In Russia, Potatoes Mash You!

The one-woman show Child of Hungry Times is being hosted by WET, which is holed up in the former Little Theatre space, at 608 19th Avenue East.

It's a one-hour one-woman show, and it runs this weekend and next (July 27 - 30) at 8pm. Tickets are $15 and can be gotten online, or by showing up at the box office, open an hour before each show. As we watched the show last night, we were wondering who might want tickets to it. We're all about pointing people in the right direction. That's us.

Based on the (Now! Uncensored!) writing of the gloriously Russian-named Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, the show features actress and playwright Bridget Bailey taking on the roles on six women drawn from Petrushevskaya's fiction. (One we recognize from "Our Crowd.") Things do not go particularly well for any of them, though it takes a while to find out what's going on. Faithful to Petrushevskaya's style, Bailey initially offers snippets out of context, conversational starts and stops -- it's a little annoying in a hot theater.

So there's the teenager's affair with the married guy who gets her pregnant, the "street"-talking woman who gets pregnant by a KGB agent and has it aborted, the mentally disabled woman whose twins die in utero, the woman with cancer who's desperately trying to keep her son from an orphan's life, and the woman who's so poor she travels around town dropping in on friends so her son can eat. She just has tea. And we're introduced to them all by a Party representative/babushka whose fawning, keening speech reminds us of the Boss's dog that's "been beat too much."

It's grim. It's not all that funny, though there are funny moments here and there. The text is sometimes too obviously translated from third-person narrative by simply changing pronouns around. Bailey's performance is one of those marvels of quick-change artistry, not just costumes, but posture, gait, and accent, too. Near the end, we were musing about how wonderfully set up the unspoken comparison about governmental "thought control" was, how an ideology can seem transparent, it's so right-thinking -- and then Bailey's babushka went ahead and made that precise comparison so we'd know what to think.