“The Gay Divorce” at The Brick, NYC
Cecilia Corrigan holds a fun house mirror up to influencer culture and brainrot capitalism in her flamboyant fever dream of a semi-solo show The Gay Divorce (1). Shapeshifting between various women, witches, and worms, she wanders through the attention economy looking for love and an escape from precarity. Basically every character is pitching an MLM. Jesus Christ even makes an appearance as a lapsed clean girl in crucifix pasties shilling “Pick Me Peptides” (mayonnaise applied like moisturizer). But theater itself might be the biggest pyramid scheme in the room – shout out my MFA grads! (jk I never got accepted to an acting MFA ;))
At rise, we meet a saucy, vaguely pan-European witch named Bufana who seems to exist in a sort of eternal fake podcast / QVC soundstage (the gleefully deranged sets are by artist Abby Lloyd). She sells advice on how to marry rich using the tradwife-y “BUF Method” (pronounced, yes, “boof”) and is attended by Jessica, an Igor-y homunculus played by the show’s director Allison Brooks who is also a fabulous clown (watch her self-soothe by eating crackers with beaver-like intensity).
One dance break later and Corrigan transforms into Girly, a protagonist of sorts and BUF devotee. She’s a bubbly, sapphic femme wearing a whimsically punk, airbrushed and bedazzled mini dress (the trippy costumes are by designer Lauren Krischer) and she’s looking for princess charming. Our ingenue soon gets engaged to a VHNW woman who, Girly’s followers point out during a #grwm, is toxic. This feels like a conventionally hetero (or gay guy) dynamic that’s interesting to see in wlw. The fairy tale implodes as the event horizon of extreme wealth gap gay marriage disappoints and the dubious promise of social mobility through social media glitches. So new personas start to spawn.
Enter a worm. Swaddled in sparkly pink fabric, Corrigan morphs into a glam, nihilistic invertebrate that still longs for (and is baffled by) attention. “I’m a worm now. And I don’t care about anything,” she taunts whilst getting ready to sleep. “What if the rest of the show is just this? You think this is a show? A worm sleeping?” The crowd loves her (and vice versa). From flirty anti-sociality to performative martyrdom, her characters almost feel like embodied stages of grief or experimental identities on a non-linear path towards a healing.
Midway through the play’s journey, a maudlin Girly gets lost in a dark forest. “How did I end up here? Oh right, I started live-streaming,” she says and we laugh. Juxtaposing theater crowd and online following — black box as black mirror — the show casts us as various publics, including rocks for Girly to faint on. Will a brilliantly dumb “clap if you believe in fairies”esque bit of audience participation revive her? It’s fun watching her wrestle with some ferns and act squalid. I’m so bored of good-coded acting and this is all delightfully anti-good-coded. Like fun bad (but good [but not “good”]). John Waters meets Pee-wee (meets Artaud?). Having taste is the obsession du jour and we’ve got it, reader!!
Finally, the apocalypse happens. Humanity’s screen time gets so dysregulated that there’s, like, an extinction. Phones are dead but Corrigan survives as an eschatological it-girl armed with pink dildo nunchucks and lifestyle tips. In this cozy wasteland, where a Real Housewives transcript is a kind of Rosetta Stone, can happiness finally be found? The show sees hope in emergent collectivities and esoteric stimulations (2).
In conclusion, everything is extremely camp which this critic loves. Corrigan and Brooks are fun and feral stage presences who play with gay abandon. Fans of drag and performance art will welcome the work’s poor theater phantasmagoria of parasocial slop made flesh and satiric study of labor, love, and being on our phones.
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(1) Adding new meaning to the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical comedy The Gay Divorcée (1934) produced at the dawn of the Hays Code (the film was originally titled The Gay Divorce). In it, Rogers seeks a separation from geologist husband Cyril Glossop.
(2) During the run, Corrigan invited a different performing artist to present a brief opening act 2 each night.
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