Don’t let the title mislead you. Porn has nothing to do with industrial sex fantasies. András Visky named his play after the alias jokingly conferred on his main character by the Securitate, communist Romania’s secret police, who listen in even—perhaps especially—while she makes love. In fact, the woman they call Porn is a theater artist, considered worthy of surveillance because she’s got the nerve to put on street performances of plays like The Bald Soprano, by Romanian expatriate Eugene Ionesco, and to distribute food and clothes to the audience of kids she calls her “little dirty ones.” “If we are afraid,” somebody says, “they leave us alone”; Porn has too much to do to stop and be afraid.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Yet it’s apt in lots of other ways. What’s really pornographic about Porn is the death-in-life Visky’s heroine is forced to endure as a subject of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Romanian communist party boss who became the unlikely focus of a Stalinesque personality cult. It’s autumn, 1989; Ceauşescu will be deposed and executed by the winter solstice. But in the meantime he’s exercising all the paranoid prerogatives of a classic 20th-century despot. Porn is kept under observation by a creepy neighbor known as Skunk, whose reports to his handler increasingly paint her as a dedicated subversive rather than the creative spirit we see before us. Her lover is disappeared. And when she makes the mistake of having a troubled pregnancy, she becomes the prisoner of a medical establishment such as might’ve been imagined by Kafka’s cruder, meaner, more down-market twin.
Although Porn is stylistically far from realistic, Visky tells us in his author’s note that it’s based on his own actual experiences and those of other Romanians. He’s certainly got a vast and horrific fund of memories to draw on. One of his previous plays to reach Chicago, Juliet, derives from the fact that he spent a good part of his childhood living (that is, starving) in internal exile with his siblings and his mother while his father served a prison sentence for dissident activities. Porn makes use of his wife’s own ill-fated pregnancy, among other things.
Still, that’s no reason not to see this Theatre Y staging of it. Those antinaturalistic strategies can be pretty arresting—especially a certain a hall-of-mirrors video effect. And then there are the lead performances. Ezra Colón is delightful as Porn’s bearish lover. The whole reason for the exercise, however, might as well be Melissa Lorraine as Porn herself. Lorraine is a storefront throwback to the age of stage divas. She doesn’t even try to disappear into a role—she makes it hers by virtue of the extraordinary force and intelligence of her being. Completely present, Lorraine isn’t just the most vivid thing in this show, but in the last dozen I’ve seen. I’d love to see her play, say, an unusually pixieish Mother Courage—but I swear I’d sit through anything she chose to perform.
Through 12/2: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theatre Y Performance Space, 1317 W. Chicago, 708-209-0183, theatre-y.com, $15-$20.
