly transforms from one character to another, creating distinct and believable cameos through shifts in physical stance, voice timbre and accent.
The script’s light if unsurprising ending could be strengthened-particularly Matilda’s tag line-but generally Slut à la Carte serves up a pleasant mixture of humor and seriousness, along with a pleasurable performance. At Players Loft. 55 minutes. [Greene]
Alexis Green
Alexis Greene is an author, editor, and theater critic. Her recent books include Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (University of Texas Press) and The Story of 42nd Street: the Theatres, the Characters, the Shows and the Scandals of New York’s Most Notorious Street, co-authored with Mary C. Henderson (Watson-Guptill, 2008).
San Diego
Produced by
Far Fetched Productions
Slut Review
by Jean Lowerison
Published Thursday, 11-Jan-2007 in issue 994
Nice girls don’t get themselves arrested for prostitution.
So what can you say about Matilda McHartle (Susan Hammons), who makes her grand entrance into the slammer wearing a red fishnet leotard under a black corset with red laces up the back and a practically invisible skirt?
Mrs. Stiletto, a former National Geographic photographer who runs the senior center next door, knows what to call her: slut. It was Mrs. S., in fact, who alerted the cops to Matilda’s habit of having sex on the hood of her car, and documented her claims with photos.
Matilda’s sister, on whom she wastes her one phone call, is in no rush to send her attorney husband with bail, either. Instead, she sics a counselor of sex addicts on her errant sister.
But is Matilda a slut or, as she puts it, just someone who is “not good at intimacy over the long haul?”
Playwright/director Brenda McFarlane’s one-act piece Slut takes humorous aim at the socially ordained “one partner for life” ideal, at least for Matilda, who asks whether being good “with little bits of intimacy” can’t be enough and why serial partnering is bad. (She has come to this after a marriage in which: “I did something no one can ever do in a relationship. I lost myself.”)
McFarlane also gives Hammons several other characters to play – a cop, a high-class girl, her friend Elena – all believably written and well played by the versatile Hammons, who even shows off a lovely voice.
Some people really aren’t much good with one-on-one exclusivity. Matilda’s solution might not be yours, but it makes for an amusing evening of theater.
Expect to hear more from McFarlane. She is a Toronto transplant, where she wrote and directed seven successful plays. Welcome, Brenda, we can use more like you.
Slut plays through Jan. 21 at 6th @ Penn Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. For tickets, call (619) 688-9210 or visit www.6thatpenn