From left: John William Watkins is Daddy, Jan Leslie Harding is Pat, and Priscilla Flores is Mel in Daddy’s Girl, one of three one-acts in Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet!!!
June is Pride month, and in theater one can expect a smattering of shows geared toward the LGBTQIA+ community. Even OpenTable has a guide to drag brunches—they are apparently a thing. Capitalizing on the June celebration is Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet!!!, featuring three one-acts written by Joey Merlo and starring Charlene Incarnate, who plays Midnight Coleslaw. If OpenTable were listing it, the 55-minute show would only qualify as a side dish.
Curtis Gillen plays Hun and Rebecca Robertson is Babe in Chair (A Vaudevillian Horror).
In a season with two acclaimed drag performances—Charles Busch in Ibsen’s Ghost and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary!—the show feels frumpy and tired. “Who did your hair?” the star asks an audience member. “Oedipus?” Then, with a glance at the audience, she announces, “I’m a drag queen. We do insults.” It’s an admission that her shtick isn’t going to be different from that of most other drag queens that one may have experienced, and the insult humor is pretty wan.
Each of the show’s three plays is preceded by a brief segment featuring Coleslaw. After an opening dance with two masked minions in leather, she suddenly asks, “Where’s my Boner?” Boner turns out to be a skull character (operated and voiced with twinkling glee by Amando Houser). If there were any hope that Coleslaw was a different kind of drag queen, it soon evaporates.
The playlets, directed by Nick Browne, begin with Chair (A Vaudevillian Horror). A straight cohabiting couple called Hun (Curtis Gillen) and Babe (Rebecca Robertson), just engaged, find a chair on the street and bring it home.
Hun: It was kind of like—an armchair?
Babe: With just the streetlights shining on it you’d probably think it was like upholstered or something. …
Hun: It had no real legs. … And it was covered in skin.
David Greenspan plays Dr. Humphrey Renfield in the monologue Alone Again. Photographs by Richard Termine.
The object they describe, for apparent budgetary reasons, is actually simply a wooden spindleback chair with normal legs. It has no appearance of upholstery under any kind of light.
Once they get the chair home, they discover it beckons to them, and each refuses to surrender it to the partner who wants a turn in its embrace, as it were.
Hun: It became our favorite chair.
Babe: Our favorite piece of furniture.
Hun: We stopped going out.
Babe: Stopped going to work.
Nonetheless, they still have plans for the future. “We want a spring wedding and a honeymoon in Hawaii,” says Hun.
As Hun and Babe battle the chair’s sinister influence, Audrey II, the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, comes to mind. The couple’s desire for a life of normalcy parallels the satire in Shop’s “Somewhere That’s Green.” At other times they recall Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, whose innocence is exposed to sexual license. (Old movies seem to be another influence; periodically Coleslaw lip-synchs to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford audio clips, apropos of nothing. It’s what drag queens do.)
Charlene Incarnate plays Midnight Coleslaw, and Amando Houser is Boner.
The second play focuses on a lesbian couple, Pat (Jan Leslie Harding) and Mel (Priscilla Flores). Pat is anguished because she has just placed her mother in assisted living, and she and Mel are packing up moving boxes. Pat’s father died when she was 15, so it’s a surprise when Daddy shows up to spend time with his late wife—it’s apparently been his custom to do that every evening. The one-act is the most successful of the trio; it actually feels structured, as Pat struggles with coming out while Daddy wants her to dress in a sweet sixteen dress that he missed seeing her in. As Daddy, John William Watkins gives a lively physical and vocal performance, between overbearingly paternal and skeevy.
In an entr’acte before the final installment, Charlene/Coleslaw does a striptease, winding up with an acre of flesh covered by only a square foot of fabric. Fortunately, the last piece, Alone Again, features the masterly David Greenspan, dressed in a smoking jacket and sitting in a real upholstered chair, seeming to channel Charles Gray from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and elevating the tone immeasurably. As his character approaches the hour of his 69th birthday, he reminisces about his youth. Greenspan’s gestures and vocal modulations are mesmerizing. He can turn even a phrase like “the fermenting crotch and its aroma of inextricable desire” into poetry—but much of Merlo’s writing here is better as well.
Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet is far from a full meal, but for those who like drag queen humor sprinkled with vulgarity, perhaps it’s sufficient as an amuse-bouche.
Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet runs through June 23 at The Tank (312 W 36th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; matinees are at 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and information, visit thetanknyc.org.
Playwright: Joey Merlo
Direction: Nick Browne
Scenic Design: Joyce Lai
Lighting Design: Matthew Deinhart
Costume Design: Brittani Beresford
Projection Design: Euxuan Ong
Puppet Design: Michela Micalizio
Sound Design: Caroline Eng
