The refreshing achievement of Young Jean Lee's "Untitled Feminist Show" is to reawaken this political ambivalence. Ironically, it uses the most stereotyped collection of performance-art gestures imaginable. Six nude women run around the stage of the Baryshnikov Arts Center's Jerome Robbins Theater for 50 minutes, breathing heavily, screaming outrageously, dancing, re-creating classical paintings (I noticed Hugo van der Goes), and getting in the spectators' faces. There's no simple way to react to work like this. The line between what's "good" or politically useful and what's parodic or obsolete will be different for every audience member.
Lee's success on this front, though, seems to have exhausted her creatively. The sequence of dances and vignettes she devises fails to develop as they accumulate. To an extent, one has seen "Untitled Feminist Show"—and appreciated the daring originality of Lee's aesthetic gesture—after its first 15 minutes.
What's left over is the virtuosity of its performers. Each actor—collected from the worlds of cabaret, burlesque, dance, and downtown theater—takes a solo turn before the show is over. World Famous *BOB* tests the pliability of her emotional range, switching from screaming to crying to whistling in an instant. Regina Rocke sings a wordless melody awkwardly but earnestly (her solo is the first, helping to set the tone for the evening). The prize goes to Amelia Zirin-Brown (aka Lady Rizzo), who offers a hysterical and obscene charade sequence that teases male audience members with the ageless Freudian fear of castration.
"Untitled Feminist Show" is not so much untitled as open-ended. It feels like the prologue to a new and as-yet-unimagined intersection of feminism and performance, with Lee daring her generation to determine its content and gestures.
Presented by Baryshnikov Arts Center and Performance Space 122 as part of the Coil Festival at the Jerome Robbins Theater, 450 W. 37th St., NYC. Jan. 13–Feb. 4. Tue.–Sat., 8 p.m. (Additional performance Sun., Jan. 15; no performance Tue., Jan. 17.) (212) 352-3101, (866) 811-4111, www.theatermania.com, www.ps122.org, or www.bacnyc.org.
