Prep School: Wild Bore

Zoë Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez, and Adrienne Truscott are a performance art super group. In Wild Bore, they join forces to take on the ultimate taboo – talking about their critics.

The first rule of making art is don’t respond to your critics. But in the U.S. premiere of Wild Bore, three masters of smart, political and outrageous comedy delve into the torrent of critical fury that has been aimed at baffling, misunderstood and downright awful works of art — including their own.

Read the Indefinite Article by Lisa Duggan. Join us for the NYU Skirball Book Club on Friday, Sept 27. We’ll be reading Vivek Shraya’s Death Threat. 

Sep 28, 2019 | #theater, #stonewall 50, #laughs

Wild Bore

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Recommended readings to accompany the Indefinite Article by Lisa Duggan.

Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Second Edition). University of Michigan Press, 2012.

Jacqueline Millner, Catriona Moore (Editors), Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes. Routledge, 2018.

Kim Solga, Theatre & Feminism. Macmillan Palgrave, 2015.

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me. Haymarket Books, 2015. 

Fintan Walsh, Matthew Causey (editors), Performance, Identity, and the Neo-Political Subject. Routledge, 2013.

Read All About It

Wild Bore at Edinburgh Fringe
Sydney Morning Herald | Apr 27, 2017

Zoe Coombs-Marr, Ursula Martinez and Adrienne Truscott try critics' skin on for size

The show isn’t so much about attacking critics as it is about celebrating criticism as an art form in itself.

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The Telegraph | Nov 21, 2017

'When bad reviews are written with arrogance, it's the best'

It is a deliciously subversive, often hilarious and thought-provoking show about how much of the critical gaze is white, middle-class and male.

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The Guardian | May 21, 2017

Zoë Coombs Marr, Adrienne Truscott and Ursula Martinez combine forces to eviscerate critics

Wild Bore… is a near impossible show for a critic to review.

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Exeunt Magazine | Nov 22, 2017

Wild Bore: A Dialogue

Wild Bore problematised and played with the concept of value so much that I have no idea whether or not it’s good.

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Meet Zöe Coombs-Marr

Zoë Coombs Marr was the winner of the 2016 Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) award for Trigger Warning and has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, London’s Soho Theatre and MICF.

The Guardian | Aug 25, 2015

Zoe Coombs Marr: It's a sexist world – comedy just reflects it

Zoë Coombs Marr has a thing for green goo.

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Kill Your Darlings | Sep 10, 2018

‘My Politics – It’s Not a Brand’

As a comedian, Coombs Marr is an expert at balancing silly and serious.

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The Guardian | Jul 19, 2016

Zoë Coombs Marr: why a 'cranky lesbian in her 30s' should be person of the year

This is a show for our times.

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Meet Ursula Martinez

Ursula Martinez is an established international writer, performer and cult cabaret diva. She produces explosive live performance, for theatre, cabaret, and beyond.

The Standard | Mar 27, 2019

'Part of me wants to take my clothes off less, but the political me resists that'

Humour, combined with an often disarming openness about her own life, have been central to Martinez’s theatre work since she made her debut.

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Perth Festival | Jan 16, 2019

SPEND A MOMENT WITH URSULA MARTINEZ

“Sometimes theatre (and art in general) is a form of escapism, or a glimpse into a different world. My work is the opposite… I think I have always found a way to make the work quite universal.”

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The Guardian | Feb 9, 2016

Stripping, bricklaying and flammable G-strings: burlesque queen Ursula Martinez

Martinez took a bricklaying course especially for her new show, Free Admission – something she enjoyed more than she expected.

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Meet Adrienne Truscott

Adrienne Truscott is a choreographer, circus acrobat, dancer, writer, and as of late, comedian, who makes genre-straddling work in New York City and abroad.

BOMB Magazine | Oct 1, 2017

Adrienne Truscott by Erin Markey

“I’ve been in therapy, thinking a lot about my experience of time, and I realized there are whole periods of my life that I don’t remember. This is what trauma does to a person.”

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The New York Times | Apr 10, 2015

Reappropriating the Rape Joke to Taunt Society and Stand-Up

“Of course it‘s a gimmick!” Adrienne Truscott said emphatically. “It‘s also a really relevant, loaded, successful gimmick.”

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The New York Times | Apr 11, 2015

'Asking for It' Uses Wit to Tackle Cultural Norms About Rape

To watch Ms. Truscott unmask these cultural norms, with verve and wit and several beers, is to feel elated and sad and angry all at once.

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Flashback

Adrienne Truscott: Asking For It

NYU Skirball first welcomed Adrienne Truscott in 2017, with her brilliant and subversive Asking For It – the same month that #MeToo and #Time’sUp were making headlines.

Radical comedian, activist and performance artist, Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It mixes humor, dance, video and p*ssy-puppetry, while undoing the rules and rhetoric surrounding rape. Truscott straddles the world of stand-up and performance art, dressed only from the waist up and ankles down. With commentary from George Carlin, Louis C. K. and others, Truscott takes on ducks, mini-skirts, rape whistles, Cosby, #45 and whoever is left in Hollywood.

Check out Ann Pellegrini’s Indefinite Article on Adrienne Truscott and Justin Vivian Bond, and our Reading List for the show (it’s a proto-Prep School).

Extra Credit

Are you into smart, funny adult human females decimating their critics? Get into ContraPoints!

YouTube theoretician Natalie Wynn brings us up to speed on gender and politics in the 21st century. Learn more about Natalie and her project of trans-feminist consciousness raising through stylish, sarcastic video essays – in this appropriately glitzy New Yorker profile: “The Stylish Socialist Who Is Trying to Save YouTube from Alt-Right Domination.”

She is one of the few Internet demi-celebrities who is as clever as she thinks she is, and one of the few leftists anywhere who can be nuanced without being boring. She knows her way around a syllogism, but she also knows that persuasion is not reducible to reason—that the best arguments, on their own, do not always win. Or, as she put it in a recent video, “Politics is aesthetics.”

In this recent video, Wynn takes on trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFS).