Easy Ryder (Cathy Kohlen) is not a well woman. With her unfulfilled longing and doe-eyed vulnerability, the improbably named titular character of Fiona Sprott’s monologue-cum-cabaret is the woman feminism left behind. That a woman must define herself in relation to a man—or the absence of one, as the case may be—is, of course, a noxious myth, albeit one which still holds sway among retrograde post-feminist types and card-carrying misogynists. It is a myth of surprising resilience and power, and it has led Easy Ryder, among countless others, to perceive herself as a failed woman, barren and undesirable.
Easy Ryder is one of a series of performance texts by Fiona Sprott which have critically and comically engaged with the deep-seated myths, collective phantasms, and traditional narrative tropes of our culture, particularly as they relate to female identity and modern relationships. Easy, which follows Often I Find That I am Naked and Partly It’s About Love, Partly It’s About Massacre, takes the search for the perfect man—a narrative trope common to much contemporary chick lit, not to mention many a glossy magazine column—and takes it to its logical, if admittedly extreme, conclusion.
In Sprott’s text, Easy’s evolution from emotionally vulnerable ingénue to psychologically unstable spinster is effected with a certain creepy inevitability. As her search for a man becomes ever more desperate, her rapidly lowering standards and dwindling self-esteem lead her away from the traditional sites of the pick-up, such the laundromat, to the brothel, where she mistakes fucking for intimacy, and to the morgue, where she finds that corpses make for pretty good listeners. Dead men, she explains in a calm, matter-of-fact kind of way, cannot but remain faithful. The piece ends in a cemetery, where Easy serenades a headstone. It’s a worrying but strangely moving scene. Sharing your life with a dead man, it seems, is better than spending it alone.
Never quite as intimate with the audience one might hope or expect, Cathy Kohlen’s Easy is a nevertheless charming creation. While it’s a shame that her monologues are delivered into the middle-distance, where they take on a frustratingly impersonal quality at odds with their inherently conversational nature, her vulnerability remains genuinely moving, her comic timing is serviceable, and her singing is all the more honest and endearing for not being perfectly watertight.
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The musical line-up is suitably eclectic: Johnny Cash’s ‘Personal Jesus’, Kelis’ ‘Milkshake’, Abba’s ‘Take a Chance On Me’, and others, break up and comment (not too ironically) on the thematic and narrative developments of the text. Musicians Dawn Yates and Michelle ‘Baggas’ Baginski make for a fine comic double-act at the side of the stage.
While entertaining and easily digestible, I’m not sure that Dan Walls’ production quite does justice to the complexity of Sprott’s text. In terms of tone, it never gets as dark as it probably should, and even when Easy visits the morgue and starts waxing poetic about the benefits of having a corpse for a lover, it never manages to stir the conflicting emotions or sense of uneasy empathy it must. Even when the text gets heavy, the production itself remains stubbornly lightweight.
Esoteric Rabbit Blog, 1 September 2007
