Who's That Girl?

by Toby Zinman

Live Girls is an intriguing play about the ways art imitates life—literally imitates it, since the two central characters are in the imitation business: a porn star and a performance artist. Sarah Brown (Cathy Simpson), a temperamental diva and performance artist, is collecting real-life stories for her new show about injustice. We watch Brown interview Sonia Ridge (Kirsten Quinn), a porn film star. We also watch Brown browbeat her assistant, Allison (Sarah Doherty), who's writing her doctoral dissertation on "truth-based performance" and Sarah Brown's career. These three women use each other for their own purposes, and Victoria Stewart's clever script is complicated enough to give both the artistic debate and the ambiguous relationships ample development.

The program's note on the playwright neglects to mention that one of the many luminaries Stewart has worked for is Anna Deavere Smith, the prominent African-American performance artist whose shows (Fires In The Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992) are based on interviews she conducts with real people. It's probably safe to assume that Stewart despises Anna Deavere Smith, since she has created her character as a sentimentalizing, self-important and exploitative fraud.

However you feel about Anna Deavere Smith, it must be granted that she is an uncanny mimic, able to transform herself, almost unrecognizably, into the people whose words and gestures she reproduces onstage. Cathy Simpson, playing this role, cannot (to judge by this performance) do believable accents, cannot imitate another person's gestures or walk (which the role requires her to do often), and cannot erase her own very mannered style of speaking from her character's speech. And since Simpson plays Sarah Brown as very butch, the play's issue of the celebrity as closeted lesbian becomes puzzling and implausible. (Simpson also cannot remember her lines, creating a number of very awkward moments during opening night.)

Quinn's performance as the sexy, smart and self-possessed (politically as well as psychologically) porn star, is the highlight of the evening.

Deborah Block directs this provocative play.

LIVE GIRLS Through Dec. 5, Eternal Spiral Project at 2nd Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330

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