STAGE REVIEW : Poet Beguiles in a Sometimes Bumpy Show

“Suppose the worst is true? That would mean the born-agains and the feminists are both right.”

That’s what Holly Hughes says at one point in her 75-minute monologue, “World Without End.” This funny, piquant and revelatory view of female sexuality and of parents trying to do the best they can is based on Hughes’ kaleidoscopic memories of her own mother. It has its third and final performance at 8 tonight as part of Sushi gallery’s Neofest.

Dressed in a short, saucy, off-the-shoulder, deep-red satin cocktail dress, Hughes evokes an impression of both a mother, sexually ripe but repressed and even psychotic, and of the mother’s sexually open, lesbian daughter.

Hughes is a beguiling poet, playing with “words like 15 gold bracelets sliding down the arm of a woman dancing in a French nightclub.”

“I should have brought a map,” she says early on. “Do you mind getting lost?” No, we don’t. Hughes is a terrific tour guide. Plus, there’s Kate Stafford’s staging and Lori E. Seid’s lighting, which add vigorous, sensuous movement and color.

Random and occasionally bumpy, the show is a journey through a tumultuous childhood. At times it is unclear to whom the character speaks--the audience, an invisible date or perhaps her mother, when she recalls a childhood visit to a New Jersey Denny’s:

“There we were, hunched over the counter, lost in the smell of fresh Formica.” What follows is an account of a mother eager to give her children something special for science class. But the result is a grisly episode.

Spying a porcupine waddling across the parking lot, mom leaves the restaurant, goes to the car trunk, pulls out an ax, and while the other customers gape in amazement, hacks the friendly mammal to death and brings back a handful of bloody quills for her girls to take to school.

It is a mixed bag of memories that spurred Hughes to begin writing “World Without End” after her mother’s death. A recurring theme is the absence of a father at crucial childhood junctures, with responsibility for child-raising falling on the mother’s shoulders.

Hughes’ childhood character asks her mother to “teach me French,” a code word for sensuality and sexuality, which her mother possesses in abundance. Hughes is at her finest when her language turns to senses, feelings and emotions.

Hitting one of her themes--violence visited on women by men--she tells of a man who strikes his wife so hard “the whole house cried.” The woman lay in her “tears and blood on the shag carpet,” apologizing and picking up an also-floored three-bean salad, bean by bean.

An unstated possibility of incest is raised as the mother uses her own body to give the daughter a hands-on explanation of where babies come from. But Hughes seems more concerned for a society that has repressed women in their expressions of basic sexuality.

Finally, Hughes turns around the image of a sinful loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden. Life is not that simple, she says. Although the father in this piece is often away, he is there at his wife’s death. When this aging couple, one at death’s door, kiss, it is not a sweet peck but lusty and filled with life.

In Hughes’ landscape, the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge is not the downfall of men and women, but rather an apple, deep-red, ripe and juicy, grown to be eaten and savored.

A New York playwright, Holly Hughes has written “The Lady Dick,” “The Well of Horniness” and “Dress Suites to Hire,” for which she received an Obie Award.

“WORLD WITHOUT END”

By Holly Hughes, presented as part of Sushi’s Neofest festival of new arts. Directed by Kate Stafford. Original music by Sharon Jane Smith and Vincent Girot. Lighting, Lori E. Seid. Art direction, Christine Vlasak. Dramaturgy, Karen Crumley. With Holly Hughes. The final performance is at 8 tonight at 852 E St., San Diego.