The Balagan's Funny Little Holiday Show About Death and Sex

Betty Campbell and Amela Meckler in "Pillow," part of the Balagan's "Death, Sex." Photo by Jake Groshong.

For theatre lovers, the holidays are a slog. Virtually every major company has its annual holiday season cash-cow re-hashing the same show you've seen a dozen times already, while the rest "cleverly" try to offer the anti-holiday fare, which rarely rises above taking easy pot-shots at beloved holiday institutions.

That's essentially the Balagan's Death, Sex 2, their second annual showcase of six short plays about death, sex, and the holidays (Fri. 8 and 10, Sat. 8, through Dec. 19; tickets $12-$15). Still, compared to some of the other anti-holiday shows out there, Death, Sex is a funny (in a South Park sort of way), racy (but not half racy enough for my taste), entertaining evening spiced up with some great local talent.

The most unforgettable bit of the evening comes, predictably, from the most accomplished actor onstage, Betty Campbell, in Pillow. The scenario basically plays like an SNL sketch setting up the guest star to play against type. In this case, Campbell, who has huge stage-presence, plays Janice, an older woman who's just killed her blind-date in sex play, and who wanders downstairs to complain at her younger, mousy neighbor Wilma (Amelia Meckler) who set them up.

The jokes generally unfold as Campbell, in dressing gown and robe, wanders about the stage, swigging straight from a bottle of Balvenie, and revealing the ever more sordid details of the evening and her past life. The jokes aren't groundbreaking, but Campbell owns them with a whip-smart snarl, tossing off barbed one-liners like, "You know, Wilma, we got the vote!", when she discovers her neighbor's never been more adventurous than the missionary position.

Easily the best written piece of the evening comes from MJ Sieber, with The Debutante. Nicole Fierstein and Jenn Kennelly start out as a pair of coke-snorting celebutantes until a mysterious agent played by Ashley Bagwell comes in. Fierstein, it turns out, is actually a government plant used to distract the public, and with the president of Congo to be assassinated that night, they have just three hours to get an anal sex tape of Fierstein out on the web so no one notices. In the end, the laugh-lines are anything but subtle, but Sieber lets his plot at least have intrigue as it unfolds.

The other short plays, all originals, run the gamut of low-brow from an eight-year-old wanting to bone Santa to Jesus getting a blow job to a male praying mantis on his wedding night (joke: he doesn't know). Jose Amador's Noelle features a middle-aged woman (Christine White) chatting with her selves at the point of previous great orgasms (Sharon Barto and Hannah Schnabel) as she gets plowed by a Euro sex fiend, only to have it end badly. Katinka Lincoln's From the Heart features the most perversity of the evening, and Nik Perleros and Terri Weagant deliver twisted little performances rich in irony.