JENNY BLOCK | Contributing Writer
JennyEBlock@icloud.com
You might say that her very existence is both revolution and revelation. Her music long has been, and her new off-Broadway show certainly is. I’m speaking, of course, about Bitch, a musician who has spent her adult life taking up as much space as possible, sonically and otherwise, and never once apologizing for it.
Why would she?
Bitch is a longtime feminist phenom, and, though you might have thought she would be done reinventing herself, she is at it once again with her show Bitchcraft: A Musical Play.
First, she was part of the duo Bitch and Animal. Then she was a solo artist. But she has always been an actress. She is finally calling on that art to take centerstage, literally, in what amounts to a one-woman show, though other voices and actors make sparse appearances throughout.
Bitchcraft is the story of a girl who did everything to make herself small and quiet because, well, patriarchy. But she learned once she left home that the best thing she could ever be was big and loud. So, she is.
There is music and magic and sadness and laughter. There is history and storytelling and provocation. There is wisdom and angst and fear and triumph.
And, above all, there is truth.
The show includes Bitch classics like “Pussy Manifesto” and four new songs written just for this show. There is a minimal set and an impressive use of digital imagery. The sounds and lights and costumes are almost characters unto themselves in the roles they play as the story unfolds.
Bitch plays the violin and tap dances. She metaphorically bleeds upon the stage. As someone once said, “Writing is easy. You just sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
So too is it with great theater, with experimental theater, with theater like Bitchcraft that is as raw and without pretense as true theater can possibly be. There are moments when you can feel the audience holding its collective breath and later gasping in relief and even tears.
This is Bitch’s story. And yet, somehow, it is a story all too many of us share, something that is equal parts frightening and comforting.
I had the chance to talk to Bitch after seeing Bitchcraft on opening night. Here is a swath of our conversation which, like her work, was an unapologetic and raw glimpse into a world where spells are cast and brooms are ridden and there is no hiding, even from the hard stuff.
Jenny Block: Where did the idea for this show come from? Bitch: Great question. So, I was getting ready to release [the album] Bitchcraft, and Bitchcraft is a very special album to me in that I took a long time to make it. I allowed myself the long time, and I wanted to incorporate, at the forefront of it, my earliest voice and my earliest relationship, which is my violin.
So that’s the album. And, so, I wanted the violin to be center stage, and I wanted to imagine myself the biggest I could be sonically.
So then when it came time to release Bitchcraft, and I was touring it already, I was feeling like a certain momentum with it. It brought back my old label, Kill Rock Stars. When they heard the first single, they encouraged me to finish the album, and they wanted to put it out.
So I had this momentum going, and I’ve always wanted to share my story in some way. I don’t care if it’s a memoir. I don’t care whatever it is.
I just had this feeling that I have a unique story that I feel like even my biggest fans don’t know about, and I wanted to share it somehow. And that began this journey with Margie Zohn.
My partner, Faith, they kind of asked me what I wanted for the holidays, and I was like, I don’t know. I just want to figure out a way into my story.
I am the kind of artist that gets really overwhelmed by “You can do anything!” I need limitations. I don’t know; do I start with, “I was born this day?” Do I start with puberty? How does this all work? One of Margie’s gifts is that she works with artists to draw out their own story.
I kind of decided that when I toured Bitchcraft, I wanted to experiment with also bringing in a narrative and not just playing rock shows.
I wanted to have a narrative. Then I got a couple Indigo Girls dates, and those are 30 minutes. So, I said to Margie — we’d already started working and started kind of playing around in the cauldron, I guess — and I said, okay, here we go. I’ve got 30-minute sets. Let’s build something here.
I knew that I wanted to cast a spell at the beginning to invite the audience in. And I knew I wanted to somehow how talk about my childhood, because I know the word “bitch” can feel like an armor for people, and it can feel like a wall. So I knew that letting them in on my young self, in a way, disarms that.
So that’s kind of where it started.
And I remember driving to those first Indigo Girl shows, and I called Margie, and I’m like, “Am I really going to in front of this audience and do monologues?”
That’s how it felt. They were monologues, and I should have a black turtleneck and gaze off into space. And she was like, “Just try it. Just try it.”
And it just felt like it worked, and it felt like this was a way to invite the audience in.
You’re right. It did disarm me. The stuff about your childhood, it felt really important. The honesty of that, has that helped you? Is it hard to revisit that every night? This version is kind of the deepest that we’ve done. Once we knew that we had a theater behind us and we were going to have a theater-going audience as opposed to a concert, cocktail bar or whatever, we knew we were able to go deeper.
It’s funny, I remember Margie and I actually went together to see Strange Loop on Broadway a couple of years ago, and — oh my gosh! I got out of there, and I thought, because there were things that I had been avoiding and didn’t want to talk about, it was too hard. It felt too icky.
I still have all my own stuff around it. And I saw that play and I thought, oh, I have to be so honest, and the honesty is okay.
And that has been a lesson in trust for me of like, okay, here’s my deepest, darkest stuff, and people have been kind about it.
And what is it about you that you got big instead of smaller? Because you could have gotten smaller and smaller. You could have done your best to disappear forever. I credit a lot to meeting Animal. And having these feminist revelations in women’s studies class. I mean, all of that stuff is true. I took one class, and suddenly I was like, oh my God, she’s right! What am I doing? And it felt like, oh, okay, here is permission. My rebellion was to make myself big.
Bitchcraft is playing at wild project, 195 E. 3rd St., New York, from Feb. 7-March 1, Thursdays-Mondays at 7 p.m. General admission tickets are $35, excluding fees.
The show features Bitch with Francesca, Cary Curran, and Donovan Fowler, as well as the voices of Seth Bodie, Ian Brownell, Amy Goldfarb, Ron Goldman, Jenna S. Hill, Mal Malme, Faith Soloway and Margie Zohn.
Bitchcraft was conceived by Bitch and Margie Zohn, with book by Bitch and Margie Zohn; music and lyrics by Bitch with additional music and lyrics by Faith Soloway, Bitch & Animal, Melissa York, Jon Hyman and Greg Prestopino.
It is directed by Margie Zohn and produced by wild project and Laura Vogel, with costume designs by Andrea Lauer with Dusty Childers and choreography by Michelle Dorrance.
For more information, visit BitchMusic.com.
