Pochsy's Lips
Pochsy's Lips turns death into eerie, funny brilliance.
Reviewed by Liz Nicholls
The Edmonton Journal - August 20, 1992
Written by Karen Hines
Music by Greg Morrison
Directed by and written with the collaboration of Sandra Balcovske.
To give a character the breath of life AND to locate him in his world AND to do it all alone on the stage: it's tackled by The Many and achieved by The Few at the Fringe.
The eerie brilliance of Pochsy's Lips isn't easy to convey. It has a queasy macabre hilarity that Karen Hines, its creator and star, controls with an expert touch. "Everything's failing apart, but everyone's falling in love," sings Pochsy sweetly at the outset from her hospital bed, accompanied by a tinny piano score. Head bandaged, eyes mortally smudged, arm connected to an intravenous pole, she beams angelically and confides that she's always felt sorry for anyone who hasn't found their special someone, and adds: "But then I think it's probably their own fault".
It's Pochsy's delicate, mysterious relationship with her own death that is so fascinating and wince-making and . . . hilarious. We know she is dying. Does she? "When I like what I see I enjoy being me," she says gaily, applying blush-on to the chalky pallor. Pochsy, a kind of grotesque angel, is a repository of pop-culture sentimentalism and half baked romantic notions. And she loops together Hallmark non-sequiturs with a blithe facility.
Pochsy reveals that she, too, is in love - with her doctor, Dr. Caligari. "When he examines me, it's like I'm the only one in the room." This is humor of the gallows persuasion. And when she happily reads us a clouds-and-cotton-candy get-well card, and when it says sympathetically that "it's too bad you're probably dying" and when she signs it herself "love from all your friends at Mercury Packers", the laughter catches you by the throat.
Her vision of sickness is that there is a squid where her heart should be, and its tentacles are shooting algae into her veins. And there is something so horrifying about this comic conceit that is echoed every time she skates around the bed on her IV contraption, like someone with a scooter.
What emerges, but in the most dark, delicate way, is innocence doomed, in a world full of deadly poisons and sugarplum commercial fantasies. Once seen not forgotten.
Pochsy's Lips
Delectable Lips
By JON KAPLAN and JILL LAWLESS
NOW Magazine, December 3-9, 1992
Written by Karen Hines
Music by Greg Morrison
Directed by and written with the collaboration of Sandra Balcovske.
Karen Hines' Pochsy is the perfect clown creation for our times - sweet on the surface, bitter at the core. She's a walking, singing, dancing embodiment of designer nihilism.
With a pink nightie and an I.V. drip, ill and maybe dying, Pochsy is evil wrapped in a bow - she's amoral, self-centred and calculating, but packages herself with coy smarminess and lives her life like one of the lifestyle ads she constantly quotes. Both Pochsy and her world are poisoned, but she sings country-inflected songs (Everything's Falling Apart But Everyone's Failing In Love) and fantasizes herself into glamorous Hollywood scenarios.
This remarkable show is fueled by unease - the hilarious constantly threatens to become harrowing. Hines exercises tight control as Pochsy skips blithely over her tragic farce of a life, moving things along at a breathless pace but sTOPping for a perfectly turned cliche or a perceptive image.
That control allows Hines to drive a stake through the heart of sentiment. Wrapping disturbing and macabre content in the slick, heart-tugging package of popular song and advertising, her comedy has the rare ability to make the audience laugh while feeling queasy.
Pochsy's Lips
A Miracle of Bitter Hope
Review by Simon Houpt
eye Magazine - November 19, 1992
Written by Karen Hines
Music by Greg Morrison
Directed by and written with the collaboration of Sandra Balcovske.
Pochsy's Lips is the best new production of the theatre season. Period.
Solo performer Karen Hines has lapped into the dark confusion and alienation unique to our age, and mined a work of gossamer charm and deadly power.
For the record, Pochsy is a young woman dying of what is probably mercury poisoning, contracted while handling the stuff at a mercury packing plant. The details aren't important; Pochsy herself thinks she's sick because She 's got a squid where her heart should be. Don't ask.
What stands out is Pochsy herself, a jumbled repository of 20th-century motivational late-night TV junk and high culture. She matter-of-factly calls God out on the carpet for His failure to even respond to her prayers, noting that "Success is an attitude, Lord. Get yours right." Later, quoting tag lines from choice advertising campaigns, she tells God that He has been declared redundant, and wishes him good luck in his future endeavors. Is this Nietzsche revisited, or just Dale Carnegie as the Supreme Being?
Informationally overloaded environmentally spent, spiritually bereft, and quite possibly meaningless, our times are not for the weak at heart. The miracle of Pochsy's Lips is that here we are not only convinced they make perfect sense, but also that, somehow, a kind of bitter hope is reigning supreme
Like the clowns she has directed for the best few years, Mump and Smoot, Hines is always aware of the audience and its role in the theatrical experience. Someone sneezes and she'll say "God bless you," in the middle of a story. It takes guts to be a clown - especially in timid Toronto - and it's great to see after all this time that the master of Mump and Smoot is herself a dazzling performer.
More than 40 years ago, Samuel Beckett said that we are given birth "astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." Blithely snickering in the face of that bleak destiny, Pochsy is part of the light that keeps us laughing as we plunge into the darkness. Beckett, a lover of clowns would have fallen for her.