George & Martha
Interestingly enough, there isn’t any anal sex in George & Martha–although an asshole does come up for close inspection, as does his actual orifice.
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One way or another, it appears that people have come to expect a reaming from Finley. And with good reason. In her most notorious public incarnation, during the early 1980s, she was a banshee straight out of the collective unconscious: famous for covering her naked body with gooey substances like chocolate, but also scary as hell for the way she seemed to channel the deep and abiding and mostly female anger that contaminates our culture like so much tritium from a nuclear plant. As Jesse Helms may have understood when he made her the poster child for his campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts, Finley was more than obscene. She was an ombudsman for the tormented, ready to rip the power structure a new one. Finley took a step back from this sort of psychic savagery in the last half of the 90s, even publishing satirical books that cast her in the role of domestic diva. But the Bush presidency has clearly got her pumped, as it were.
And he’s mean, too. He belittles Martha with verve and uncharacteristic creativity. He twits her for her quaint values, telling her, “Guilt and conscience are lower-class phenomena. I lie. I lie all the time. We lie. It isn’t about money anymore, Martha. It’s about lying.” He never loses a chance to denigrate competence or celebrate his globe-straddling fucked-up-ness.
Where: University of Chicago Reynolds Club, 5706 S. University
