Jennifer Joplin’s one-woman show The MILF Also Rises is an incredibly intimate hour of bare-all truth-telling that is both genuinely funny as well as thought-provoking. There are three things she knows for certain: She has a vagina, likes drinking — maybe too much — and in the end, we all die. No one makes it out alive.
In the hour that Joplin’s show unfurled, interest never waned. Laughs rolled in tandem with heavier moments, a difficult balance to strike but one Joplin did masterfully. As she spoke to personal memories and sentiments — from craving the validation of boys in high school (thanks, Sixteen Candles) to fielding motherhood as a professional woman to reaching middle-age — she also related to present-day issues.
The veil of the American dream is lifting and everything is changing. Joplin’s piece is, ultimately, a response to the #MeToo movement, but also to the changing landscape of feminism and the calling out of archaic gender roles. She reminds the audience that, she too, needs to change, along with the rest of us. She calls to her privilege as a cisgender white woman. As the show’s tagline puts it, she navigates this world of #MeToo, Marches and “an ever-encroaching maturity using the only tools she’s got — Truth, Justice and the AmeriMILF Way.”
The set itself is bare-boned, but that makes Joplin’s ability to captivate a room all the more impressive. The performance took place in an Art Academy of Cincinnati classroom with props that included a small table, a chair — the kind you might see on a porch or sitting outside a coffeehouse — and a privacy partition. Throughout the performance, she placed protest signs around the space, espousing messages like, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, “Bitches get shit done,” and “Equal rights for me doesn’t mean less rights for you. This isn’t a pie.”
In being completely honest, she asks the audience to look within themselves and reflect on their own understanding of the current socio-political climate America finds itself in. Perhaps the most important takeaway from the evening was that, though death is inevitable, change is chosen. And the latter is hard, sure, but in accepting this call to action we can make our communities a better place while we’re alive.
And though there were a few moments — very few — where Joplin stumbled over a line, this didn’t detract from an overall emotive, warm and engaging stage presence that was both funny and comforting. As a 23-year-old woman, I appreciated being able to hear the stories of someone from another generation raised in an entirely different climate. Near the end, she gestured to the protest signs around her and asks, almost pleading, “Where was all of this when I needed it?”
My roommate, Katie, summed Joplin’s show up best upon exiting the performance: “I feel empowered.”
It’s easy to sink into nihilistic thoughts when things feel dark and Joplin’s last truth — death — is at the end of all things, but The MILF Also Rises is fueled by the hope for change — which, I think, starts with the willingness to be honest with each other.
The Cincinnati Fringe Festival runs through June 15. Find showtimes, tickets and more info here. Check out more reviews from our CityBeat team here. For a comprehensive list click here.
This article appears in May 29 – Jun 5, 2019.
