Klub Ka and not a nice girl:
Two Long Hard Wonderful Journeys From Sex To Satisfaction

by Paul Pierog

The Stone House is a rich folklore fantasy full of striking symbolic events resonating with inner psychic life and meanings. It's plain mental fun—disturbing, humorous, and vividly entertaining. A crow and a radio story teller develop a deep connection while reading a book that mysteriously materializes about the fantasy trip of a girl with poetic inclinations sexually abused by her father from the age of five. Characters of the book include Ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses, dead famous poets and blues singers as well as a team of Pricker, a cactus, Zzaytha, an African violet, and Xit, a bonsai pine.

Turned into the play Klub Ka, the richness of the prose is supplemented by sound and invigorated with the bodies of the actors. The elements are blended well together to make a lively collage for the audience to put together like a puzzle. Curiously, Eric Forsythe, as Champion Daddy, is the most moving and rounded character, flitting in and out to maintain the spell of his early evil actions. Emily Happe plays Suji, the fragile soul of a budding girl poet who wends her way through a shape shifting universe to salvation at the blues house of the dead, Klub Ka. Though deft puppetry, Frankie R. Cordero plays a radio station DJ as a vulnerable, winning and seductive crow. As Papa Gee, Kevin "B.F." Burt provides the musical support of the blues to help turn pain into wisdom. Director Tisch Jones brings the show together with many interlinked collaborators.

Writers James V. Hatch and Suzanne Noguere are joined by visual artistic Camille Billops in creating a uniquely personal mythical exploration realized in both the book The Stone House and the musical drama Klub Ka.

Also, Cheryl King seems to tell the truth, a stunning device for a theater production, a one-person play at Where Eagles Dare, a black box theater. She seems to be, and probably is, an intelligent, warm, gracious women in her late forties, and she's seems to be masturbating on a bed. At the end of her one-act play, she's shimmering and shaking with the spirit of the goddess of love, Aphrodite.

Between these points, she shares freely of the traumas and pains of her sexuality, the abuses, the mistakes. She's so very human it's easy, even for a male, to identify with her. Her husband provides a framework. He prefers golf to sex. In exchange for Cheryl accepting his obsession, he will accept her having sex elsewhere. This one-act play shows her arriving at an initial step with a student for Cheryl in her job as an acting coach.

The play is presented as if it were a true story, and the quality of person sharing is intimate and intelligent, bringing us into the sexual being of a complex and seemly happy woman. The chronicle of her stages in sexual awakening and victimization as reconsidered in the present are vivid and deserve attention, and the assimilation of these experiences into a full present life are aptly and skillfully dramatized. In the process, the actress presents sympathetic short portraits of parents, relatives and God, as well as the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, whom she manages to reincarnate in the end.

These three works deftly explore growth from girlhood sexual tragedy to enlightened creative adulthood in ways that are intimate, honest and profound.

A frequent reviewer for the magazine, Paul Pierog is a veteran director trained at the Yale Drama School.