To fully savor the classical nuances that flourish in PlayhouseSquare’s presentation of Dixie’s Tupperware Party, you may want to take a cursory glance at your moldering high-school Cliff’s Notes. Playwright-actor Kris Andersson and director Patrick Richwood have obviously spent many scholarly years cruising around ancient Greek and bawdy Roman farces.
This learned frolic comes equipped with the Aristotelian unities:
action (will desperate Dixie unload her plastic products?); place (a
Tupperware-strewn living room); and time (90 minutes). Its fidelity to
the antiquity includes its semi-tragic heroine betrayed by a male
wearing a drag variation of an ancient Athenian mask. And in a further
allegiance to the past, she walks in grotesquely elevated heels.
In its tribute to Roman farce, our lusty Dionysian heroine
transforms each Tupperware product into some form of phallic pleasure,
while cunningly turning six onstage ladies (audience volunteers) into
her Greek chorus.
Andersson also pledges fidelity to the noble art of female
impersonation. If the lauded Varla Jean Merman is the Sarah Bernhardt
of this art, then Andersson is a sort of Eleanora Duse. Following the
drag unities, he strives for the de rigueur mid-’70s, overripe, auburn
lushness of mid-career Ann-Margret.
We’re not sure which ancient god decreed it, but following this
deity’s laws, Andersson’s Dixie has a trailer-trash pedigree, a
voracious libido and an astounding need to wiggle her derriere and
proclaim innuendo-laden remarks with regularity. The apotheosis is a
tale of her teenage daughter in London discovering the joys of hot
Dickens cider. At first we take this literally, and then — in
true Mae West manner — the sexual connotation delightfully rises
up inside of us.
Taking time off from studying these great works of antiquity,
Andersson apparently also paid attention to slightly less antiquated
Don Rickles reruns. Like ye olde master of comic effrontery, Dixie has
the ability to select unsuspecting audience members and chew on them
like a poodle with a juicy bone. Thus, on opening night, a hefty
front-row woman, a little too honest about her sexual orientation,
became Dixie’s lesbian rival.
One of Andersson’s special talents is improv. He/she takes questions
from the audience, does production numbers about how Tupperware can
keep a pickle fresh and tells stories like the one about the tragic
fate of Brownie Weiss, founder of the Tupperware party, who was fired
by the company and died broke.
To appreciate the show, let us look at the balls that Andersson
juggles. As in all drag, the meaning of femininity is on trial —
here cleverly tied to kitsch and domesticity. Without an overdose of
profundity but a fair amount of fun, Dixie’s Tupperware Party proves Oscar Hammerstein II wrong: there most certainly is something like a dame.
This article appears in Oct 7-13, 2009.