CARLA ROSSI: ONE NIGHT ONLY is a one-act play that is part monologue, part drag number, part TV show, part music video, part ritual, and entirely funny, loud, and messy. Co-starring Jen Hackworth, featuring music by Mickey Pollizatto, and with costuming by Korin Noelle, CARLA ROSSI: ONE NIGHT ONLY presents our titular goddess as she tries to win back her popularity, welcoming the public into her home for a very special live broadcast of TV’s Hoarders. But Carla isn’t the only one at home, and some loose threads are about to unravel.
CARLA ROSSI: ONE NIGHT ONLY was written, assembled, and rehearsed over a semester until its premiere on May 2, 2013. This is a play about a script about a faux-reality show. It utilizes performance, prerecorded video, a live video feed, sound, song, multimedia interaction, audience participation, and heaps of trash to visualize oppressive realities, assumed realities, and – more hopefully – alternate realities. It is influenced by the work of performance artists, drag queens, stand-up comedians, actors, musicians, and playwrights. It is inspired by extensive research around the performed societal constructions of gender, sex, and race, as well as the construction of otherness and ethical systems that respond to it.
This play was born from my experiences as a “half-breed” and my search for self-identification through language that does not reinscribe oppression. In the end, I found performance to be a revolutionary language that exposes identity itself as a construction. CARLA ROSSI: ONE NIGHT ONLY is a declaration that drag queens, clowns, tricksters, shamans, and other half-breeds aren’t alone in their in-between-ness; we are all in-between, and every one of us is performing all the time.