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An Ill Bird

Charlotte Ford's CHICKEN plays on our biggest, weirdest fears.


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Published: Sep 1, 2010

Neal Santos

Charlotte Ford (center, with Jay Dunn, left, and Mikaal Sulaiman) in CHICKEN.

It's one thing to be sick in Scotland; the mossy knolls practically beg you to stay damp and get ill. It's another to be unwell while performing at the Edinburgh Fringe, the festival on which our own hometown performing-arts bonanza is based.

Even so, that's how we found Philadelphia actress/performance artist Charlotte Ford: suffering from bronchitis yet stage-ready, finishing up over there before coming home to perform CHICKEN — her absurdist three-person clown play about nuclear annihilation, isolation, boredom, fear and anxious pranking.

If anyone can merge those head-rattling obsessions, cross-dress and Elvis-sideburn them and make them quake, it'd be Ford. The avant-garde auntie is unafraid of looking goofy (recall Pig Iron's 2009 Live Arts show Welcome to Yuba City), sounding squeaky (1812's Cherry Bomb) or coming across as unabashedly dumb (her '08 Live Arts Flesh & Blood & Fish & Fowl) — all of which make her one of the bravest local perf-art personages to come along in the last decade. Combine Ford's havoc and fearlessness with the adept direction of Pig Iron's Geoff Sobelle (her live-in paramour), and the anxiety-laden CHICKEN should be a raucous study in solitude and slapstick. If only Charlotte can quell that cough.

City Paper: Are you at the Edinburgh Fringe doing CHICKEN, or what?

Charlotte Ford: I'm in Edinburgh with Geoff performing Flesh & Blood & Fish & Fowl through the Traverse Theatre. ... We just got a Fringe First and got short-listed for the Total Theatre Award. Yee-haw.

CP: I've seen quoted that your work in Flesh & Blood & Fish & Fowl was sublimely stupid. Just because some critic jackweed puts the word "sublime" before "stupid" doesn't make things OK. What say you?

Cf: I actually wrote that. I think it's a compliment.

CP: Do you feel like an old theater soul or a young avant-garde sprite, ready to tear the ass out of the proscenium?

Cf: The latter for sure.

CP: Connect yourself to your Pig Iron peeps in six degrees of separation or fewer.

Cf: I've worked with many artists from Pig Iron in different projects over the years — from Geoff in F&B&F&F and Red-Eye to Havre de Grace with Lucidity Suitcase. Alex Torra was the outside eye for the research and development phase of CHICKEN; Sarah Sanford and I were in 24-Hour Bald Soprano together; and many of the gang were involved in Alex Torra's Come to My Awesome Fiesta, It's Going to Be Awesome, Okay? James Sugg composed the music for Cherry Bomb. And I was the outside eye for the Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines run at [New York City's] Here Arts Center, which Quinn [Bauriedel] and Geoff were in — so we've all known each other for a pretty long time now.

CP: How's working solo different than collaborating with Pig Iron or 1812?

Cf: It's great — you get to follow exactly what you're interested in and run with it. But it's also quite a challenge to produce something without an infrastructure. It's a lot of hats to wear at once, and that can distract from making the work.

CP: Why do an expressionistic clown play about nuclear annihilation and boredom?

Cf: It's pretty terrifying to be worried about nuclear annihilation and have no way to occupy yourself.

CP: Did it seem less clowny when you got $20,000 from the Pew grant peeps?

Cf: That was a very happy day.

CP: How did you decide to make each of the three guards enact their worst fears as part of CHICKEN's frippery? What did you learn about yourself through finding/testing those fears?

Cf: We improvised using everyone's worst fears. We made a big, scary list — it was like ordering in Spanish at Geno's.

CP: Are you — and I'm going by the press release — the "buzz-cut she-beast," the "Casper Milquetoast somnambulist cross-dresser" or the "passive-aggressive Elvis devotee"?

Cf: I am the buzz-cut she-beast. My character, Pamela, is a sadist — she loves seeing people do awful, terrible things. She, of course, hates having to do them herself.

CP: Why start theorizing and writing about those awful, terrible things in the first place?

Cf: I wanted to make a project about fear. The plan was to create a Michelin Man-like suit and go around Philadelphia doing things that scared me, believing the suit protected me — like, auditioning for a musical at the Walnut, discussing the financial prospects of my career in theater with my parents, hooking myself up to a crane and smashing myself through a cement wall. I wanted to try to make an expressionistic clown play where a woman was so terrified of the rodents in her kitchen that the rats grew gigantic, 7 feet tall, in proportion to her fear. A gigantic rat is in her kitchen, frying eggs at the stove, smoking a cigarette and ashing in the eggs, pooping on the floor. The woman is trying her best to ignore him. I wanted to explore the idea that the experience of living with constant anxiety is probably worse than what we're scared of occurring.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

CHICKEN runs Sept. 3-6, $25-$30, Live Arts Studio, 919 N. Fifth St., 215-413-1318, livearts-fringe.org.