A Performance Artist With a Natural Instinct to Shock

It’s a long way from tiny town Michigan to New York’s East Village, but Holly Hughes has taken the trek as easily and as irreverently as she mixes travesty and social comment in her plays.

After majoring in art in college and a furtive try at a career as a painter, Hughes discovered play writing in the early ‘80s while hanging out at the WOW Cafe, New York’s premier bastion of feminist theater.

Rebelling against a conservative, upper-middle-class upbringing, doing the shocking thing came almost naturally for Hughes. Bashing traditional and feminist dogmas alike, her theater combines the outre with the poetic. So bold are these riffs--with titles you can’t print in a family newspaper--that Hughes has even had trouble getting actresses to play the roles.

“They think it’s pure pornography and that it’ll ruin their careers,” she says, only half in jest.

The 34-year-old playwright will perform her “World Without End” Thursday and Friday and June 8-9 as part of Highways’ monthlong “Ecce Lesbo/Ecce Homo” festival celebrating Gay Pride Month.

Like fellow monologuists Spalding Gray and David Cale (among others), Hughes’ solo is fictionalized autobiography. “I’m performing some version of Holly, maybe an improved version,” Hughes says. “You can always improve on reality through art.”

But, unlike Gray, Hughes specializes in ribald iconoclasm and what Village Voice critic Cindy Carr has called “dyke noir “ theater. Like the late Charles Ludlam, Hughes uses humor as a leveling device and trashy gags as a crowbar to open the door for activism.

“Ludlam had a wide range of emotion within the style of camp, rather than just being decorative,” she says. “There are campy elements in my work and a humor that’s John Waters-esque in its love-hate relationship with popular culture and trash.”

But Hughes also has a serious agenda. “I implicate both myself and the audience,” she says, “asking questions like what it means to be a good mother in the context of a culture that is fundamentally misogynist.”

That fear is central to the story she tells, which is inspired in part by her own mother’s “rather unconventional” telling of the facts of life.

“Women are punished because they’re assumed to have a certain kind of power,” Hughes says, still on the subject of repression. “But in fact, they’re relatively powerless.”

That lack of power, Hughes says, comes from a paradox that has faced women since before her mother’s generation. Women are revered as mothers and yet denied the chance to define themselves as anything but that.

“World Without End” was also influenced by Hughes’ having overheard “two black men sitting on a city bus talking about how white people were killing them.”

“One guy was going on about how white people hate (blacks) so much they don’t even know they’re doing it. I draw parallels between racism and sexism, especially now that we’re in this alleged post-feminist generation, it’s again become un chic for women to express their anger or to ask the world to change.

“I’m interested in ambiguity. Just asking a question like ‘Is someone a good mother?’ becomes extraordinarily complex. That level of complexity in the way I present the stories and the people in them makes people uncomfortable. I don’t necessarily say this is a good thing or not.”

But Hughes isn’t content to tear down ways of thinking without offering alternatives.

“I try to match the horrific images (presented in her monologue) with some that are transcendent,” she says. “One of the difficulties of life is trying to assess a situation.”

Ironically, though, critics haven’t been as circumspect in their analysis as Hughes herself. “Even though there are strong women performers and writers out there, when someone wants to praise (you) they’ll compare you to Sam Shepard and not to Irene Fornes or Caryl Churchill,” she says.

“It’s legitimizing because of the culture to be compared to a man--especially a straight, white man. It’s not just male critics, either. There’s some filter--an unconscious sexism--that all of us have.

“Even though her style of delivery is completely different, you’d think that (monologuist) Karen Finley would be an obvious comparison because what we’re talking about is similar, but nobody’s made that comparison,” she says.

One thing Hughes and Finley certainly share is the ability to shake people up.

“Probably no one gets through (“World Without End”) without thinking, ‘I wish she hadn’t gone off into that area’--whether their judgments are based on aesthetics or content. There’s something to offend just about everyone.”