I didn’t know what to expect going into Black Stockings. I thought the show description sounded interesting. It is ultimately about two sex workers talking about the morality of sex and comparing it to war. But the show, produced and directed by Winnie Wenglewick and co-produced by Brittany Lacour, takes you on an emotional rollercoaster.
Wenglewick, who plays Donna, and Lacour, who plays Trish, are sex workers in Manchester, England that divulge all the juicy details and truths behind sex work. The show seems filled with laughs, jokes and funny sexual innuendoes (even including a blow-up sex doll from the opening scene) till Trish’s past is revealed through various spotlighted monologues throughout the play (which the play was originally by Peter McGarry, who originally produced Black Stockings at the Orlando Fringe Festival in 2002).
We learned the ugly truth behind Trish’s relationship with her grandfather, who was a WWII bomber pilot who used his memories of Dresden to hurt not only himself but his granddaughter. With comedic relief throughout the play (where at one point Donna, talking about her “slutiness” says she “developed faster than a Polaroid”), it really brings to light the very many things sex and war have in common — it deals with the morality of what is right and wrong, power and influence. We can see these running themes evident through the two characters of Donna and Trish, mostly because of the very impassioned acting on the parts of Wenglewick and Lacour.
The play shows Trish as the feistier of the two, while Donna is more even-tempered. But as the play continues, it makes you think is Trish feistier because she is less accepting of her station in life? Toward the end when a turn of events change the lives and paths for Donna and Trish, we see how a sense of morality, by knowing that we — despite society being responsible for showing us it’s okay to act immorally when it comes to sex (and war) — are the ones who choose the path of decency and morality that we walk down.
The show was brilliantly put together, and leaves you with a feeling of heavy emotions. You at first laugh at the two women, thinking when they talk of their “jobs” that they stumbled upon them on their own accords. But toward the end, I started to second guess if really the undoing of our behaviors have a larger part to do with society or how society projects us to be?
I would recommend seeing this show — it puts sex and war into a different perspective, plus Trish uses a dildo as a unicorn horn. It doesn’t get much better than that.
