Karen Mould, aka Bitch, shares her intimate story in dazzling multimedia show (photo by Eric McNatt)
B*TCHCRAFT
the wild project
195 East Third St. between Aves. A & B
Through March 1, $36
thewildproject.com
bitchmusic.com
“I was a quiet child,” Karen Mould, aka Bitch, says numerous times in her not-quite-solo show, the scorching and endearing B*tchcraft: A Musical Play, continuing at the wild project through March 1. She whispers the phrase, sings it, and screams it, echoing her transition from a young girl resented by her parents to a fierce performer not afraid to stand up for what she believes in.
Born in 1973, Bitch was raised in suburban Michigan by an English father and mother who let her know that she kept them from living out their dreams. “My dad wanted to be a painter / But as an only child / Destined to take care of his parents / And then three daughters / He had to get a real job / So my job is to pour him the perfect beer,” she sings in the opening number. “My mom didn’t want to be a mom / She wanted to be a musical theater legend / But Michigan was as far off Broadway as you could get / Plus she had three girls to raise / And we all know whose job that is.”
“You’re bloody useless,” the voice of her father screams out.
“You’re a bull in a china shop,” the voice of her mother complains, referring to her daughter’s size and clumsiness.
“Up in my bedroom, I was NOT a quiet child,” Bitch tells the audience.
She imagines that the broom she uses to sweep the house can help her fly away. She writes heart-rending stories in her notebook that she reads to her bestie, a stuffed beaver named Beavy (Francesca) that comes to life. She falls in love with the violin. When she has her first period, dozens of tampons fall from the sky. She goes to college, takes theater and feminist courses, and meets Danny, with whom she forms a band, Bitch and Animal (Francesca). They build a following, but an incident at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival involving transphobia and TERFs alters her future dramatically.
B*tchcraft: A Musical Play continues at the wild project through March 1 (photo by Eric McNatt)
B*tchcraft was conceived by Bitch and director Margie Zohn, who wrote the impressive book together; the music and lyrics are by Bitch, with contributions from Faith Soloway, Melissa York, Jon Hyman, and Greg Prestopino. The intimate ninety-minute tale is accompanied by Bitch’s drawings, first black-and-white, then color, projected on the back and side walls (with framed works on paper in the lobby). The images change from her father’s angry eyes, swirling stairs, and a magical hillside to a tsunami of blood and such terms as “Male Gaze,” “Patriarchy,” “Misogyny,” and “Camp Twat: ‘Tenacious Women and Transfolk.’” The fun projection design is by Brian Pacelli, with lighting by Amina Alexander.
The immersive audio, by sound designer Sean Hagerty and engineer Gregory Kostroff, is virtually a character unto itself, from soft and tender to loud and aggressive, including a crackling fire, tinkling chimes, violin and guitar, a shower, a highway, crickets, and disembodied voices (by Seth Bodie, Ian Brownell, Amy Goldfarb, Ron Goldman, Jenna S. Hill, Mal Malme, Soloway, and Zohn). Samantha Tutasi’s set and props, which are brought on- and offstage and moved around by two crones (Cary Curran and Donovan Fowler), feature a wooden pentagonal covered box that morphs from a cauldron and bed to a sandbox and truck. Andrea Lauer’s costumes both contain and free Bitch as she goes from a little girl to a grown woman.
The musical numbers feature such powerful and engaging songs as “Pussy Manifesto,” “Hateful Thoughts,” and “Fallen Witch,” guiding us from her childhood to road trips to facing cancellation, with playful tap choreography by Michelle Dorrance. Through it all, Bitch stands tall; in “Be Bitch,” she declares, “I could be bitch / It rhymes with witch / I’ll wear the badass drag of it / Reclaim that word it sounds absurd / I’m gonna be bitch I’m gonna let it rip / You can call me bitch / This whole world can suck my tit.”
Bitch has released such solo albums as Make This Break This, In Us We Trust, and Blasted! and, with Animal, What’s That Smell and Eternally Hard, establishing herself as a queer music icon, including opening for Indigo Girls and Ani Difranco. In B*tchcraft, she stirs it all together in an exciting multimedia cauldron that should lift her career to a new level — although the specter of the Trump administration’s attack on the arts hovers over the production.
“At some point I had actually believed that coming out, we would be embraced into this big happy gay world utopia. But patriarchy was alive and well in most gay spaces because they were mostly run by men. If I had a nickel for every drag show we sat through at prides that ripped on women, or said hateful things about lesbians or our genitalia, I’d be richer than Oprah right now!” she says in the show, holding nothing back.
But more than anything else, B*tchcraft is a clarion call for everyone to keep writing, to keep singing, to keep sharing, and, hopefully, to keep making shows like this.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]