Ch. 4: Rabbit Sends in a Little Willie
"Utterly bourgeois!" was Dodie's assessment of the play Alice and Mouse had seen.
"How can you say that? You've not even seen it!" Mouse objected.
"How can it be anything else given your description of it? It's nothing but an excuse for titillating and athletic sex scenes in a story that reinforces accepted stereotypes, particularly with regards to lesbian love." Dodie smiled at Alice who was wearing the Mickey Mouse tee-shirt she'd originally wore. "Don't worry, Alice, I'll show you real theatre. Vibrant living theatre!"
Dodie escorted Alice to a converted warehouse called The Doss House, in a poor part of town that Alice hadn't seen before. Mouse declined to go. "There's no point," she explained. "I either don't understand it or I don't enjoy it. And usually both."
"Well, this shouldn't strain too many people's cerebral processes!" exclaimed Dodie when they arrived to see The Mushroom Garden, subtitled Mould, Dung and Modern Life. The audience was fairly mixed. Many of the women had their hair shaved and like Dodie wore nothing but military looking boots and a vest to just below their navel. Many of the men dressed like the women and some wore shapeless jumpers and baggy corduroys with sandals. Dodie seemed to know everyone there, and shared cigarettes with almost everyone she passed by.
"This is Alice," she'd say, cuddling Alice close to her and nervously pulling her pubic hair. "I'm introducing her to culture."
"She'll get it if she's in the front row," laughed one of the men whose penis dangled just below Alice's line of sight.
Eventually, Alice and Dodie sat at the front on plastic seats that were arranged in concentric circles around an otherwise undistinguished area that represented the stage. Curiously enough, the front seats were not the most popular. "Audience participation is the rule in modern theatre," explained Dodie. "Modern theatre is about breaking barriers. Breaking rules. Getting across to people. Okay, it's still limited by the censorship rules. No buggery. Only simulated sex between two men. But all the main rules are broken."
"Is there going to be audience participation in this play?"
"I'd be very surprised if there wasn't." When the play began Alice's confusion only grew more intense. There may have been some story line in the speechifying and sex scenes but it seemed to occur at almost random moments. The actors and actresses, who also didn't shave off any body hair, never seemed to play very well- defined characters but they did a lot of shouting and made obscene jokes about each other, the present government and the audience. Alice's vocabulary grew by more and more colourful swear words, of whose meanings she wasn't absolutely sure.
There was some audience participation, but to Alice the actors seemed to be simply bullying people in the audience. At one stage, they dragged a girl out of the third row. One of the actors was fucking one of the actresses. They persuaded the girl to take off her vest, and she revealed two very large breasts. The actress being fucked took the girls' nipples in her teeth and one of the actors slowly caressed her pubic hair. While this was going on, a couple of actors performed a rather tuneless song on the theme of racial equality.
Alice was quite relieved when the break came, but the performance was left in a very unsatisfactory state with one of the actresses leaving stage after giving a monologue to the backing of badly-tuned piano to the effect that she was in despair at the lack of imagination of both of her boyfriends. Alice was rather hoping Dodie might enlighten her how this made any sense with the rest of the action.
"It's fairly obvious really. The way the actors have been disrespectful to the women, including those in the audience, is symptomatic of a very unprogressive attitude. It'll all become obvious in the second half."
This wasn't true. Alice's mystification merely deepened. She was also very embarrassed when one of the actors proffered his erect penis which had just been dipped in each of the actresses' cunts to the women in the front row to do what they would. Alice didn't like the smell so she waved it aside. Dodie however threw herself enthusiastically on to it. This seemed to be a general cue for audience participation. Before not very long, there was an orgy on stage where some half of the participants were from the audience. Being art, however, it lasted less than fifteen minutes and members of the audience returned to their seats. Dodie who had just been fucked by three of the actors wiped her pubic hairs with her vest which had come off in the proceedings. "That was a scene to remember!" she whispered.
From Alice's perspective the play still never got very far despite several more tuneless songs, some rather clumsy dancing and some monotonous monologues. There was however quite a lot of applause at the end, particularly for some of the more energetic of the cast. The applause never seemed to end as far as Alice could see, while the sweating, mostly naked, cast wiped semen and other stains from their bodies.
