Direct from NYC Performance Series presents George & Martha

Performance art

At The Five Spot in March, Karen Finley played the trembling Liza, ruminating on our post-9/11 reality. In her latest lambaste at patriotic rhetoric, Finley bases her scabrous satire on Georges and Marthas throughout the ages: Edward Albee's lethal pairing for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the Washingtons we know and love from the dollar bill. But mostly, a white-and-black-striped (and naked) Finley and flag-striped newcomer Neal Medlyn will focus their perf-piece on Martha Stewart and George W. Bush. During an imagined tryst in a Manhattan hotel room during the Republican Convention, Finley's besieged pairing discuss their worries and woes with their usual righteous indignation. "The tragedies and personal triumphs of these self-created icons become intertwined in their symbiotic need to be loved," says Finley by e-mail. Together, the Stewart/Dubya pairing -- toying with each other, verbally and physically throughout the play with the intimacy of lovers and irksomeness only they could achieve -- seek to redesign America with a "Middle East craze" and vice versa. Paranoia pushes "Bush" toward snorting blow and imagining Bin Laden hiding in his ass and "Martha" toward fashioning invisible nose-hair scissors for her jail stay. How fun.

Direct from NYC Performance Series presents George & Martha, Sun., Oct. 24, 8 p.m., $20, The Trocadero, 1003 Arch St., 215-922-LIVE.

—A.D. Amorosi

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