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Finger Love

nytheatre.com review by Kyle Ancowitz
August 15, 2005

Finger Love is a puppet show about women masturbating. Make no mistake, it’s not for everyone. Having said that, let me tell you that I laughed till I cried. I shook with laughter. I laughed so hard, I couldn’t tell if anyone was laughing with me. I was careful to laugh very knowledgeably—what choice did I have?—but I basically died laughing.The show runs a half-hour long, and while some may argue that this belies the real complexity of the female orgasm, writer/creator Anna Sobel has instead chosen a lighthearted approach that depends on songs, puns, gags, and, yeah, puppets to trace gently over the surface of dilemmas that keep other folks up at night. In fact, as she explains in the program notes, Sobel uses puppets “to say what might be taboo for people to say,” and bless her for it, because this means a lot of smut-talking puppets.Sobel and her co-puppeteer Kirsten Kammermeyer manipulate a puppet troupe that includes a sage but sassy Bay Area lesbian, her orgasmically-stymied married pal, a variety of singing vegetables that are longer than they are wide, a trio of vagina beauty contestants, all ten fingers, and a back massager with a familiar Austrian accent. We also get a special guest appearance from an exceptionally flamboyant, singing, satin-and-leopard-print-velour vulva puppet from House O’Chicks, a San Francisco sex-ed outfit that doesn’t seem to want my business.Finger Love functions more as a public service announcement than a legitimate drama, but this seems to suit Sobel’s purposes precisely. The mass of public knowledge on the subject is somewhat slender. For instance, recent research published in the New York Times has put the female orgasm’s evolutionary function into question, while others have speculated that the phenomenon doesn’t belong to women at all, but merely a genetically distinct subset of the gender. Some deeper understanding is warranted and if the puppets want to take us there, then I say we go with them. If they’ll let me go. I may not be invited.In conclusion, I thought Finger Love was a hoot. Sobel’s piece is vulgar, filthy, profane, and delightful. If your strongly-held religious convictions won’t hold you back and you can stand blushing for a full thirty minutes, you just might enjoy yourself.