Risk. Joy. Discomfort. Experiment. Play. Theater people love to use use these words in conversation — not to mention in mission statements and marketing materials — and whether verb or noun, they’re all much more difficult to embrace and to sustain than we’d like to believe. Shows that achieve them all at once are unicorns — but they do exist, and Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month comes about as close as you can get. Conceived by Becca Blackwell and written (and fearlessly performed) by Blackwell and Amanda Duarte, Snatch Adams is, as the friend who sat beside me declared when the lights came up, “the antidote.†It’s a raucous, curious, loving, and very literally wet-and-wild cure for a pair of plagues that cling to contemporary theater like long COVID: irony and sanctimony.
Snatch Adams is part clown show, part talk show, part comedy, part commentary, part public-service anatomy lesson, part performance art — or, to be more true to the spirit of the project, it is all these things and something else, something unnameable and wholly, happily itself. But, for the sake of the children, a brief description: Snatch Adams (Blackwell) is a six-foot-tall vagina and also a clown. She used to work at Planned Parenthood, but these days, in the post-Roe America that’s pretty much The Purge but for bodily autonomy, the clinics are closing and she’s out of a job. Coincidentally, so is Tainty McCracken (Duarte), a five-foot-something-tall “gooch†and a stand-up comic of the problematically old-school variety. He’s recently been canceled (“They took away my dick!â€), and he needs a new act. (Duarte looks like the love child of Tom Selleck and the Cowardly Lion if he were also a perineum.) Thank goodness they’ve found a conveniently empty theater! Now Snatch and Tainty can manifest their dream of starring together in a real live talk show. There will be games, prizes, banter, news segments, commercial breaks, puppets, audience participation, canned applause — even a special guest (the production hosts a new visitor each night).
Though it cultivates a feeling of gonzo messiness, a play like Snatch Adams can only come together, and sustain its anarchic spirit, at the precise balancing point between total commitment to craft and total freedom in performance. Working with director Jess Barbagallo and production designer Greg Corbino, Blackwell has envisioned a stage world as dense and meticulous in its detail as it is hilarious. The enormous sequined vulva and ribbed pink vaginal tunnel through which we enter the theater, the Fallopian tubes that snake around the space; the menstrual-pad wall art of Rorschach period blots; the massive set of open golden legs that loom like a temple façade at the back of the stage, their central doorway another bespangled vagina; the lewd novelty coffee cups (Snatch’s, a pair of boobs; Tainty’s, a toilet); Derek Rippe’s wonderful Schoolhouse Rock!–esque animations and video designer Nicholas Zeig-Owens’s black-and-white, “Oh, we’re having such fun in NYC!†SNL-parody opening credits … Everything’s dreamed up and executed in what feels like a state of giddy, ingenious pleasure.
Inside this lovingly built container — which constantly delivers new surprises, wacky Easter eggs (or maybe they’re just human eggs?), and anarchic, gasp-inducing bits and props — Duarte and Blackwell play off each other, and the audience, with flexibility and charm. They’re joined by Amando Houser and Becky Hermenze, known as the “Slit Crew,†two amusingly serious, entirely game performer-stagehands who both operate the big back-wall vulva puppet and emerge to enact a series of hilarious advertisements during the show’s “Capitalism Breaks.†Houser is particularly funny as a deadpan letter carrier who gets several jokes out of the problem of identifying their missives as mail/male: “Oh no, my bottle spilled in my bag. I hope I didn’t get any gender fluid on them.†They pause. “It’s a trans joke. I can make them.â€
“There isn’t a script, really,†the show’s press representative told me in an email. While I’m sure that there’s something — and that the writer-performers know that something intimately — it’s a text that can be picked up, tossed around, messed with, and morphed, a jungle gym for two expert acrobats plus their faithful Slit Crew. There’s shameless yuk-yuk-ery (Tainty wistfully recalls touring abortion clinics with his old stand-up act: “Yeah, they called it the ’Borsh Beltâ€); there’s improvisation and adjustment (“Nooope, no, we’re cutting that, definitely cutting that!†Duarte cackled after making a clanky old joke); and, from Blackwell, there’s an impressive sense of calm, openhearted bravery and patience with the audience.
Because, folks, Snatch Adams requires volunteers, and people are nervous. As Blackwell frolics in and out of the crowd, fluttering their labia and kindly offering presents to those willing to reach into their “big gaping hole†while Duarte cracks wise in the background, it becomes clear that both performers know how to wait out the awkwardness — more, how to convert it into camaraderie. Yes, they will succeed in bringing people up onstage to pelt Snatch with Wiffle balls that represent herpes, or to compete to see who can figure out fastest how to put on a terrifying old-fashioned menstrual pad (you know, the kind with a belt). And everyone will be okay, because the thing holding all these shenanigans together is care.
This is why — despite moments that might test the weak-stomached (and they exist: Blackwell and Duarte are unafraid of the squishy, the smelly, the bloody, and, scariest of all for those who know, the yeasty) — Snatch Adams is ultimately the descendent not of the gross-out genre but of PBS. Underneath all the fluids, the dancing Diva cups and flying feces, the play is as pure of heart, and as unpatronizingly edifying, as Sesame Street. The gentle spirit of Jim Henson is in the room, as is Ms. Frizzle. Blackwell even performs a sweet little nod to Mister Rogers, crooning, “It’s a beautiful day in the labia,†as they change costume to get ready for the evening’s special guest. The night I saw the show, our guest was Drag Race season-ten alumna Miz Cracker — glamorous, droll, unafraid to discuss shitting herself in public, and accomplished in the true Jane Austen sense (she has a black belt in karate and speaks fluent Wolof).
Because it lacks all insecurity, Snatch Adams is able to make the generous version of jokes that feel curdled in other shows. Do straight cis men get ribbed (for her pleasure — sorry, I’m cutting it, I’ll cut it!)? Absolutely. But it’s all about tone. No one is scoring points here. We’re all just marveling at how weird and hard and, yes, sometimes institutionally shitty but also kind of miraculous everything is — and at how much time we waste on shame. Near the show’s end, Blackwell emerges as themself, ostensibly to do a little stand-up but also to share a little philosophy. They introduce themself, sans Snatch, as “a person of trans experience,†someone who has “lived as both a woman and a man,†and they tell us that they’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching. According to Lao Tzu, to name something is to limit it, to cut it off from the eternal. It is now incontrovertibly this and, therefore, not that. Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken reaches for both-and: funny and serious, structured and messy, bawdy and tender, male and female and neither. It’s a celebration of muchness, of living in a strange, drippy, lovable body and sustaining an indefinable spirit — and everyone is invited.
Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month is at Soho Rep through December 3.