Female trouble – Chicago Reader

In 2022, Writers Theatre staged Gracie Gardner’s Athena, a sensitive character study of two adolescent girls who meet as fencing competitors and become close. Now Facility Theatre stages the local premiere of Gardner’s absolutely bonkers Pussy Sludge, an extravagantly absurd but pointed dissection of female body image, mother-daughter relationships, queer attraction, environmental depredations, and a whole lot more. Directed by Ava Calabrese Grob with a mostly surehanded mix of gleeful histrionics and tender revelation, it’s a highly theatrical piece that deserves the attention of anyone who is tired of realism (or the real world right now, for that matter).

Pussy Sludge
Through 4/19: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM; Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California, facilitytheatre.org, $25 suggested donation

We first meet the title character, played by Hannah Ottenfeld with kinetic angular hypnotism reminiscent of Patti Smith (in fact, I had just noted how much she reminds me of Smith when she burst into a high-octane dance to “Because the Night” at the top of the show) as she crawls out of her bed. There is a pulsating mass of black fabric moving in and around her, and we soon learn that her name refers to the fact that she literally leaks crude oil out of her vagina. She takes refuge in a swamp in a national park, where she’s visited by her mother (a hilarious and fierce Carolyn Hoerdemann), who tries to set her up with RJ (Layke Fowler), a nerdy can factory manager. (He wears a propeller beanie—hard to be geekier than that.) 

But Pussy Sludge (who loves to masturbate) feels an erotic connection to goth Courtney (Seneca Sims), even as annoying Girl Scout Becca (Michaela Voit) decides that cleaning up Pussy’s swamp is her designated good deed. “I love this place. And I want to protect it. And when I hear there’s a woman barking at people, sludging up my favorite place in the world? It’s a temperate rainforest. It’s a fragile ecosystem. I get worried.” The side story of a woman park ranger and her estranged love interest doesn’t seem to blend as easily into the fever-dream narrative of the swamp, but the characters eventually come into focus as inadequate forces of order and empathy.

The entire world of Gardner’s odd but bold feminist parable feels like a fragile ecosystem—appropriate for the dangers facing women under the darkness of the new administration. I was entranced especially by the relationship between Sims and Ottenfeld (aided by intimacy and fight director Bianca Thompson) and by longtime stalwart Hoerdemann’s complicated mother. The movement work throughout is excellent as the oil slick expands, contracts, and consumes the characters.

Gardner’s darkly funny and sometimes mournful piece serves as a reminder that hatred of women’s bodies and queer relationships drives us into a swamp of self-loathing and isolation that can only be broken by refusing to play by society’s rules at all. “You have sludge coming out of you. You’re gonna be nauseating to someone no matter what you do,” Courtney tells Pussy. Draining the swamp of our received narratives is hard and dangerous. But it’s necessary.