Many veteran actors avoid solo shows: Too much memorization, too few lifelines. Jessica Rothert is not a veteran: The Northern Kentucky native and graduate of Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts will be a senior theater major at Indiana University. But she handles Claire Dowie’s Why Is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt? with verve, not to mention a relish for the script’s inventiveness.
The character she plays is a tomboy. We meet her at 14 when she convinces three other girls to band together as “The Fab Four.” She’s John Lennon, the most androgynous of the group, and she sustains the fantasy long after her friends move on to primping and boy-chasing. She’s a student at a Catholic girls school where skirted uniforms are required. (She calls skirts “easy-access attire.”)
Role-playing provides Dowie’s play with humor. Uncomfortable with customary gender stereotypes, Rothert’s character tries on various roles as she grows into young adulthood. Each one is positioned with a twinkle in her eye that allows her refusal to conform to be entertaining rather than oppressive. Working in a secretarial position for “a classy firm with branches all over America,” she imagines herself a private in the army in Burma, wearing boots and marching around the office. At an accounting firm, she decides she’s decoding intelligence for the CIA.
These fantasies — enlivened by Rothert’s inventive performance — keep the 90-minute piece moving, but the writing is heavy-handed, especially in the second act that restates attitudes we’ve already heard. After some predictable drama, she decides that being a boy is more fun, the same point that opened the show.
Dowie’s script from the early 1990s feels dated — it rails about boys being pampered and girls being tolerated and trained. Maybe that still happens, but it sounds like an observation from a good while back, and that makes this performance sound more like cultural history than today’s world.
Rothert brings to life this energetic if perplexing character, and the audience filling the 20 seats at Queen City Off Broadway’s facility in Northside enjoyed meeting her. Grade: B
WHY IS JOHN LENNON WEARING A SKIRT?, presented by Queen City Off-Broadway, continues through Saturday.
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2006.
