MACHOS TEATRO LUNA
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Most female drag shows seem to combine feel-good entertainment with heavy-duty gender pondering, a la the defunct Chicago Kings. Machos is a more straightforward theater piece, resembling Eve Merriam’s The Club, set in a posh 1890s British club and incorporating raunchy songs of the period that highlighted the men’s sexism. The Teatro Luna women started out pissed—at boyfriends, brothers, bosses. But they ended up taking an open-hearted approach to the loaded subject of machismo. As director Coya Paz writes in a program note, during the interviews “we found that a curious thing was happening to us. We wanted to know less about what men thought about women and more about what men thought about themselves.” The time-consuming process, which left room for reflection, has produced a richly nuanced show.
When Machos treads on stereotypical ground, it usually does so delicately, with the sort of detail that ensures that each story evolves. One section begins with a chorus of three men praising their moms. It gradually comes out, though, that one loves his because she waits on him hand and foot (he’ll never leave home), another is actually incredibly annoyed by his “moms” because she gets into his shit all the time (he’ll never marry a woman like her), and the third has so much respect for his hardworking mother that he’s a little too hands-off with other women (he’ll never get laid).
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