Lunatic(a)s

LUNA BIN Belinda Cervantes comes out of her shell.

One woman can’t resist the urge to look through her boyfriend’s cell-phone history. Another divulges that she gets off on gay porn, while a third shares her fetish for licking unused silverware at Denny’s and IHOP. The theme of the latest monologue/sketch/rant fest from the funny feministas of Teatro Luna is that women can be crazy, but it’s not quite as chick-lit simplistic as that may sound. Taking inspiration from the company’s namesake, Lunatic(a)s notes that the moon is traditionally connected both to women and to insanity, and uses the tale of the Mayan moon goddess Ix Chel as a through line, recasting her as a modern Latina girl.

Saracho guides the proceedings as gracefully as possible, though the show suffers slightly from an unevenness of tone that might just be the nature of ensemble-created work; it doesn’t seem quite right that a sketch about road rage should be more memorable than a scene in which a woman is visited in her dreams by a raped and murdered female soldier, but that’s indeed the case. The cast seems to have a better handle on the laughs, the moments of blistering, hilarious honesty about the everyday insanities they experience as women and as Latinas, and those are the moments that stick with us. But even the funny bits can venture into the deep, as when the gay porn fan, describing the kind of violent domination scenes she prefers, realizes with horror and guilt that she’d find the same scenario offensive and unacceptable if it involved a woman. What would Ix Chel do?—Kris Vire