Interview Part 2


Perry’s most recent, two-month trip to Europe included jobs in Germany, England and Amsterdam, and “Switzerland for pleasure.” Since 1982 she’s been performing on both sides of the Atlantic — far more overseas, in fact, than here. For some years Perry benefited from the generous funding for the arts in Europe — small theaters and other venues were able to invite her back again and again. That’s waned significantly since the Berlin wall came down and, she says, “everyone in Eastern Europe moved to Germany.” Money for the arts declined as the need for social services increased. “It’s the same thing that happened in England,” Perry says. She went from between 80 to 120 jobs a year in Europe to just 14 last year.

For the most part, from Berlin to Burlington, audiences have been delighted by Perry’s unique and highly physical command of satire, candor, insight and, not least, her zany costumes and near-operatic singing. She’s an uncensored feminist and a humanist; she pokes fun at the foibles of mankind — emphasis, perhaps, on man — but gets the Great Cosmic Joke: that, like it or not, we’re all in this together. And for Perry, outrageous is normal. “I invented German cabaret,” she’ll claim. “Of course, they didn’t realize that I’d invented it.”

While her humor can be laser-sharp and is always irreverent, Perry sagely points out, “Anyone who would come to see a show called Holy Sh*t is not likely to be offended.” And if they were, they’d be missing the point — not to mention some pants-wetting giggles.

In the new work as well as earlier ones, such as Out From Underground — a retrospective that she showed in Burlington in 1998 — Perry has played to all kinds of audiences. Hip students to little old ladies; lesbians to corporate businessmen. And many nationalities.

While performing in English has not been much of a handicap with multi-lingual Europeans, some theater-goers in the good old U.S. of A. have not quite understood. “When I performed at the University of Southern Utah,” Perry says, “someone called me the Devil and ran screaming from the room.” She’s probably as proud of that judgment as accolades that liken her to “a cross between Doris Day and a high-velocity rifle.”

Perry is adamant that her shows are not gender- or sexual-orientation-specific. Her shows “have universal themes that are relevant to everyone,” Perry insists. “I would love everyone to see my show; it’s about being a human being.”. Perry recalls the time she was performing “the lesbian bondage skit — with a flyswatter — and this 75-year-old heterosexual couple in the front row burst out laughing,” she says. “I love to find the points where we’re exactly the same. . . I expect them to go home thinking about what I said.”