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Looking at the Female Gaze: Five Models in Ruins, 1981
A sumptuous, if maybe overtidy, trip back to the shoulder-pad era.
With the fifth of Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s title characters mysteriously absent and their photographer, Roberta (Elizabeth Marvel), busy setting up the lights, the models turn to a gleeful game of “the worst job I ever had …” The gigs they’ve endured, and the harassment from the men (almost entirely) who have shot them, goes past what’s legal — one has been made to pose with corpses, pretty much all have been objectified since they were underage — into arias of brutality. Alex (Britne Oldford) once crash-landed in the Amazon and claims to have survived in a tree by consuming condensation and the flesh of her fellow passengers, “which was actually kind of liberating,” she announces, “’cause I was so hungry, I was starved for that shoot.” The shoot itself was later canceled, she says with a shrug, because of a local coup d’etat. Afsoon Pajoufar’s enviably ornate set lends the play verisimilitude too, with great slabs of frescoed walls crumbling into a swampy collection of reeds to one side of the stage.
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