Title: True Confessions of a Go-Go Girl

Written by: Jill Morley

Date saw the show: July 28, 2007
Place saw the show: Kansas City, Missouri, Fringe Festival
Company: Eubank Productions (www.eubankproductions.com)
Principal Leads: Ashley Otis, Justin Van Pelt, Vanessa Severo, Bonnie Johnson, Mandy Mook

Director: Steven Eubank
4 Stars

Reviewed by: Deborah Ground Buckner

Writer and filmmaker Jill Morley (www.jillmorley.com) provides an inside glimpse of the world of women dancers in some of the sleaziest clubs of New Jersey. True Confessions of a Go-Go Girl was published in Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 1998 and has been performed in Manhattan, San Francisco, the Texas Fringe Festival and Los Angeles. This latest staging, at the Kansas City Fringe Festival, gives a hard and realistic look at the sex industry, “the only industry where women get paid more than men.”

Jill (Ashley Otis) tells of her change from a homely tomboy in a “lifetime of Catholic school” and four years in college to “Dylan,” a pole dancer. “I was fascinated with the sleaziness—a whole nother world of women.” She introduces the audience to Edna (Vanessa Severo), willing to break the rules and “flash” customers for better tips, Nina (Bonnie Johnson), a blond dancer whose work has earned her a sugar daddy buying her a Mercedes (but she complains because it is silver and not gold), and Halley (Mandy Mook), the seen-it-all, done-it-all girl Dylan is afraid of becoming.

There are some amazing performances of pole dancing, including upside-down spins, and enough “come-hithers” to keep an audience on edge, without crossing the lines as Edna did.

Dylan talks tough in the beginning, bragging of the little tricks she can use to increase her tips (“I learned how to look deeper into a man's eyes and not look away.”). But there is a vulnerability to the character that begins to emerge. First, she displays a protest of bravado: “Who are you to judge me? I work here. You hang out here!” She begins to turn to scotch to bolster the nerve to go out on stage (“You have got to drink to get this job.”). She reaches a point where “what made me different from a prostitute was no longer clear.”

The play takes the audience to the backstage dressing rooms (often no more than a cluttered table with a small mirror), on to the stages of smoky dives, and into the lonely homes of the women who are portrayed. This is a realistic glimpse of a world many know nothing about, a world of humor, dance, sex and heartbreak.