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"Sex" and Synanon onstage | page 1, 2
Elyse Singer, the director (and excavator) of "Sex" in its current run at New York's Gershwin Hotel, seems to gravitate toward women with curious pasts. Singer is also the director of another play currently running off-Broadway, "Hundreds of Sisters and One Big Brother," an autobiographical one-woman show by a pal of mine, Deborah Swisher, who has about the most interesting past I can think of. Since "autobiographical one-person shows" have essentially worn out their welcome with theater audiences fatigued by paying to witness what should be breakthroughs in the therapist's office, "Hundreds" is promoted as a wild tale of '60s naiveté and sunny, idealistic foolishness. The story is actually a well-told, hardcore look inside soul-deep brainwashing, cult-style, but audiences might not fall all over themselves to see it if it were billed that way. Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Thursday in People + Archives
Swisher, a gorgeous, half-black, half-Jewish hottie, spent her childhood in the Synanon commune in California. Synanon, which started out as a drug-rehabilitation-cum-life-redirecting program for convicts, evolved into a celebrity-studded, high-profile "alternative lifestyle" experiment before digressing into an isolated, armed and paranoid community that blindly carried out the weirdly intrusive whims of an egomaniacal, charismatic leader. In the multi-voiced telling of the story (all characters superbly realized by fireball Swisher), Debbie is separated from her mother and sister at age 7, then raised by cult members, trained to live and work in an environment that sounds a lot like a nonstop hippie boot camp, peer-pressured into shaving her head, peer-pressured into losing her virginity to an older man "suggested" for her by cult leaders, emotionally sabotaged by sadistic power abusers and systematically turned against her mother and sister when they show disloyalty toward "the Group." However, her tone never indicts, her story never accuses or even regrets. Swisher shows remarkable compassion for her old environment, and proves irrevocably by the very life-affirming magnitude of her person that there must have been something good about Synanon, because it cranked out a golden kid like Deb. Swisher, in real life, is one of those Frank Capra heroines who believes in Honesty and Truth and Abraham Lincoln and Santa Claus. She is one of the most cheerful, non-bitter, non-jaded, non-cynical, sweet, hardworking people I've ever known, and it all comes across onstage. The show itself is a testament to Swisher's plucky human spirit; when she was performing "Hundreds" at another theater last year and bankrolling the production herself, as much as I loved the show, I tried to convince her to give it up and get a cash gig so she could stop temping at law firms. But she so guilelessly believed in herself, just like all the after-school specials say you're supposed to, that she ignored all sideline ventures and kept flogging away on her little show (which is hugely demanding both physically and emotionally) and now she is in a big off-Broadway venue, which is pretty goddamned major in the scheme of things. She emerged so victorious with that heartwarming maneuver that she made me feel that I had been a sad, mangled vampire to give her such wretched advice. Who'd a thunk that that "Believe in yourself" stuff actually worked? It's such a dried-out cliché we don't even consider it anymore. It apparently takes a cult to isolate you from these hoary, overplayed chestnuts of Hollywood sentimentality enough to sincerely implement them in your own life. While "Hundreds" is unquestionably elevating to the human spirit, yadda yadda yadda, and little old ladies go away feeling touched and brave, and young men go away and think about Swisher when they take a shower, and all that good stuff, it remains to be seen what will happen. Will artistic good triumph over commercial evil -- will something else happen with this unique, remarkable story? Will it move up? Will it go to capital-B Broadway? Will it get picked up by a film company? Will Swisher get to be in the film, if it does? Will the studio want to rewrite it into a grotesque, cloying failure of a hack monstrosity, like they always do? Or will the sheer difference of it from other stories keep the big money away? In short, it will be very interesting to watch the trajectory of Deborah Swisher, as I believe her to be a veritable bellwether for how evil or not evil things are swinging in the entertainment world. I naturally presume the worst, but that's only because I am corroded by worldly cynicism. Well, we'll just have to wait and see, won't we? If Swisher's world-beating heart can't slay the Goliath of rampant, blockbuster commercialism, no one's can.
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