IN HEAT: Is She Hot Under Her Collar or Under Her Skirt?
nytheatre.com review by David Hilder
August 10, 2012
"The Universe is a taker, not a giver," says Doris Anderson. "If you give everything over to the Universe, you won't have anything left!"
Doris is the tart, offbeat, and fundamentally charming founder and sole operator of SILC (the Self-Identified Lesbian Community Center), and now she's branching out into public access cable—and we, the audience, are in her studio in IN HEAT: Is She Hot Under Her Collar Or Under Her Skirt? Doris is played by Sally Sockwell, and she's a certified hoot.
Neither particularly young nor overly glamorous (she tells us with some pride that her outfit came from the JC Penney's catalog), Doris speaks her mind on all sorts of topics, from dating to contemporary gender issues and identities to her personal distaste for bisexuality. She takes things far, sometimes too far, and that's a blessing for an evening like IN HEAT, which could easily suffer were its points not sharpened like razors. As it is, Sockwell is hilarious company for not much over an hour, and if the show she's in bears an unnecessary framing device, the time we spend with her is always diverting. Kudos to Sockwell, director Jocelyn Sawyer, writer Lisa Haas and especially an unnamed stage manager who offered heroic assistance during a technical SNAFU.
