Yale Cabaret
“When it comes to the physical side of things, you have to know how to hit someone without damaging a kidney.”
“I’m proud of the fact that I got two kids out of my small hole. My boys are awesome.”
So said two of the eight women — including a nun, a dominatrix, a musician, a lawyer, an actress, and someone who worked for Mother Teresa in Calcutta — in Shiny Objects, a show conceived, developed, and performed by Maura Hooper and Zenzi Williams for a Feb. 19 – 21 run at the Yale Cabaret.
To create the funny, thoughtful, and moving Shiny Objects, Hooper and Williams interviewed 15 women for an hour and a half each. From these 15 they selected the words of eight interviewees to perform, though not simply as eight monologues; instead, they wove the interviews together in a sort of collage.
Zenzi Williams.
Thanks to Hooper’s and Williams’ thoroughly impressive acting chops — they sometimes switched characters onstage, on a simple, appropriately undistracting set, from one second to the next — the eight women are each distinct, fully realized characters. But the structure of Shiny Objects invites the viewer to think of the piece as less about eight individual women and more about the connections between them, the things they share, and how their experiences add up to a larger whole.
Shiny Objects is full of thwarted ambitions. One interviewee wants to be a doctor, but is told point blank that she can’t. So she goes into energy healing, embarking on a personal journey that takes her to India, and to Mother Teresa. The nun, meanwhile, is all quiet desperation, a fiercely intelligent woman who feels constantly caged by her circumstances.
It might be tempting to think of Shiny Objects as essentially a feminist play, and in some ways, it is that. But sticking that label on it — or any label — does a real disservice to what Hooper, Williams, and director Christopher Geary capture.
As the three explained in a talkback after the Feb. 20 performance, each of the interviewees offered a sort of grand theory of what it was like to be a woman. But as Hooper, Williams, and Geary worked with the material they’d collected, Geary said, in the tradition of the best oral histories, they found that “the truth is in the stories that they tell, not in the mantras that they lived their lives by.”
Maura Hooper.
They’re right. A lawyer interviewee drew wisdom from an office affair, explaining that before she met “Patrick,” it was as though she was the main course at a fancy restaurant, living under a metal dome. Patrick lifted it off. At the time of the interview, she’d been married to Patrick for decades. The wry, extraordinarily self-aware dominatrix went into hilarious details about the ways her job cut across normal gender expectations. Her story culminated in a particular episode in which, standing behind a naked woman pregnant with her seventh child and rubbing her belly while a man whipped the pregnant woman’s feet, the dominatrix began to reassess her priorities.
Yet some of those mantras were pretty good, too: “The best things happen when you follow shiny objects and don’t make any plans,” one said. Or as the musician said: “To hold back, to be afraid to shine, is the most selfish thing. God will just be like, ‘why didn’t you sing your part?’”
Shiny Objects thus has a lot of say, not just about feminism, but much more broadly and profoundly, about the ways women have been living their lives for the past few decades. I found myself thinking hard about the things that have changed and the things that haven’t, the difficulties that have improved and the ones that haven’t — and the ways that women have reacted and adapted. Which led to some real revelations that I was lucky enough to have heard in the Cab’s little theater. Perhaps one of the deepest is also one the simplest.
“Can I just be?” one of the interviewees said. “Just let me be.”
The next Yale Cabaret show, The Untitled Project, runs from Feb. 26 to Feb. 28.
