Philly Fringe 2024: Tennessee Playwrights Studio’s That Woman – The Monologue Show and Becky Bondurant’s Penis Envy

That Woman

That Woman - The Monologue Show is a historical piece of theater, offering new perspectives on JFK’s misogyny, exploitation of women, and likely sex addiction, as told by different women who were tied to him romantically. It also includes a closing monologue by Jaqueline Kennedy Onasis, insisting that she not be defined by the 10 years that she was with Jack. Created by Molly Breen (who also directs and performs in the show) and Angela Gimlin, this showcase-style piece relies on both the content of the writing and also the ability of each performer to bring the women’s stories to life.

I went in honestly not knowing anything about the women reported to have had affairs with JFK, except for Marilyn Monroe was one of them. The show is a revelation: these are stories that were largely hidden from the public, thanks to a network of handlers around the President. The women came from a wide variety of backgrounds, from burlesque performer Blaze Starr, who ran away from her West Virginia home after narrowly escaping a gang rape by local boys to Mary Pinchot Meyer, an artist and former editor of the Atlantic whose death still remains a mystery.

The writing is strong, each story is compelling. Breen herself plays Mimi Alford, a 19-year-old intern who had her first sexual experience with JKF after being hand-picked for an evening at the White House when Jackie and their children were away. Breen has the gravitas and capacity as a performer to inhabit this story and bring us into Alford’s naivete and her perspective as an older woman.

However, some of the younger actors in the ensemble did not possess this depth and their stories felt more caricatured. The show is on a tour to different Fringe festivals and the program indicates that some local actors are engaged for each run. My sense is that these actors don’t have the rehearsal time to really grow into their roles in the way that Breen, who performs throughout the tour, clearly does—and that detracts from the show’s power.

Penis Envy

Penis Envy, on the other hand, is the best kind of monologue show: finely crafted and intimately inhabited by writer and performer Becky Bondurant, who also, in collaboration with her seven- and nine-year-old children, created the vibrantly colored Presidential portraits that serve as the show’s backdrop. Bondurant’s is a highly personal story, weaving together many strands of her life experience. We meet her as an MFA creative-writing student under the tutelage of a highly regarded male writer; as a college student who is trying to both empower and starve herself; and as a mother who is eight months pregnant and excited to bring her daughter into a world with a woman for President when Trump is elected.

Bondurant expressed the shock, rage, and utter disappointment that so many of us felt the morning after that election. Each part of her story returned to and riffed on Freud’s “Penis Envy” theory, offering both a critique and a kind of tribute to the conversation that Freud brought into Western thought.

Though Bondurant’s performance was subtle and restrained, taking place from a seat behind a table, she took us boldly into the messy earthiness that is living in a female body: suffering with a norovirus as a teen; having sex for the first time after her first child was born; calling the hospital while in labor with her second child because her husband hasn’t secured a room with a birthing tub; describing the pleasures of having a vagina to her six-year-old daughter—who surprised her by perfectly describing how an orgasm feels.

Penis Envy was funny, bold, poignant, sad, and transformative. Bondurant confirmed how women can internalize the misogyny of the culture that surrounds us, but she also described how we might free ourselves of that cultural bullshit. She dreamed of writing a great American novel, but ended up finding her artistic voice as a storyteller, with all of the great themes she needed emerging from her own life.

Both of these shows, even with any deficits, are important and inspiring and remind me why Fringe Festivals showcasing this kind of work are essential.