I guess I just think that sex is a gift from a benevolent Universe and all we\u2019ve got to figure out is how to unwrap it<\/p>\nMatilda Mchartle<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s witty and fast paced play pries apart social stereotypes and stigmas in an insightful, light-hearted and comic examination of love and sex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Produced by (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\/<\/a> )<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Review-SLUT-12th-Night-Blog-Liz-Nicholls-April-8-2018 2<\/a> The outsized letters, 10 or 12 feet high and defined in flashing lightbulbs, spell out the ultimate deal-sealing class\u00addismissed 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ve heard the term \u201cthe male gaze.\u201d SLUT is \u201cthe social gaze.\u201d It\u2019s on Matilda J. McHartle (Michelle Todd), who arrives onstage, hair bouncing in indignation, all in white \u2013 in a satin-and-lace corset get-up with stiletto boots \u2013 like a big beautiful disgruntled meringue. How could this happen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dander up and nearly squealing with outrage, Matilda is happy to tell us how she\u2019s 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 ex\u00adNational Geographic Magazine wildlife photographer with a specialty in night shots. So there\u2019s documentary evidence of our heroine having sex on the hood of her car. With a variety of guys. That\u2019s 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\u2019s stage partner, the light-up SLUT sign, steps brazenly up to it and undermines her confidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s 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\u2019s waiting for love before he gets laid. There\u2019s the purse-lipped old widow. There\u2019s a sex addiction counsellor, a snazzy call girl, a ditzy girlfriend. And Todd, an eminently likeable performer, has fun with the voices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the play has a tendency to repeat and explain itself in thudding add-ons where it might profitably let its one\u00adliners 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. \u201cHe\u2019s like 22 years old! What do you think I am? Oh right, a prostitute. Because a woman can\u2019t have a few different lovers and not be a whore, right?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or this: \u201cThey put me in a holding cell with a bunch of women who look like hookers to me. 0 right. They think I\u2019m one too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The character we meet in Todd\u2019s performance, child-like and blithely innocent, and pitched high toward wide\u00adeyed incredulity and fury, just doesn\u2019t seem likely to say \u201cmaybe false bravado would work better than lame confusion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But having said that, I must add that Slut, which premiered at the Toronto Fringe in 2000, long before the<\/p>\n\n\n\n MeToo reveals of our time, is amusing in its premise and refreshing in its insights. It\u2019s not about women as victims of male predation. It\u2019s not about sexual aggression or cynical calculation. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And you want to cheer her on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By Colin Maclean<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gigcity.ca<\/p>\n\n\n Northern Light Theatre artistic director Trevor Schmidt announced his 2017-2018 season as three plays that explore women\u2019s identities with regards to sexuality, religion and the Christian morality of the societies in which they had been raised. \u201cThe Virgin, the Whore and Something in Between,\u201d was his tongue-in-cheek subtitle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Virgin was the ultimate unspotted female, Mary the Mother of God \u2013 as an embittered old woman in The Testament of Mary. The \u201cin between,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now comes the third female exemplar \u2013 Slut. That\u2019s the title of Toronto playwright Brenda McFarlane\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first thing that strikes you is Schmidt\u2019s set. It\u2019s the word SLUT spelled out in illuminated letters \u2013 eight feet high. It is an eye-grabber, and the director ingeniously turns it into an extra character in this one-person show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matilda \u2013 played with a surprising innocence and an effervescent spirit by Michelle Todd \u2013 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\u2019 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\u2019t help matters. Nor do the endless shots of her having it off with all sorts of men in her apartment (sometimes two a night) \u2013 secretly photographed by a one-time African wildlife photographer for the National Geographic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n McFarlane has a lot to say about the sexual roundelay between men and women, but she doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t know how to cope in the face of Matilda\u2019s bubbly good spirits, along with her obvious discomfort and lack of understanding of why she\u2019s been arrested. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201ca gift from a beneficent universe.\u201d When the photographer\u2019s pictures turn up, she wails, \u201cThis is my life. They weren\u2019t johns \u2013 they were lovers!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 and the forces of all that is right and good bring in a therapist, who suggests to her she is addicted. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schmidt\u2019s fine directorial fingerprints are all over this one even if he remains subtly hidden away behind the smart ideas and energetic pacing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, \u201ca gift from a beneficent universe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Produced by by Paul Birchall<\/p>\n\n\n\n In writer-director Brenda McFarlane \u2018s thought-provoking play, one woman\u2019s 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\u2019s no prostitute: Rather, she considers herself more like the sexual Salvation Army, a dedicated volunteer. <\/p>\n\n\n As she awaits interrogation at the police station, Matilda is forced to confront the pitfalls of her libidinous private life. In McFarlane\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, McFarlane\u2019s play unintentionally undermines the character\u2019s free-spiritedness: Many of the character\u2019s glib responses to the outside world\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2007 New York International Fringe Festival<\/p>\n\n\n Slut \u00e0 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\u2019s Slut \u00e0 la Carte is an amusing, pointed take on a culture that still views the sexual woman as the slut next door. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The script\u2019s light if unsurprising ending could be strengthened-particularly Matilda\u2019s tag line-but generally Slut \u00e0 la Carte serves up a pleasant mixture of humor and seriousness, along with a pleasurable performance. At Players Loft. 55 minutes. [Greene]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alexis Green<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s Most Notorious Street, co-authored with Mary C. Henderson (Watson-Guptill, 2008).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Produced by Nice girls don\u2019t get themselves arrested for prostitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s habit of having sex on the hood of her car, and documented her claims with photos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matilda\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But is Matilda a slut or, as she puts it, just someone who is \u201cnot good at intimacy over the long haul?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Playwright\/director Brenda McFarlane\u2019s one-act piece Slut takes humorous aim at the socially ordained \u201cone partner for life\u201d ideal, at least for Matilda, who asks whether being good \u201cwith little bits of intimacy\u201d can\u2019t be enough and why serial partnering is bad. (She has come to this after a marriage in which: \u201cI did something no one can ever do in a relationship. I lost myself.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n McFarlane also gives Hammons several other characters to play \u2013 a cop, a high-class girl, her friend Elena \u2013 all believably written and well played by the versatile Hammons, who even shows off a lovely voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some people really aren\u2019t much good with one-on-one exclusivity. Matilda\u2019s solution might not be yours, but it makes for an amusing evening of theater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Slutwritten by Brenda McFarlanePublished 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\u2019ve 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… Read More »Slut<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":256,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/420"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432,"href":"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/420\/revisions\/432"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}EDMONTON, MANITOBA, CANADA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Northern Light TheatreEdmonton<\/span>Featuring:\u00a0Michelle Todd
Director, Set & Costumes:\u00a0Trevor Schmidt
Lighting Design:\u00a0Beth Dart
Stage Manager:\u00a0Elizabeth Allison
Production Manager:\u00a0Tyler Herman<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\nReview by Liz Nicholls<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
April 8, 2018<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
S. L. U. T. The funniest set design of the season \u2013 and the only one (to my knowledge) that actually engages in smart-ass repartee with the character onstage \u2013 is to be found in the Northern Light Theatre season finale.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Slut-Michelle-todd.webp\")
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Matilda is an accountant who, she assures us, does own glasses and flat black shoes. And, much to her exasperated incredulity she\u2019s been arrested- for indecency and running \u201ca common bawdy house.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Matilda has lovers Oots of them), not clients. She\u2019s an unattached woman who enjoys sex and is generous-minded about sharing that enjoyment widely. She isn\u2019t a madam. Or a prostitute. She\u2019s not a nymphomaniac or \u201ctroubled\u201d or out-and-out mentally ill. Ergo she must be a \u2026 SLUT.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSLUT: Let\u2019s talk about sex<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cMaybe,\u201d she wonders, \u201cI am a sex addict.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nToronto, Los Angeles & New York<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Far Fetched Productions<\/p>\n\n\n\nL.A. Weekly<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bmcfarlane.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Slut-Lineup-Icon-Clr7.jpg\"){kind=icon}
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nA CurtainUp Report<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nSan Diego<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Far Fetched Productions<\/p>\n\n\n\nSlut Review<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
by Jean Lowerison
Published Thursday, 11-Jan-2007 in issue 994
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