Tucson Weekly: Beyond Skin Deep (May 14

Bloodhut Productions Offers A Multi-Ethnic Look At Women And Race.
By Margaret Regan
MEIKEL BERRY HAS dreadlocks, but she didn't always.
Once upon a time, as a little girl in Baltimore, she sat contentedly between her mothers' knees getting her hair braided into cornrows. When she was 14, though, her mother sent her off alone to the beauty parlor. Berry was confused by the division between the no-nonsense barbering at the men's end of the shop and the froufrou and chemicals at the women's end. She decided to go her own hair way.
"Cut it all off," she finally told the barber.
Review Berry's entertaining monologues on hair, African-American female division, punctuate the latest evening of skits from Bloodhut Productions. Only Skin Deep, the fine sixth offering by the 6-year-old Tucson women's collective, delves into ideas about race and female beauty. The two subjects don't automatically lend themselves to a joint treatment, but Berry's treatises on hair hit the two where they converge. Berry describes how black women, to conform to some all-American ideal, have straightened and damaged their hair, or even hidden it altogether in wigs like the Supremes-style model she sports in "Hair III." Berry's own glorious head of braids have cost her. One time, she explains, she failed to get a great job she wanted because the boss declared that her dreadlocks signified rebellion.
In typical Bloodhut fashion, the 26 separate skits in Only Skin Deep grapple with the reality of women's lives, alternating between personal truth-telling by individuals and uproarious playlets by the ensemble. Performed on a simple set, with a pointedly multicolor banner, the candid stories trace the tangled web of ethnicities that bind and sometimes strangle the hyphenated American nation. Along the way, they cover aging, lesbian sexuality, adoption and the commercial impulse to make women insecure about their looks.
There are nine performers this time around, and six of them, like Berry, are guest artists. The newcomers have some entertaining tales to tell. Aleta Garcia, the child of an Irish mother and Mexican father ("Of course, they named me for a Greek goddess"), pays tribute to both heritages in the laugh-out-loud "Riverena." Corralling the whole company, Garcia leads the puffing dancers in stiff-bodied Irish movements to Celtic music in a sendup of the Irish troupe Riverdance, then segues into a rousing Macarena.
Cultures don't always blend so happily. As a Tucson high-schooler, Garcia veered between being considered "too white" to be Mexican, to getting an A in Spanish simply because her last name was Garcia. Rachel Heinrich, descended from a rich assortment of European and Native American groups, was tormented by the other kids at an Indian boarding school for being a "half-breed." In "Family Reunion," Laurie Levon, a Bloodhut regular, mourns the lost world of her childhood, where she grew up in an intensely Catholic, and Polish, extended family. Julia Matias does a long monologue with photos on her marriage to a Filipino-American man and the subsequent culture clash with her in-laws. Her piece, "When Worlds Collide," is probably the only recitation that's a bit off the mark; it's a moving, but meandering, tale more akin to dinner-table discourse than a carefully constructed theatrical work.
More successful is Matias' "Sound Off," a funny Army chant performed with five others, a triumphant sing-song rejection of false beauty standards. Marching and gyrating with five other Bloodhutters, Matias gets off such lines as "I don't need no great big boobs/I've got all that I can use!/Sound off/One, two, three, four." Old Bloodhut hands Kim Lowry and Rhonda Hallquist twice do a comical takeoff on a used-car ad, "Body Better," screaming to their TV audience that in their going-out-of-business sale they're selling new boobs, butts and washboard abs at "prices so low we can't tell you what they are."
The good thing about Bloodhut is that the funny bits act as buffers between seriously wrenching work. And there is some serious stuff here. Heinrich actually wept during opening night in "Mamalogue" as she told of her love for the child she gave up for adoption. Marge Hilts, the oldest in the bunch, is painfully honest about her own failings in "What Goes Around Comes Around." As a young woman, she decided not to marry a young man she loved. He'd been bounced out of fraternity because his mother was Jewish and she didn't want her own future children to have to face such discrimination. Now, in one of life's ironies, she finds herself the grandmother of mixed-race grandchildren. She adores the kids and her fears for them are palpable: She nearly broke down when she described racist shopkeepers trailing her teenage granddaughter around stores. Hers is the quintessential Bloodhut story: fashioned in equal parts of profound revelation and the minutiae of daily life, it goes way beyond the skin deep.

Bloodhut Productions' Only Skin Deep continues through Sunday, May 24, at the PCC Center for the Arts Black Box Theatre, 2202 W. Anklam Road. Curtain is at 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, with a 2 o'clock matinee on closing day. Tickets are $10 general, $8 for students, and they're available at Antigone Books, Fit to Be Tried and at the door. For more information, call 795-0010.

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