Op-night viewers might have thought they had logged onto the wrong vimeo, since the first fourteen minutes of Hell In A Handbag's latest online production is wholly devoted to a compilation of mid-20th-century vintage television commercials taking us from the wholesome family-oriented Fifties to the sensual youth-market Sixties. (Any of you Boomers remember Noxzema's "Take it all off" campaign?) The purpose of this chronology is to acquaint us with the dramatic universe occupied by our heroine, whose tragic demise is formatted in the mass media entertainment of the period.
The program we are allegedly watching is titled "I Am Not a Suppressed Homemaker" and is hosted by Lady Marcia Macbeth offering helpful advice to stay-at-home spouses on domestic skills, such as cleaning and cooking. Ground-breaking as this concept was in 1958, she confides to us and to her cameraman, it is now 1969, but the show's producers refuse to acknowledge the social changes of the last decade. When we see our leading lady preparing to start the show, she is dressed in Twiggy eye-makeup, fall-enhanced hairdo, white vinyl boots and a scarlet housecoat barely concealing the bloodstained nightie beneath. That's because the topic of today's episode, she announces, is "blood"—how to distinguish human from fowl, fresh from dried, vascular from rectal, and the difficulty of washing it out of the bed linens evidencing her participation in dark deeds she can no longer keep hidden.
Audiences accustomed to Hell In A Handbag's playfully nostalgic approach to camp-drag parody should be warned that Smith's vision, though purporting to be based on Shakespeare's witchy tale (Marcia's husband is named "Mackers"), more closely approximates the Guignol-Grotesque satire of Billy Bermingham's legendary Torso Theater, whose founder reveled in six-foot prehensile penises, villains executed in microwave chambers, and simulated body fluids sprayed by the gallon.
Being fundamentally a solo show, however, broadcast from an actual home doubling as a soundstage kitchen, Smith's gross-n-gory images are mostly verbal. David Cerda, Ed Jones, Caitlin Jackson and other Handbag regulars contribute perfunctory cameo-appearances as mile-marker personalities like Jacqueline Susann and Lesley Gore, while Pamela Parker's trio of naked marionettes modeled on the cartoon art of Jay Ward lend a touch of whimsy. In the end, though, what dominates the narrative focus is director/videographer Stephanie Shaw's enthusiastic, but curiously—well, bloodless, invocation of kaleidoscopic mandalas, high-contrast duotone colors, solarization, tracers and other visual motifs associated with psychedelic-era iconography illustrating our Mad Housewife's descent into frustration ultimately proving fatal.
