Miss America

Lesbian feminist troupe Split Britches delves deep into the whirlwind that is our country: forever in crisis, forever fascinated with its own outpourings of rage and outrage, and happy to entertain itself with a jagged sort of navel gazing that rips right into its own entrails.

That's certainly the sense you come away with after seeing Miss America, a dissection of a failed relationship in which two women look back with nostalgia on better times personally and, for the country, socially.

Superficially, the show is about revisiting the ruins of a relationship gone wrong, trying, as one line of dialogue has it, to make sense of things though repetition: or, rather, through an obsessive analysis that takes many forms: stream-of-consciousness diatribes, flashes of Vaudeville, a mocking re-enactment of a TV weather reporter standing in the middle of a hurricane to comment on a disaster as it unfolds, a running commentary, punctuated by the flash of a camera, as the show leaps off the stage and into the audience: "Is it a surprise or a catastrophe?" wonder the actors, as they survey the battered flotsam of a culture seized by constant media deluge.

This all feels like it's happening right in the nexus between entertainment, infotainment, and psychosis.

Puns troupe member Peggy Shaw, "I do, sometimes, miss America... I miss the old routine."

As if in answer, Lois Weaver reaches into the recesses of pop culture to bring forth echoes of the past. At this point, memory and nostalgia may be all that sustains us, and they are powerful forces: even when things go slightly awry, as with a tap-dance routine at the performance I attended in which Weaver slipped and fell, the show steams ahead with a self-propelled momentum: I'd swear that Weaver tumbled, bounced, and sprang back to her feet in near-perfect time to the pre-recorded tap rhythm she'd been miming to a moment before.

The show is produced on a shoestring, and favors sparkle over story and wordplay over plot. But in the fragments and figments of characterization it offers (Weaver lying in a heap with one shoe knocked off by some immense collision; Shaw confessing that her childhood strategy to win the title of Miss America included a strip tease), the show offers a few sips from a wellspring of rage, pain, confusion, and addled ecstasy. Shaw sums it up best when her screams of "Happy!" morph into "Help me!"

"What if I am the most beautiful girl in America?" the actors challenge. "What if I do marry your daughter in California?"

Good question. Now can we talk about it, and in the process, rebuild our American dreams?