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The most astonishing images that emerge from Holly Hughes'
densely written solo performance rudely confront a mother's
sexuality. In the parking lot of the H&H Bakery in
Pinconning, Mich., she beats a porcupine to death with an axe
handle and offers the bloody pulp to her daughter as a science
project. Inviting her daughter to share the bathtub, she uses
her own body to demonstrate the facts of life: "She said
she liked to smell herself. It made her a better gardener.
There's no word for a woman who has that kind of power over
tomatoes." The daughter -- horrified, jealous, aroused --
watches her parents make love on her mother's deathbed. Hughes
is at heart a poet, and like the best of them she uses
language not to dress up the messy emotions of life but to
strip them till they're raw and shivering. Her writing is an
unlikely mating of Ntozake Shange's feminist humor-with-anger
and Sam Shepard's dirt-plain purity; in a little more than an
hour, World Without End travels from Saginaw to the
Lower East Side, nailing in the sparsest terms the holy sound
of zippers ("Jesus loves that gettin'-naked sound")
and the cozy aroma of a Denny's ("things in general
frying"). And like a number of her writer-performer
contemporaries (David Cale, Chris Durang, Karen Finely),
Hughes struggles to find theatrical form for her passionate,
impolite content. She mixes narrative, song, and tirade so
unpredictably that you almost dread to hear what she'll say
next. Yet afterwards it's stunning and satisfying to realize
you've been in the hands of a master writer who learned well
at her mother's knee, "Nobody's scared enough."
7 Days, April 19, 1989
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