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Midway through Anthony Hudson’s marvelously unhinged audio play The Carlalogues, drag clown Carla Rossi (Hudson) becomes exasperated with her unruly audience. “Shut the fuck up!” she screams. Carla’s manservant Jeffrey (Ken Yoshikawa) somberly declares, “I’ll use the prod, Miss Carla.” We then hear the staticky sound of electric shocks.
The message is loud and the message is clear: If you don’t want to be shocked, get out. Vibrant and beautifully bracing, The Carlalogues, directed by Luan Schooler, gets a kick out of messing with you. Hudson has been playing Carla for years, but time hasn’t dulled the character’s rambunctious edge. Whether she’s talking politics or pop culture, she offends with glee, mocking her audience in a way that is tart yet not entirely mean.
Yet even Carla fans may be astounded by the character’s antics in The Carlalogues, which involve her defying pandemic safety measures by tying up an entire audience and forcing them to watch her rant through a series of vignettes that gleefully violate history and the boundaries of good taste.
In some scenes—like an interlude featuring an aggrieved Cher—the play is a pure blast of side-splitting madness, but Hudson also unleashes skillfully salty political commentary that leaves neither conservatives nor liberals unscathed. When Carla announces, “That was the political portion of the show. I like to get that stuff out of the way immediately,” she’s actually just getting started.
The play’s most insightful scenes include Carla airing her thoughts of gender-reveal parties. While the 2020 El Dorado, Calif. wildfire—sparked by a pyrotechnic device at a gender-reveal party—is the clear catalyst for Carla’s musings, she also claims that the Hindenburg disaster and the Titanic’s fateful encounter with an iceberg were caused by similar shenanigans.
It’s a great gag because the exaggeration allows Hudson to lampoon an archaic ritual in a way that is both entertaining and enlightening. Carla’s joke about a gender-reveal party sinking an 883-foot ship hits home because it’s not really a joke at all—it’s an invocation of a disaster that illustrates how disastrous presuming an unborn child’s gender identity can be.
Progressive Portlanders will find plenty to love in The Carlalogues—there’s a great jab at people who don’t pay taxes yet claim to support the police—but when it comes to comedy, Carla strives to offend as many people as possible. Nearly every scene showcases the ruthlessness of her wit—and when she targets self-congratulatory white liberals, her aim is delightfully and devastatingly precise.
“I’m Carla Rossi, Portland’s premier drag clown—the ghost of white privilege,” she declares. “It’s not funny yet. It’s funny because white privilege will never die. Oh what? Did I go too far? Are you woke now because you put a black square on your Instagram? Good for you. You just solved racism in between a set of mattress ads on a data-mining platform. Congratulations.”
No one—including Jackie Kennedy, Shirley Temple, Christopher Nolan and the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch—is safe from Carla’s jokes, and there’s something comforting about that. No matter how much the world changes, Carla can always find something to laugh at. For someone who advertises baby monitors endorsed by the estate of Ethel Merman and something called a Sylvia Plath Easy-Bake Oven, she’s an oddly reassuring presence.
Near the end of The Carlalogues—which also features an audio essay by Hudson called Nobody’s Going to Fund This—we hear shrieks, gunshots and a song attributed to Bosch entitled “Music of the Butt.” It’s a zany and occasionally nasty conclusion, but it’s also a comforting reminder that while COVID-19 has killed millions, it hasn’t killed Carla’s (or Hudson’s) joie de vivre.
The pandemic has produced plenty of somber plays about the Way Things Are, and rightly so—the terrors of 2020 and 2021 need to be studied and memorialized through art. Yet we also need plays that feed humanity’s collective, frequently neglected appetite for demented mischief. Carla fulfills that hunger, which is why, in her own madcap way, she’s a symbol of hope.
LISTEN: The Carlalogues streams at artistsrep.org/performance/the-carlalogues through June 30, 2022. Free. Bonus material for a sliding-scale fee.