Theater Review: 'honey' Features Buzz Of Activity

A play about sex (or intimate) workers found a strong focus in a superb performance by Korri Werner as Ivy. The play, “Honey,” was staged Saturday at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, 3000 General Pershing Blvd. The play also benefited from the swirl of activity created around Ivy in her hotel room by a strong female ensemble (and one man). The no-intermission Fresh Paint Performance Lab production offered onlookers an intense, rewarding, not R- or X-rated, theatrical experience. But it was Werner as Ivy who carried the show, making insecurities about her personality and body type manifest in various ways. Werner changed from casual clothes into a dress as she rehearsed responses to a male client — at times before an empty mirror — with touching vulnerability. These included laughing at his jokes, being suitably impressed by his profession and trying to sound sweetly sexy, but not quite pulling it off. Just entertaining and diverting enough were Werner's interactions with other members of the almost all-female ensemble. Wildly amusing was a group song about putting “your head in the money” and literally throwing it around, extending the bee hive metaphor to hilarious lengths. Werner also bonded with the maid bringing her too many towels and with a fellow sex worker about wanting to go freelance while watching “Pretty Woman” on television. Wonderfully creepy was a scene in which David Burkhart invades her room while she's asleep, as the Video Vigilante, trying to save her and others with “tough love.” In other more sympathetic vignettes, Kaylene Snarsky portrayed a dream ballerina, and Morgaine Gooding-Silverwood played a masseuse whose hand gets cramped. The piece was created by director Katherine Wilkinson, Chelcy Harrell, Gooding-Silverwood and Emma McFarland, with original music by Ben Harrell. Described by director Wilkinson as about labor “at its core,” based on the metaphor of the worker bee, “Honey” gives a human face to a taboo issue, and is highly recommended. — John Brandenburg, for The Oklahoman Read more on NewsOK.com