All Hail The Sausage Queen
The Nest
1615 N. Delaware Ave.
Philadelphia
Sept. 23, 2024
Claire Pitts made free, vegan hot dogs for everyone who came to her avant garde art show Monday night. Then she stripped down and mashed those dogs into pulp with her bare hands while making direct eye contact with her audience.
I was disgusted, but I wasn’t uncomfortable — which may have been the point.
Pitts, a local performance artist, writhed around in mustard for 30 minutes of her 30-minute, theatrical spectacular, All Hail The Sausage Queen! The Nest hosted the short play in conjunction with the Philly Fringe Festival.
Over the length of time it takes to watch a short TV episode, Pitts took her audience to hell and back. She was testing us and herself at the same time: How far could she go without going too far?
Before the show even started, the friend I’d forced along was wary of what was to come.
“This place is cool,” he commented, still in generous spirits after our walk past a man grilling up complimentary sausages into a high-ceilinged warehouse drenched in red light. “It’s like a dungeon. A sex dungeon.”
Then he noticed the informal stage of sorts — a gingham-covered catwalk, bordered by foldable seats that suggested audience participation would play a significant role in whatever demented performance I’d just bought us tickets to see.
“I don’t wanna be a part of any antics,” he warned me, pushing his hoodie over his eyes.
He shot me a dirty look minutes later when Pitts appeared — steering a red toy car around the room with her legs hanging out the vehicle doors.
Pitts played the part of a washed-up pageant queen desperate to star in a commercial for Hebrew National in exchange for a “lifetime supply of sausages.” She relied on physical comedy to illustrate how the exploitation of human beauty only makes an ugly mess.
The plot mattered less than the presentation. Pitts clearly wanted to find out how much fleshed-out fuckery her audience could handle. In a short slip, she contorted her body into bizarre positions, leaving the crowd to either stare at the awkwardly intimate scene or turn to each other and giggle uneasily as an evasion tactic.
Pitts tried inviting audience members into the exhibition. When no one volunteered, she didn’t push any further. She stayed in character and found other ways to bump up against our boundaries.
But even while she stared us down and got up in our faces, she managed to remain firmly balanced on the tentative tightrope that separated the audience from the act. She never went so far as to make me or my friend, at least, feel unsafe about being put on the spot.
In the end, wearing a boot for a faux-broken leg, a skirt stitched out of sausage links, and a bra composed of ketchup and mustard packets, Pitts posed salaciously but grotesquely for a photographer from Hebrew National while an audio clip of President Donald Trump repeated: “The fact is, the girls are beautiful. It’s gonna be beautiful girls.”
After getting banned from the competition, Pitts mashed up all the sausages she’d casually consumed throughout the play while singing, “I’m dying, I need to be under your skin.” Then she got right back in her clown car and drove out of the room.
I turned to my friend post-show for his opinion.
“At least it woke me up,” he said.
Most media is designed to test the limits of our attention spans. Even the current election season seems centered around somehow turning passive engagement with Tik Tok videos of politicians saying crazy shit — whether esoteric, hateful or just absurd — into real votes. All Hail The Sausage Queen was different. Whether I liked it or not, the play required its audience to get face to face with unfiltered ugliness. The ball was always in our court: We could decide at any time when we’d had enough. So could Pitts.
Knowing all of that made it impossible to feel offended by Pitts’ performance. The real show was watching a middle-aged woman in bell-bottom jeans lower her eyes and purse her lips with apparent disappointment while Pitts squirted ketchup all over her nearly naked body.
Bon appetit!
NEXT:
See what else is left in the final days of Philly Fringe Fest by checking out their list of events here.
