The Thrillpeddlers
E and I are so going to this. I told him about it out just now and he said he was going to take me to this as a surprise. I wish I hadn't spoiled it!
Truly Obscene Thrills
Local theater company The Thrillpeddlers delivers wonderfully pornographic Parisian Grand Guignol
Violet Blue, special to SF Gate
Thursday, March 19, 2009
More...
By the time the nuns have revealed their racy undergarments and begged for discipline from the convent gardener, after the butler uncontrollably barks like a dog after boinking the maid, and somewhere between the fluorescent pornographic, lights-out "spookshow" -- you know that The Thrillpeddlers newest stage show "Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Grand Guignol" is not going to be like any theatre experience you've ever had in your life. Or may ever experience again. Or be able to forget about, no matter how hard you try.
Like any proper horror narrative where the innocent-eyed girl informs the audience that no, the terror has not been vanquished and the demons are about to return to the screen with twice the venom, The Thrillpeddlers are back. This time, not only has the modern Grand Guignol theater company returned to the stage with a bloody vengeance, but they're doing it Parisian style -- back to the roots of Grand Guignol. Their newest show is an over-18 only, delightfully obscene and pornographic staging where very little is left to the imagination. It's like your brain just had a lot of unprotected sex and maybe some roofies and you woke up with your frontal lobe feeling really stretched out in a way that you're too embarrassed to even tell your doctor about.
It's that much fun.
Porno theater sounds like it's either going to be a total turn-off, or a trip to see live acting onstage that just sort of leaves you feeling vaguely uncomfortable. But the intention of Grand Guignol is to make you feel extremely uncomfortable, and The Thrillpeddlers have it down to a delightfully campy (and sexy) art while following the rich tradition of the genre. The theater itself is custom-built to keep you closer to the action than necessary, and the vignettes performed, while direct translations from their original scripts, deal with the most impolite subject matter possible. Violence, madness, hysteria, disease, murder in every possible form and crazy, outrageous, and especially really gross-out sex is standard fare for Grand Guignol, whose origins date back to 1897.
Back then, the Theatre du Grand Guignol was founded with much blasphemy in a former chapel in Paris and it was not only customary to splash the audience with gore, but one director even counted his successes on how many ladies fainted in the audience per each evening's performance. The actress Paula Maxa, during her career at the Grand Guignol (circa 1917) was known as "the most assassinated woman in the world." The theater would typically feature 5-6 vignettes a night as "hot and cold showers" that alternated between grisly extreme horror and bawdy sex farces.
Last year, The Thrillpeddlers soaked their precious Hypnodrome with fluids and shook the "shock boxes" a la British Grand Guignol, which had short life span (1920-1922), pun intended, due to Britain's censorship standards. In this year's "Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Grand Guignol" they go all the way (and then a little bit further) with their outrageous stage porn -- after an appetizing cannibalism act, of course. And boy, do they have a good time. All four tasty, extremely playful, black-humorously presented short plays are not for the delicate, the easily offended or anyone under 18. They're all original Grand Guignol vignettes, but with modern fetish stylings -- and fortunately -- a stage variation on the traditional use of pigs' blood.
We begin in Paris with "Private Room Number 6," (1907) and a visit to The Rat Mort, a shady nightclub -- our favorite place to spend an evening, unless we happen to be a sadistic Russian general. This one takes a decidedly "Death and the Maiden" twist when he tries to take a working girl into a back room. Basically, you'll want to change your petticoats after the first act.
That we are San Franciscans and "Tics, or Doing the Deed" is circa 1906, is especially fitting when nonconsensual wife-swapping gives the guys uncontrollable shakes -- and other bizarre physical tics -- after getting it on behind closed doors. No blood is spilled (for a minute, anyway) in this one, so as the decidedly lighter sex farce of the evening it's the so-called "cold shower" vignette, even if the topic is hot.
Then we travel to see "The Head Hunters" (from 1958; the Grand Guignol closed in 1962) where wayward ethnologist Philippe Roujan disappears into the jungles of French Guiana with, of course, an escapee from Devil's Island as his guide. With much urgency, the young man's father and bodacious fiancee rush from Paris to Amazonia, "guided only by the girl's unfaltering belief in the questionable science of Radiesthesia, a method of locating the missing man through psychic means." This doesn't turn out so well when they meet a tribe of headhunters and cannibals, clothes being torn off, and a nice dose of bondage, not to mention the indelicate horrors of the South American jungle.
Last but unforgettably not least (no matter how many times you try and rinse your brain) "The Discipline" is a playful, sexy, campy, wonderfully filthy enactment of eighteenth-century erotica, that might have you laughing through tears of "OMG they really went there." Here we visit a convent where a hot Goth Mother Superior decides that the only way to alleviate her sins is a good flogging, and when other super sexy Gothy nuns think that's a really good idea, the resulting extremely horny gardener exhibits (and uses) a shlong that simply can't be described -- unless the editors here go on vacation.
You'll just have to go see it for yourself. With a date. But don't say you weren't warned, and don't bring your mom unless she's Susie Bright.
The Thrillpeddlers' "Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Grand Guignol" opened last weekend and runs Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings at 8 p.m., March 12 through May 2, at Thrillpeddlers' Hypnodrome (575 10th Street, San Francisco). Tickets range from $15-$69 and can be purchased in advance online at Brown Paper Tickets.
Truly Obscene Thrills
Local theater company The Thrillpeddlers delivers wonderfully pornographic Parisian Grand Guignol
Violet Blue, special to SF Gate
Thursday, March 19, 2009
More...
By the time the nuns have revealed their racy undergarments and begged for discipline from the convent gardener, after the butler uncontrollably barks like a dog after boinking the maid, and somewhere between the fluorescent pornographic, lights-out "spookshow" -- you know that The Thrillpeddlers newest stage show "Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Grand Guignol" is not going to be like any theatre experience you've ever had in your life. Or may ever experience again. Or be able to forget about, no matter how hard you try.
Like any proper horror narrative where the innocent-eyed girl informs the audience that no, the terror has not been vanquished and the demons are about to return to the screen with twice the venom, The Thrillpeddlers are back. This time, not only has the modern Grand Guignol theater company returned to the stage with a bloody vengeance, but they're doing it Parisian style -- back to the roots of Grand Guignol. Their newest show is an over-18 only, delightfully obscene and pornographic staging where very little is left to the imagination. It's like your brain just had a lot of unprotected sex and maybe some roofies and you woke up with your frontal lobe feeling really stretched out in a way that you're too embarrassed to even tell your doctor about.
It's that much fun.
Porno theater sounds like it's either going to be a total turn-off, or a trip to see live acting onstage that just sort of leaves you feeling vaguely uncomfortable. But the intention of Grand Guignol is to make you feel extremely uncomfortable, and The Thrillpeddlers have it down to a delightfully campy (and sexy) art while following the rich tradition of the genre. The theater itself is custom-built to keep you closer to the action than necessary, and the vignettes performed, while direct translations from their original scripts, deal with the most impolite subject matter possible. Violence, madness, hysteria, disease, murder in every possible form and crazy, outrageous, and especially really gross-out sex is standard fare for Grand Guignol, whose origins date back to 1897.
Back then, the Theatre du Grand Guignol was founded with much blasphemy in a former chapel in Paris and it was not only customary to splash the audience with gore, but one director even counted his successes on how many ladies fainted in the audience per each evening's performance. The actress Paula Maxa, during her career at the Grand Guignol (circa 1917) was known as "the most assassinated woman in the world." The theater would typically feature 5-6 vignettes a night as "hot and cold showers" that alternated between grisly extreme horror and bawdy sex farces.
Last year, The Thrillpeddlers soaked their precious Hypnodrome with fluids and shook the "shock boxes" a la British Grand Guignol, which had short life span (1920-1922), pun intended, due to Britain's censorship standards. In this year's "Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Grand Guignol" they go all the way (and then a little bit further) with their outrageous stage porn -- after an appetizing cannibalism act, of course. And boy, do they have a good time. All four tasty, extremely playful, black-humorously presented short plays are not for the delicate, the easily offended or anyone under 18. They're all original Grand Guignol vignettes, but with modern fetish stylings -- and fortunately -- a stage variation on the traditional use of pigs' blood.
We begin in Paris with "Private Room Number 6," (1907) and a visit to The Rat Mort, a shady nightclub -- our favorite place to spend an evening, unless we happen to be a sadistic Russian general. This one takes a decidedly "Death and the Maiden" twist when he tries to take a working girl into a back room. Basically, you'll want to change your petticoats after the first act.
That we are San Franciscans and "Tics, or Doing the Deed" is circa 1906, is especially fitting when nonconsensual wife-swapping gives the guys uncontrollable shakes -- and other bizarre physical tics -- after getting it on behind closed doors. No blood is spilled (for a minute, anyway) in this one, so as the decidedly lighter sex farce of the evening it's the so-called "cold shower" vignette, even if the topic is hot.
Then we travel to see "The Head Hunters" (from 1958; the Grand Guignol closed in 1962) where wayward ethnologist Philippe Roujan disappears into the jungles of French Guiana with, of course, an escapee from Devil's Island as his guide. With much urgency, the young man's father and bodacious fiancee rush from Paris to Amazonia, "guided only by the girl's unfaltering belief in the questionable science of Radiesthesia, a method of locating the missing man through psychic means." This doesn't turn out so well when they meet a tribe of headhunters and cannibals, clothes being torn off, and a nice dose of bondage, not to mention the indelicate horrors of the South American jungle.
Last but unforgettably not least (no matter how many times you try and rinse your brain) "The Discipline" is a playful, sexy, campy, wonderfully filthy enactment of eighteenth-century erotica, that might have you laughing through tears of "OMG they really went there." Here we visit a convent where a hot Goth Mother Superior decides that the only way to alleviate her sins is a good flogging, and when other super sexy Gothy nuns think that's a really good idea, the resulting extremely horny gardener exhibits (and uses) a shlong that simply can't be described -- unless the editors here go on vacation.
You'll just have to go see it for yourself. With a date. But don't say you weren't warned, and don't bring your mom unless she's Susie Bright.
The Thrillpeddlers' "Audacious Artefacts: Parisian Grand Guignol" opened last weekend and runs Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings at 8 p.m., March 12 through May 2, at Thrillpeddlers' Hypnodrome (575 10th Street, San Francisco). Tickets range from $15-$69 and can be purchased in advance online at Brown Paper Tickets.