She Was A Conquistawhore
This isn't really my kind of thing but it might be your kind of thing
She Was A Conquistawhore
Created and performed by Rachel O’Hanlon-Rodriguez
Directed by Cat Ramirez
with live music by Chris Sannino
with the Die-Cast Collective
June 29 and 30 at Studio 34, West Philadelphia
Recommended, if this is your sort of thing.
This is a fun little solo show built on the (self-acknowledged) cringy conceit of being a duologue with the performers’ vagina, who is an aggressive, horny gunslinger named Pete. a Covering fairly well-worn sexual liberation/coming-of-age territory, with a dash of gender-discovery, the title of the show promises to get into some decolonial dish. It doesn’t really deliver on that, nor is it about sex work. There’s a touch of it, but mostly the auto-biographical-fictional show’s punny title is a framing device for O’Hanlon-Rodriguez’s story of empowerment and self-discovery via sexual conquest on the Main Line. Which is all well and good, but it fell short of the promise. The tensions between the gunslinger Pussy Pete and Rachel personalities never feel as high stakes, or as existential, as they could. Decolonization isn’t a metaphor: I wanted “land back” to mean more than fucking white guys. With a reference to manifest destiny, the show seems to embrace the colonial attitude—hence the title?—without really exploring its implications and antagonisms.
The show lands, then, firmly in whatever you want to call this Vagina Monologues-adjacent genre of racy fringe festival solo-performance, complete with obligatory light audience interaction. Nothing groundbreaking (I just wrote “groundbreadking,” must be dinner time), but a good night at the theater if this is your kind of thing.
O’Hanlon-Rodriguez gets good comic mileage out of her Irish-Latina heritage, riffs on some country classics, toy horses, and a can of beans; though their literal riff on Ennio Morricone, and other cliches of the Western, were, for me, lacking in specificity and depth. There’s a touch of unfinishedness here—far from a dealbreaker for a fringe show—which I think might have something to do with the show’s structure, especially its soft ending, and maybe from being performed for the first time in a venue with a stage. Conquistawhore showed at last year’s Cannonball Festival, just recently showed in Denver, and surely has a life ahead of it. I hope it develops further.
I’m going to try to use the summer to clear out the backlog of some of the things I’ve written and been too busy and/or depressed to finish. In the meantime, I’ll be at Case Comedy tonight for Alex Tatarsky and Shane Riley. Tatarsky is one of our—as in, like, America’s (happy 4th of July, I guess)—most promising young theater artists, if not our most promising clown, and Case Comedy has quietly become an occasional scratch night for some of Philly’s finest talent. As a bonus, Upstairs at Abyssinia has one of the best beer and cocktail list’s in town and the downstairs has a fantastic kitchen (which itself is actually down even more stairs, in the basement).
Tatarsky and Riley had one of the finest shows of the 23-24 season with Sad Boys in Harpy Land, which got multiple extensions Playwright’s Horizons and had a brief, surprise stand in Philadelphia as part of last year’s Cannonball/Fringe festival. Sad Boys was easily the finest piece of theater I saw at last year’s festival—far out stripping any of the shows programmed by FringeArts in the curated fringe.
I’ll be writing more about Philly Fringe and the apparent crisis at FringeArts in the coming weeks as announcements are trickling out.