Call It Chocolate Cake

At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I'm just gonna come right out and say it: between the title and the 20-word description in the brochure, I had fairly low expectations for "Call It Chocolate Cake" before I even walked into the room. More specifically, I was expecting bad standup comedy. (For no particular reason, I was even more specifically envisioning some well-meaning middle-aged liberal straight person's take on the oh-so-hilarious subject of gay marriage.) It looked short, it was just down the street, and i'm gonna be tying the knot with the man o' my dreams pretty soon myself, so I thought I'd give it a try anyway.

The moment I walked into Sp@ce 224, saw performer Janet Werther getting ready, checked out the crowd, and heard some early Ani DiFranco on a boombox as preshow music, my preconceived notions vanished--only to be replaced by a whole new set of expectations/stereotypes. Now I was imagining a super-earnest young dyke's perspective on the same topic, and for the first few minutes of her piece--a solo movement section accompanied by a reading of a text consisting of found definitions of various key terms--that's pretty much what I got. I figured I'd seen this kind of thing (both the dance vocabulary and the verbal content) a lot over the last 20 years or so, particularly in various small performance spaces throughout the East Village back in the late 80s and early 90s.

But. But. But. Werther is way smarter about what she's doing than my first impression allowed. She may be covering some familiar territory (okay, familiar to a tiny portion of the general population), but she absolutely makes it her own. She's got a wonderful sense of humor--which is to say a sense of perspective--about herself, her subject matter, and her art, and is terrifically alive to the twists and turns of live performance. That's not to say the piece was a laugh riot on Thursday night; she apologized at one point for the fact that we might be expecting a comedy and were getting something quite a bit heavier. (Hell, I got pretty misty-eyed as she evoked the hypothetical possibility of being in a coma and her life partner not being able to visit her in the hospital. Having dealt with numerous emergency-room adventures with my own spartner, her story truly hit home for me.) No, the greatest compliment I can pay "Cake" is this: it doesn't strive to be polished and perfect, it strives to be human--and totally lives up to that simple-sounding, difficult-to-achieve goal. One performer with one recently injured foot, two readers recruited from the crowd to deliver the aforementioned text cold after some hastily delivered direction in full view of the rest of the audience, several bags of Skittles deployed at just the right moment, and a t-shirt. She's even got a response for people like me who are tempted to turn up our noses at her use of those Ani songs. I don't want to give too much more away, partly because Werther is really good at surprises, and partly because the piece is designed to change from night to night. (There's an excellent chance that any lines or actions I quote will be gone next time around, only to be replaced by other great stuff.) I'm hoping to catch the show a second time later on, to see how it evolves. And I'm even more excited about watching Werther evolve, too: her instincts are fantastic, and she's a born performer.

Come to think of it, I'd even watch her do stand-up if I had to.