Shut Up and Love Me!
But in her newest full-length effort, Shut Up and Love Me!, I’m not sure Finley would know or care if anyone was laughing at her ideas or her performance. And that’s both the best and the worst thing about this maddeningly incoherent but somehow riveting evening of rants, physical comedy, metaburlesque striptease, and plain old what-the-fuck looniness and self-absorption. It’s amazing to see Finley send up her own naked-provocateur persona: the piece ends with the slathering of a foodstuff, in this case honey, on her naked bod. But it’s also frustrating these days, when John Ashcroft has covered up Justice both in the flesh (or marble anyway) and the spirit. Finley isn’t as on point with her fierce messages as she used to be. Like so many erstwhile revolutionaries, she’s opted to look inward instead of outward–to the rocky plains of lust and self-destructive obsession rather than patriarchy and oppression. Oh, she lands some punches, but not nearly as many as she has in the past.
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But perhaps that’s the point. None of us really knows what the hell is happening. When the entire world seems caught up in an Alice-in-Wonderland scenario where no one in power means what he says, or even pretends that he means it, there’s something reassuring about Finley’s ability to be raw, fucked-up, questioning, horny, and funny all at once. Shut Up and Love Me! is far from polished, much of the material is overly familiar (and underrehearsed), and there may be more of the Empress with no clothes here than visionary insight. But Finley is also more genuine and generous with her audience than in any other work of hers I’ve seen.
