FronteraFest Long Fringe 2011 Review: Let's Make Love Tonight! at the Salvage Vanguard Theater

Annie La Ganga

Let\’s Make Love Tonight!
Saturday, January 22; Sunday, January 23; Friday, January 28
Salvage Vanguard Theatre (2803 Manor Road)
$10
[info] | [tickets]

Seen a lot of theater, seen a lot of solo performance. Seen a few shows about sex or that deal primarily with sex. Suddenly it’s surprising that we haven't seen a show that opened with the following line before last night: “We don’t have to have a play right now. We could have an orgy.”

That’s surprising, right? We could. Just have an orgy. How is it that with all of the bad performances or open mics friends perpetrate on each other this line has not come up before, a million times? Annie La Ganga, in her short, sweet and hilarious “self-help/stand-up/comedy/interactive/performance art/improv/monologue,” Let’s Make Love Tonight! has thought this through because, apparently, she’s got some questions for you about orgies.

Specifically, who in her audience has been in one. Surprise! It was the couple that would have probably won Least Likely to Have Ever Been in an Orgy. Each show will be different based on audience suggestion or La Ganga’s mood/menstrual cycle (according to her!), and ours focused a lot on orgies because she is an “orgy failure.” She’s tried and failed to be in one, even at Burning Man where skinny gay guys with grilled cheese sandwiches cater the orgies (apparently!). She has questions about sex in general, about love and about relationships. About how much sex is normal if there is such a thing as normal, about why we enter into relationships, and about her very cute (apparently!) boyfriend.

The show is largely extemporaneous or maybe entirely improvised and some of the typical traps happened. The pacing early in the show was difficult, and La Ganga lost herself in a couple stories and had to ask if she left any threads dangling that we wanted her to finish. (Annie! what was the name of the Smut Shack at Burning Man? Purely academic question.) Those are things that you might have to accept if you’re paying for an improvised show, but La Ganga also had a believably authentic epiphany about Fromm’s 1958 The Art of Loving re: his 4 ways of coping with essential human separateness, which is the kind of thing you hope for at an improvised show. We assume that future performances of Let’s Make Love Tonight! will include revisions to highlight that personal discovery she shared with her audience, so we’ll let you see it for yourself. It was pretty amazing, actually.

La Ganga is an important voice in Austin’s spoken word, solo performance, and stand-up comedy communities although she may not identify with one or any of them. If you think of yourself as part of one of those communities, it would make good sense for you to check out one of the three remaining performances of Let’s Make Love Tonight! If your nights aren’t as good as ours was, maybe you'll get a consolation orgy? Not promising anything.