What price docudrama? Live Girls raises interesting questions BY IRIS FANGER

"Fuck art" is a line of dialogue spit out as ammunition in the battle between the adversaries of Victoria Stewart’s new play, Live Girls, which pits Sarah, the high priestess of reality-based performance art, against Sonia, the porn star whose life Sarah is mining for a new stage piece. It’s also the action that drives the obligatory scene in which the two women go to bed together. And the phrase is a sort of mantra waved as one central theme of the play — that is, if you believe that the behavior of a single artist, on stage and off, stands for the conduct of an entire profession.

Given the profusion of other ideas about art, life, and reality that Stewart spreads out in Live Girls and the savvy world premiere of the play at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, it’s a shame to report that the edifice nearly topples under the weight of its main philosophical argument — that art transforms life. However, Stewart has given the actors — a trio of powerhouse women under the direction of David Wheeler — enough material to create believable people throbbing with need and well able to hold your attention, despite the play’s lofty outbursts of jargon.

What’s attracted notice to the play is that the leading character is almost certainly based on the respected performer/playwright Anna Deavere Smith, for whom Stewart has worked. Deavere Smith became something of a cultural icon with her diversely representative one-woman presentations of political hotspots, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities, about the violence that erupted in the neighborhood of the title between blacks and Orthodox Jews, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, about the riots in Watts after the Rodney King verdict. She constructs her performance pieces by taping conversations with the central figures in a dispute and becoming each of her subjects on stage, speaking their own words, to form an elaborate collage of a complex situation. According to the playwright’s WHAT program credits, Stewart worked as a stage manager for Deavere Smith. And if Sarah Jones, as the performance artist is called in the play, is not meant to be Deavere Smith, why give the role to Jacqui Parker, the only African-American in the cast?

Live Girls revolves around an interview session between Sarah (Parker) and Sonia (Tanya Clarke) that strings throughout the play, interrupted by fast-forwards in which the material being gleaned is performed on stage several years later and by scenes in the hotel rooms where Sarah’s private life unfolds. The conceit is that the performance artist is creating a new show on the theme of injustice. Porn queen Sonia has come to relate her perception of mistreatment by the Las Vegas cops, but she refuses to behave like a victim begging for sympathy. Meanwhile, Sarah’s assistant, Allison (Jennifer Gibbs), an earnest doctoral candidate who’s writing her dissertation on her employer’s work, learns more about Sarah than she can handle while arranging schedules, taking dictation, and picking up the emotional debris that’s left after the interviewer has finished and walked away.

Clarke’s Sonia is a porn star who’s defiant about her calling, funny, smart, and well-read — a refreshing anti-cliché. By contrast, Parker’s Sarah is a selfish monster who takes the gift of another person’s story and gives nothing in return. Sonia is open about her feelings and her sexual yen for women, answering Sarah’s often insulting questions honestly; Sarah is devious, shrouded, and ultimately threatened by the fear of coming out. What Parker does not capture is Deavere Smith’s gift for projecting the personality and energy level of the person she has appropriated for the stage, complete with mannerisms and manner of speaking. Parker is more laid back, delivering some of the lines she’s lifted from the porn star’s revelations in an elocutionary tone.

The surprise ending constitutes a triumph of revenge. Like Sonia, Stewart does manage to "fuck art," or at least Deavere Smith, suggesting that the lauded performance artist may indeed be the woman we are watching and not quite the exemplary idol that the cultural establishment has made of her. The playwright also raises a tantalizing question about the sort of art Deavere Smith creates: agitprop drama based on actual situations. Can the daily headlines, or real-life stories, really translate into stage truth when they’ve been manipulated for the presenter’s ends?