Out in the Mountains

Interview with Janice Perry

Janice Peny; Aka GAL, has a new show
this year, Queen Lear. The performance
at Burlington City Hall was to a sold out
audience, in Gal ‘s usual give-all style.
Gal was receptive and gracious while we
met in the offices of Outright/OITM. She
spoke about Everything! Here are slic-
es of the conversation...

OITM: I read the last interview that
OITM did with you, they were basically
interviewing Gal, rather then Janice,
keeping them separate...

Janice: There's a reason for that. My
work is interesting and readable, and my
life is a regular life. And it's mine  and
I have no life other than my work.

OITM: When I saw your Queen Lear
show at Johnson State College, you made
a comment about a person leaving in the
middle of your show, you said, ‘oh a
Christian’, Do you improvise much in
your show?

Janice: If someone gets up and storms out
when I'm talking about S/M bondage,
you have to assume it had something to
do with me and not that they had to get a
drink of water. Everyone sees them
leave, to not acknowledge it, I don't think
is good. The audience would be worried
now about how I'm feeling. I need to let
them know it’s ok.

OITM: I read about your experience at
Southern Utah University.Were people a
little shocked?

Janice: That was when I did my show
with the big penis. It was a lecure dem-
onstration so some students were required
to go. There were four hundred people at
the show. All through the show people
were jumping up and leaving, and one
person pointed at me and said,”You are
the devil Which was really cool. When
they ran out they went to call the police,
the school President, radio and the news-
papers. Finally the police came over and
we had a chat. They didn't throw me in

jail, but they asked me to stay in town for
three days until they decided what to do.
I've always regretted that they didn't
throw me in jail. What was interesting
about that was a lot of people left, but
then I had to hang around over the next
few days and people were coming up to
me on the street and saying, ‘I saw you
but I had to leave because my boss was
there, or my roommate was there or my
minister was there’. People came up to
me and said, ‘you must be that convoca-
tion speaker that I heard about.’ After the
convocation they always hold a luncheon,
to sit and have lunch with the speaker,
normally only about five people attend.
There were sixty people there, ad they
couldn't all fit in the room. They were all
like, 'Wow, I thought I was the only per-
son like this, People invited me to their
homes. These two women invited me to
their house. They were lesbians and they
had never met another lesbian. So when I
got back to Vermont, I sent them Lesbian
Connection, Out in the Mountains, and
On Our Backs, (laughter) Just to have a
kind of overview That kind of stuff is
really exciting. It makes me happy that I
didn't go “oh I'm working with a bunch
of Mormons I should tone myself down”.

OITM: Is that the most extreme situation
you have ever been in? »

Jaince: Yeah, I've never had anyone
jumping up and calling me the devil until
that. Normally in a university students
get embarrassed by the sex stories, some-
times men are offended by my presence.
Normally the response is really good.

OITM: I was thinking when I saw your
recent show about the four women stoned
in Somalia, the 20,000 women raped in
Bosnia, the gays in the military, it was as
if everything you were talking about
came out of the newspaper. Somehow
you put it together in a funny, thinking
way. How does that happen?

Janice: Gee, I don't know..(Iaugh) Some,
times I don't know what I'm thinking
about till I'm on the stage. There is a real.
ly outline, there's also room in there for
that stuff

OITM: Do you always have a message in
your work?

Janice: My feeling is that it is a waste of
time not to. I hate stand—up comedy,I
hate these jokes about nothing.Anything
that’s not really powerful and emotional is
superfluous. I have to have some of this
‘superfluity’ just because I want to be ac-
cessible to everybody. But it's really fun
when I play in a place where the people
are really smart, like Smith College. Ican
use whatever vocabulary I want, I don't
have to fiddle around. Although fiddling
is fun, don't get me wrong...

OITM: In the Vermont Times review of
the City Hall show, your piece on incest
is criticized. When I was sitting in the
Johnson theater, with a very, mixed audi-
ence, someone's grandmother, all the
way down to high school age students,
and I thought, not only are there sur-
vivors of incest, but perpetrators of incest
in this room. It is obviously a painful
part, there is nothing humorous about it
at all. Why is it important for you to do
it?

Janice: Well, you know why. You just
said why.. I thought about not doing it
and I think about not doing it every night.
I don't think that addressing a serious
subject is any indication about my com-
mitment to performance. My commit-
ment is to personal freedom and social
justice. My feeling was not that the audi-
ence had been dulled, my feeling was
that the audience was moved. It did take
them a while to come back. That was the
way I planned it. The first time I did that
piece I didn’t know how to get out of it at
all. In Cologne, Germany, (the first per-
formance of the Oueen Lear show) we all

 

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