Review: SPANKING MACHINE at The Marsh Offers a Painfully Funny Exploration of Our Collective Fear

It's a rare thing when a performance makes you laugh out loud, moves you, and then causes you to reconsider certain seminal events from your own life history. Spanking Machine, Marga Gomez' latest and perhaps final memoir theater piece, does all that and more in a swift 70 minutes. The wonderfully enigmatic title device takes on various meanings throughout the show. As one of character says, "It's something we never see, but we're afraid of it our whole lives."

Spanking Machine is a hard show to talk about in much detail, though, without revealing the myriad, improbable twists and turns it takes in its ingenious construction. It begins in straight-forward fashion as Gomez recalls her best friend from childhood in Washington Heights. His name was Agamemnon Perez Jr., but he went by Scotty because "he thought that sounded less Cuban." Marga and Scotty, two proto-queer, brown kids became fast friends, terrorizing the tyrannical nuns at their Catholic school, engaging in harmless hijinks throughout their neighborhood and whiling away untold hours watching "Dark Shadows" on TV after school.

So far, this is pretty much patented Gomez territory, even if we haven't heard these specific stories from her before. She has an unfailing knack for making every incident sound so colorful that I feel I have led a very boring life by comparison. Or maybe it's just her talent for locating the kernel of truthful humor in even her most improbable tale. Things start to get much more complicated once Scotty contacts her for the first time in 40 years. Let's just say that in those intervening decades Scotty both has, and hasn't, become exactly the uber-gay man she always assumed he would mature into. Making plans to meet up with Scotty face-to-face in Miami gradually leads Gomez down a rabbit hole of adventures and memories, some of them almost surreally wacky, some of them tenderly heart-breaking, and some of them downright horrifying. Gomez may be the ultimate survivor, but the past stubbornly refuses to stay in the past.

The real genius of the piece lies in its deceptively loose dramaturgy. The opening riff on some seemingly random memories from Gomez' childhood neatly introduces the themes she will circle back to throughout the piece, each time in a different way, each time with greater depth. I don't think it's giving away too much to say that chief among those themes is sexual assault. While perhaps similar stories are very much in the media these days thanks to the brave women of the Me-Too Movement, Gomez goes beyond the common "bad guy takes advantage of powerless woman" narrative to look at how sometimes the perpetrators can be the unlikeliest of individuals, how you can learn from the experience and still perhaps unwittingly continue the pattern of assault, and how you can also sometimes manage to break the chain of abuse. The final section of Spanking Machine, where Gomez recounts performing for a raucous lesbian S&M event in the late aughts, is its most outrageously funny and also deftly brings a whole new meaning to the title of the piece.

Gomez' mad skills as a performer are on glorious display throughout. She has been at this game for decades and knows exactly how to put an audience at ease - in this case by acknowledging upfront the strangeness of performing to a masked audience. She reels us in with disarming humor before catching us off guard with her more emotionally complex stories. Working with just a small box of well-chosen props, some atmospheric lighting and an evocative soundscape, Gomez conjures up entire worlds, both alien and familiar. Even in the more horrifying episodes, it's notable that she never, ever paints herself as the helpless victim. We the audience never feel we need to take care of her or that she's going to share more of her trauma than we can handle.

If I have any reservations about Spanking Machine, it's only that I wish it were maybe 10 minutes longer. There are certain beats, mainly the darker or more ruminative ones, that I think she could delve into a bit more or let linger a few seconds longer in order to give us time to absorb them and let them resonate more fully. As it is, though, Spanking Machine continues to resonate with me aplenty, even a week after seeing it. It turns out that those funny tales we all seem to have, the ones we tell so often that they become part of our personal narratives, don't tell the whole story. They tend to omit the darkest parts, which means they also skip over the parts about how we learned to survive them.

Spanking Machine runs through October 23rd on Fridays & Saturdays @ 8pm at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA. For information or to order tickets visit themarsh.org. All patrons must be fully vaccinated and show proof of vaccination along with valid ID during check-in before the performance, and wear a face covering over while inside the theater.

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