Anomalous Co. was scheduled to produce Stiffler and Bounds together at the American Theater of Actors from December 17th through the 20th. Stiffler can be reviewed here.

The goals of Anomalous in producing Stiffler are readily apparent and very admirable but were very poorly executed. The idea of supporting socially significant international theater, employing immigrant actors and urging the humanization of women in the sex trade are all legitimate concepts. But Stiffler is hardly the piece to accomplish those goals.

Stiffler is the very definition of experimental theater combined with theater of the absurd. It is impossible to know how much might have been lost in the translation from Gheg Albanian which seems to be a more colloquial form of Albanian and probably makes translation more difficult and Anomalous does not credit the translator of this production. What the audience does know is that Stiffler contains all of the flaws inherent in many pieces of experimental and absurd theater.

Doruntina Basha tries to make Hava (Diana Zhdanova) a symbol for all women. This reality of the effort has the unfortunate result of making Hava more of an individual than a universal example. Hava’s sex work is ill defined. Is she a street walker, an escort or a “casual” professional? In Basha’s world she seems to be all three and that is hardly the way the industry works.

Hava is as much disrespected for being poor and female as she is for being a sex worker. The person that disrespects her most is the admissions nurse at the emergency room where she goes to get treated for the large carving knife planted in her back. That the person most judgmental of a woman is another woman is never a surprise, but Basha’s latter insistence on showing that the nurse is projecting is an unsupported step in trying to universalize Hava into ALL women.

A suggestion for Anomalous to promote its goal of humanization of women in the sex trade is to produce one of Kaitlyn Bailey’s two solo plays. Either Cuntagious or The Oldest Profession outline both Bailey’s experience as an escort who willing and aggressively entered into the profession and her advocacy for sex trade legalization which would serve to physically and mentally protect practitioners and have the advantage of being written by an extraordinary writer and thinker.