Not Keith (Queen-Tiye Akamefula) and Not Charlotte (Annie Hoeg) hide in noirish shadows in What a World! What a World! (photo by Maria Baranova)
WHAT A WORLD! WHAT A WORLD!
The Tank
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Through August 2, $28-$53
thetanknyc.org
“Oh, what a world! What a world!” the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) cries out after Dorothy (Judy Garland) accidentally throws water on her while trying to put out the burning scarecrow (Ray Bolger), whom the witch had just set on fire.
Inspired by the 2019 Met Gala, the theme of which was “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” The Wizard of Oz, which has its fair share of camp, and Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” playwright Eric Marlin wrote What a World! What a World!, making its world premiere at the Tank through August 2.
“As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility,” Sontag writes in the highly influential piece. “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. . . . Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn’t: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms.”
What a World! What a World! is a deconstruction of 1940s melodrama — specifically, the fictional 1943 film The Pearl of My Oyster and its two leads, Keith and Charlotte — exploring issues of camp, parody, eroticism, romance, drag, and, mostly, gender and how things have changed, or haven’t, over the last eighty-plus years.
The majority of the sixty-five-minute play takes place on a gray, dank, empty stage where Not Keith (Queen-Tiye Akamefula) and Not Charlotte (Annie Hoeg) re-create scenes from the film using minimal set decoration, primarily microphones and film lights. Their costumes, by Megan Rutherford Murray, start out simple but morph into something more, well, campy, while Skye Mahaffie’s lighting incorporates elements of 1940s cinema, both romance and noir. The actors switch between four pairs of characters: Keith and Charlotte from The Pearl of My Oyster, a drag king and drag queen portraying Keith and Charlotte, a queer couple sitting on the floor commenting on the movie, and a queer couple watching a recording of the drag performance. It’s not always clear who they are at any given moment, resulting in some bumpy transitions.
“Don’t worry about keeping it all straight,” Marlin notes in the script. “Nothing about this should be straight.”
What a World! What a World! explores camp, parody, gender, and more at the Tank (photo by Maria Baranova)
Not Keith and Not Charlotte occasionally break out into experimental movement, discuss love and legacy, and talk about Hollywood stereotyping. “I want to be hideous. I want you to love me hideous. I don’t want you to love me beautiful. Loving me beautiful is easy,” Not Charlotte says. Not Keith channels Humphrey Bogart when he declares, “Now you listen here and you listen good. There are two kinds of dames in this godforsaken world. The kind who plays tricks and the kind who shoots straight. So tell me, which kinda dame are you gonna be?”
They argue over the quality of The Pearl of My Oyster itself, with Not Charlotte calling it “a dumb old movie” and Not Keith arguing that it’s “a fucking epistemology of fabulousness.”
Salt, a mineral used in many religious rituals, and water, which is to sustain life, figure prominently throughout the heart-tugging Oyster narrative, from salty Altoids and Keith’s being a fisherman (but not quite an old salt) to breathing in salty air and drinking salty water, evoking potential doom, though not necessarily like the Wicked Witch of the West faced as she screamed, “I’m melting! Melting!” right before “Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would’ve thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness.” (As a bonus side fact, several of the later books in the Oz series, written by Ruth Plumly Thompson, feature a pirate named Captain Salt.)
In addition, when Not Keith and Not Charlotte are fighting over what camp is, the latter explains, “Without camp the world is so serious, it is wickedly serious. . . . Only with true inanity is there a flicker of joy in the world. I need the flicker.”
What a World! What a World! evokes the work of Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland (A Letter to Lyndon B. Johnson or God: Whoever Reads This First, And Then the Rodeo Burned Down) and Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams (Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods), although it lacks some of the innate cleverness and sociopolitical depth, as well as camp. Not every melodrama can be Casablanca, Imitation of Life, or Magnificent Obsession.
Akamefula (Black Girl Magic Show) and Hoeg (Slow Field) have a playful chemistry, but even at sixty-five minutes, there are slow gaps, and the dialogue occasionally feels like it has been taken straight from a master’s thesis. Marlin (there will come a time for vengeance, bad things happen here), whose Brooklyn theater company is known as the Healthy Oyster Collective, and director Ilana Khanin (Shot List, I Was Unbecoming Then) do save some playful surprises for the latter part of the show, including one utterly delightful and hilarious scene involving a toy that is layered with meaning (but also just plain funny).
In “Notes on Camp,” Sontag writes, “True, the Camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.”
What a World! What a World! might not be the pearl in an oyster, but it’s worth its salt, more than just a mere flicker of joy.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]