Size does matter, even if bigger isn't always better. Her small hands are an enticing physical characteristic to other women, Marga Gomez tells us early on in Pound. Why that is so will be left to your imagination here, though that's not the case in her new solo show in which imagination is invoked for other matters. Like passage through a vaginal portal to a data cloud where cinematic lesbians float about replaying the usually grim stories that engulfed them in their movies. "Jill took a tree to the pussy," Gomez says of the falling phallic oak that does in Sandy Dennis' character in The Fox.
After debuting the show in New York this summer, Gomez has returned home to present the absurdly hilarious Pound at Brava Theatre Center. In the 75-minute show, Gomez acknowledges her new surroundings, noting that Brava's studio theater is up two flights of stairs and "miles away from any bathroom." But the space provides an intimacy that serves material both conversational and confessional.
Outfitted in a plaid work shirt, shorts, and military boots, Gomez takes us along several paths that find unlikely points of intersection. One is the unplanned celibacy that her gynecologist diagnoses, ironic since she is rejected by an online hookup with the screen name sadgirl2 because of her reputation as a womanizer. About the only thing she really had in common with sadgirl2 is a love for the 1996 cult movie Bound, with its themes of lesbian empowerment and scenes of steamy lesbian love.
That gives Gomez a chance to riff on the negative reinforcement she had gotten since adolescence from movies in which lesbians hang themselves, wield ice picks, or take a tree to the pussy. Gomez has framed the show as a movie script, announcing scenes in terms like "Flashback. Interior. The Metreon." And it is in the Metreon, after watching a movie with her gay nephew, that she follows a woman who has been cruising her into the restroom. The woman is wide open to all sorts of penetration, and before she knows it, Gomez is sucked up into a vaginal portal that takes her to that data cloud, where she encounters characters played by Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Sharon Stone, Sandy Dennis, Judi Dench, and, of course, her beloved Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly from Bound. (Gomez thinks there is a market for Bound action figures.)
In director David Schweizer's production, the hallucinatory cloud scenes lack some of the focus and sharpness of Gomez's crazy-enough scenes of life among the living. These scenes are funny enough in their energetic weirdness, though Gomez's exaggerated observational humor works best in the semi-real world she inhabits. But with her eyes aglow, her contagious good humor, a missing self-censoring gene, and a talent to make audiences feel that this performance is just for them, Gomez so wants to pull you into her world that you may be ready to jump into the next vaginal portal that comes along.
Pound will run at Brava Theatre Center through Nov. 15. Tickets are $20-$30. Tickets are available at brava.org.