B*tch Eat Dog

I recently took a couple hours from work to go into D.C. to attend a puppet show at the theater at UDC. The show is called “B*tch Eat Dog”, asterisk included. It was my first foray into fringe live performance, at least since my undergrad. I enjoyed it, I found it entertaining and it was worth the metro ride and the quite modest ticket price. Oftentimes the show was quite on the nose with its message, but that’s kind of part of its kitschy burlesque-ish charm.

The show consisted of a collection of brief skits adhered together by a host, a large puppet of a bookish old white man dressed in a brown suit, I would assume modeled after one of the writer’s professors, both in look and demeanor. He was well meaning but clueless, attempting to overcome his “privilege” of being a white man by increasingly more ill-fated performative stunts, such as attempting to bring the ghost of an early suffragette back from the dead only for her to go on a racist tirade against the voting rights of African-Americans, and culminating in cutting his dick off, only to be told that no one asked him to do that. He symbolizes the male overreaction to women’s issues and the feminist cause, in that they feel the need to help beyond their means, often where it is not needed.

The first skit, and my favorite, was a “girlboss” retelling of Moby Dick. Captain Ahab, who speaks in unintelligible grunts, slaps around his crew, which includes a woman with her child. Moby Dick is replaced with Big Richard, a big white crocodile. I thought it was pretty funny how the audience would react when Ahab would smack the female puppet around. No one in the audience would even let out a chuckle, but when the baby got slapped there would always be a couple laughs. Of course, I also held in my laughs whenever the woman got smacked, for fear of a pummeling of tote bags and personal vibrators. The ending suggests that in girlbossing control of the ship, rather than uprooting the tyranny of the oppressive male figure, you end up simply replacing the oppressive male figure with an oppressive female figure.

I also enjoyed a musical number sung from the point of view of a “trad” wife obsessed with unpasteurized milk. She espouses subservience to “Him” without ever clarifying whether referring to her husband or God, blurring the lines between the two, deifying the husband above herself. At the same time, the trad wife character has multiple breasts, like that of a farm animal, minimizing her role to that of livestock which produces milk and children. She is a corruption of the mother figure, with breast milk that “could kill a child” coming from one teat and another that “could kill a man”. At the end of the number, she dies from the unpasteurized milk she praises.

The last skit I will recount is one about weaponized tears, a sort of in-critique of female culture. It’s posed as an infomercial promoting a new invention which will turn your tears into lethal bullets with which you can kill. You can use it on a restaurant host who tells you that no tables are available, on a girl who is dating your crush, or on a wedding guest who is wearing the same dress as you, among other things, with a final disclaimer that weaponized tears are only usable by straight white women. What I found interesting was that all but one of the examples, that being the one of the restaurant host, had the victims of weaponized tears being other women.

It’s a bit ironic, but I find myself unable, or perhaps unwilling, to comment on certain skits simply because I am just not equipped to do so being a man. I don’t think I would have anything of value to really add to those. Also I will end my review of the skits itself here because it’s not my job to retell the entire show. I fear I may have already told too much of it, but it’s my first time ever writing a review of a live show so if that is the case then forgive me.

The show involved a good deal of audience involvement, with various props being tossed into the crowd and audience members being brought up on stage to be part of the play itself. The audience was quite an interesting scene, I was taken aback by what I described to a friend as “the most homosexual heterosexual couple” I’d ever seen. It was a man and a woman, both shaved bald, wearing the same outfit, a crop top shirt and a short skirt, with the man’s belly hair assaulting the eyes. It was honestly just a bit too in-character for a show like this, if I were the organizers I’d pay them to attend at every showing.

I was messaging a girl a few days afterward and the topic came up about things to see in D.C., and I mentioned that I went into town to see a show, referring to this one. She asked me about it, and I innocently described it as one of those “kitschy vulgar feminist plays”, assuming she’d understand what I meant. I mean, the play is called “B*tch Eat Dog” and features a talking uterus which throws eggs into the audience. She immediately blocked me, assuming that I meant it as a sexist derision, so I do blame this show for that.

Overall a good experience.