Death Becomes Her, Her and Her

Christine Louise Berry has been compiling information on murderesses from the Victorian Age to the present. She even has come up with a wry alphabetical catalog of the violent means that they used.

A is for arsenic, of course. But there are a few surprises: Z, for example, is for 30 zinc coffins.

“That’s a true story,” said Berry, who will recite her alphabet as part of “Women Who Kill Too Much,” a performance piece tonight at the Huntington Beach Art Center; she is one of three collaborators.

“Vera Renczi was a little bent, whacked, no getting around it,” Berry said during a recent phone interview. “She had these various suitors, courted them to the point where she took their money, then poisoned them. She had an easy chair, and she’d sit around [the coffins] in the basement, just a quiet evening at home. . . .

“We looked at a lot of obviously excessive behavior. In this case,” Berry said, quoting from her alphabet, “ ‘zinc as the ideal supplement to any active woman’s diet.’ ”

Though Berry, Adrienne Houle and Joan Spitler have taken a tongue-in-cheek approach to femmes who are literally fatale, they looked at that excessive behavior in order to make a case for the women’s clemency movement: The trio says that women on death row because they responded violently to an abusive situation should be dealt with more leniently than other prisoners.

Berry lives in Manhattan Beach, Houle and Spitler in Venice. Performance artists by night, Houle works at a cigar store by day; Berry is an art model and has a part-time job at a bookstore, and Spitler is a cake decorator.

Culinary aesthetics play an important part in serving up a serious topic with a comic touch, Berry said. “A lot of the piece is set in the kitchen, with actresses dressed in an apron and looking demonic, with hedge cutters and shears. Joan is a fabulous cake decorator. She has a wonderful section where she’s decorating this deadly cake while talking about poisoners in the Victorian era. Their whole approach back then was presentation, packaging, making something very pretty that you would be delighted to receive--and that would be the end of you.”

The art center has slated a double bill. It begins with a panel discussion on “Sisters in Crime” by three members of the Orange County chapter of Sisters in Crime, an organization devoted to women who write in the mystery crime genre.

Noreen Ayres, Earlene Fowler and Maxine O’Callaghan will explore such issues as why so many women write in that genre, whether they depict violence differently than male mystery writers do and how readers react to female private investigators as protagonists.

Ayres has written several novels set in Orange County featuring female forensic sleuth Smokey Brandon, an ex-cop and ex-stripper. Fowler’s books center on a widowed amateur sleuth and folk-art museum curator named Benni Harper. O’Callaghan introduced Delilah West, one of the first fictional female private investigators, in 1980.

“Women Who Kill Too Much” taps into a related vein, the characterizations of female killers in pulp novels and on talk shows. But the actresses aim to break through the sensationalism; they look squarely at women’s shifting role from victim to victimizer.

While it may be socially acceptable to consider murderous men as deviants or evolutionary throwbacks, for example, and to chalk up their evil impulses to jealousy, this is not the case with murderous women, at least not according to a promotional blurb that Berry wrote for the show:

“Women kill to instigate personal, social or political change--or just because they feel like it. What’s the difference between a woman who kills and a woman who doesn’t? Not much.”

So, are all women are on the verge of killing? “No,” Berry said--then briefly put down the receiver to check with her cohorts. “We’re not saying that, are we?” she asked them.

“Now keeping in mind a large element of parody, you have to take some kind of drastic stand,” she said, back on the line.

Spitler, Houle and Berry are former members of Rachel Rosenthal’s Los Angeles-based performance company. Spitler recently appeared as a lipstick-wielding vamp in “13 Ways to Scare Your Lover” at Spaceland in Silverlake. Houle’s solo “Razors Under Lace” premiered last year at Cal State Los Angeles. Berry’s “Smart Gals Are Going Places” also debuted last year, at Lubner Studio in Marina del Rey.

All three focus on women’s issues in their work. “We’re hammering our lip-liner into plowshares,” Berry said.

*

Much of the show’s parody centers on the self-help movement. “A lot of the self-help movement for women is ‘inhale, exhale, go with it, be positive, build yourself up, break through it,’ ” Berry said. “But there’s another option. There is a shortcut.”

Murder?

“It can be.”

If that is the shortcut a woman chooses, Berry asserts, it’s probably not because she is emotionally fragile, intoxicated or menstruating.

“Those are all cop-outs. When women did kill, it was often very strategic. They were slowly poisoning people . . . slowly gaining status or money. It’s not enough to say you’re inherently crazed because you’re on the rag--and a lot of women have been written off that way.

“In fact there may be some damn good reasons they killed. We believe that women on death row for killing [abusive] husbands or boyfriends should be treated as men returning from war--that after 10 years of not knowing when somebody is going to go too far, or going to kill you . . . they’re in shell shock.”

Somehow, “Women Who Kill Too Much” reveals a minefield of comic material.

“Clemency is our most pressing issue here, and we try to hit home with the fact that . . . we’re not so timid, that we will take this step,” Berry said. “But it’s still a sendup. We all keep a sense of humor.”

* “Women Who Kill Too Much” will be performed tonight at 8:30 at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St. $6-$8. A panel discussion on “Sisters in Crime” will start at 7 p.m. $2-$3. Admission to both events: $7-$10. (714) 374-1650.