By R. Pikser

 

Kick is the story of a Catholic girl’s journey through life as she negotiates her experiences with religion, sex, rape, friendship, and surviving in the world of theater and of dance. 

 

The format of Kick is that most current of forms:  the one person show. Joanna Rush does all the impersonations of herself at different ages and of the people who surround her as she is growing up and growing older.  However, this is not a showcase of impressions.

Joanna Rush in KICK

(Photo credit: John Ricard)

 

This is a play and Ms. Rush and all her characters relate to each other and some of them, at least, change.  The story is always at the fore.  We see Ms. Rush as Catholic school girl, a runaway trying out for the Rockettes, a young girl getting raped, a young dancer at the Rockettes, a woman getting married, a woman raped by her husband, a woman getting divorced, fighting with her son, a woman refusing to be raped.  All through her journey, in between lectures from her Irish father, or the priest, or good advice from her fellow dancers, she comes back always and again to her best friend from high school, Joey (later Sebastian, the famous stage director), from whom she gets not only advice but commiseration about men, about life, and about religion.  He is still caring for her after his death.  When she goes out West to scatter his ashes (Sex is his downfall, too: He dies of AIDS) that is the place that she finds inner strengths she had lacked before.

 

There is enough dancing worked into the show for us to believe in Ms. Rush’s life as a dancer, but the dancing is minimal.  Her movement skills come into prominence in the physicalizations of the various characters.  A rolled-back shoulder or a protruding stomach, or loosely hanging arms set the tone and the rest of the character falls into place, before our eyes, with body, gait and voice. 

 

Kick is collaboration between Joanna Rush, the writer and performer, and director/choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett.  The two of them have blended the hilarious with the wrenching in such a way, with so many ups and downs, that the laughter relaxes us and leaves us unguarded and open to the next awful event.  At the end of 80 minutes this reviewer was exhausted.  And in tears.  And exhilarated.

The two collaborators hope to take the show to college campuses, to educate the young women and young men.  As we know, rape and date rape are very much with us in this supposed age of post-everything.  Women, in spite of real gains, are still considered not to be at the same level as men, whether in employment or in the respect due them as human beings.  There are still so many battles to be fought, too many of them internal.  Kick shows us that we have come far, and that growth is still and always possible.

 

What an honor to have seen this piece and to have seen this level of work.  It reminds us that theater is indeed magic and that all we need is a space, talent, and some very hard work.

 

Kick

November 22^nd 2015

St Luke’s Theatre

308 West 46^th Street

New York, NY  10026

Tickets: $39.50 & $59.50 via TeleCharge.com or at St. Luke's Box Office

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