Miss Autobody

Cecily M. Barrie is a graduate drama student at Mount St. Vincent
University in Halifax.

This play is a refreshingly good-natured and earthy condemnation of
pornography and violence toward women. The collective product of Les
Folles Alliées, an all-woman theatre troupe from Quebec, the nine
scenes in two acts present a mix of genres (satire, musical comedy,
farce, vaudeville, and social commentary) served up as a “live comic
strip for adults” to be performed or read aloud. The purpose seems to
be to sexually titillate and then illustrate to the audience aspects of
pornography that at best, promote an unrealistic image of women and, at
worst, condone violent, misogynist treatment of women in the name of
“entertainment.”

As farce, the play not unexpectedly contains much double entendre and
even rhyming couplets in dialogue, but it also takes on a carnival tone
when the actors burlesque as caricatures—singing packages of food,
animated furniture, dancing porn magazines, and pantomimic shadows.

Although the plot seems freewheeling at times, the dialogue and musical
segments that convey the denunciatory theme are carefully explained in
the preface and afterword. Performance could well make use of these
sections as director’s guidelines.

The pun of the acting troupe’s name (Les Folles Alliées) is
unfortunately lost in the translation to English, but the impact of the
troupe’s play does not suffer the same fate. Instead of being a solemn
polemic, it is an effective and lively assertion that protest can be
good-natured as well as loud.