Bridget Bishop Presents the Salem B*tch Trials

A new work by Jared Rubin Sprowls

Or: “Fabulous Witches”

Not being a regular frequenter of drag shows myself, I fear I have no reference and no right to offer comment of the relative fabulousness and glamour spells of Jared Rubin Sprowlls’s Bridget Bishop Presents the Salem B*tch Trials. Bridget Bishop (Brita Filter), a well respected Queen and mother to a prosperous house, has decided to take her unusual elegant extravaganzas into a staged show about the original Bridget Bishop, first woman executed in the Salem witch trials.

Unfortunately the performance comes at a rather teetering time in her personal life: two of her drag daughters, Sissy (Monet X. Change) and Chrissy (Miz Cracker) are eyeing bigger and better things than backup dancers, her idol and preferred songstress Donna Summers has just passed, and her third daughter Sarah (Nichole Sonell) is transitioning, questioning the whole of her mother’s lifestyle, and fighting her for the affections of Nathanial (Mark Gran Tambellini) a handsome and good-willed lad in gold lamé shorts and precious little else. Under the power of Dusty Ray Bottoms, this evenings MC, Bridget must battle all these waves, corral her unruly family to fill in the principal cast of the original Bridget Bishop and still be Fierce as ever.

Sprowls serves us sass in extra measure but sprinkles it with history and leavens it with candid reflections about the power and the burden of Drag and the relation between mothers and daughters of all sorts. Still the play is greased on the queens’s joie de vivre and easy manner both as written in the script and sparking from the performers (after Dusty Ray Bottoms mis-introduces us to one of Bridget’s Husbands, Change cheerly lobs an unscripted bob of shade, “Oliver. You f—ed it up in rehearsal, you f— it up in the show.” And if this spontaneity and emphasis on spectacle comes at the cost of finding out the threads of the tangled mess that led us to this night and all it’s revelations and reverses, well, we are always marvelously entertained. Cracker’s rubber-limbed antics and Change’s deadpan asides (as well as her spot on portrayal as “Old School” Bridget’s baby daughter Mary), sweep the halls with laughter.

The play’s sweet spot rests in its lip syncs. From Bridget’s explosive entrance, to her vulnerable seduction of Nathanial to her duel with Sarah: Filter gives her whole body and soul to the performance, ‘tongue teeth t—s and toes.’ In addition to her tremendous talent and conviction to her art Filter also careful crafts Bridget’s journey. At the top of the show Bridget treats the in-between events of her namesake’s life as filler to be swanned through, dismissive of Sarah’s (an aspiring actress) instance on professionalism. In light of her own trials throughout the show she presents the Bridget Bishop of Salem Town more earnestly (though never less sassy), finding more in common with a woman judged and feared by the way she choose to live her life.

And we end with a dance party. What more could be asked for?

Warning: contains nudity.