Charles
Isherwood

July 14, 2015

Marga Gomez spins a comic fantasia on depictions of lesbians in the movies in her new solo show, “Pound,” presented at Dixon Place as part of the theater’s annual “celebration of queer culture.” As she reminds us early on, Ms. Gomez herself once played a lesbian — or so she conceived her character for her three lines of dialogue — in the 1998 film “Sphere.” She and Queen Latifah played characters who worked in an underwater biodome. “Both of our characters are attacked by sea creatures,” she recalls, “and we die in the first 30 minutes because they always kill the lesbians of color first. Also, we should have stayed in the biodome.” Gently mocking how things have changed, or maybe not, Ms. Gomez adds: “That’s how it was back then for even possibly lesbian characters. Not like today, when lesbian characters lead happy lives in prison.” (The reference, of course, is to the popular Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black.”) Clad in a plain shirt, black shorts and black boots, Ms. Gomez performs her show, which she wrote and which is directed by David Schweizer, as a sort of live movie script. (“Flashback. Interior. Doctor’s office.”) Her delivery is crisp, brisk and often deadpan, but her big, dark eyes gleam with intensity. Woven through her often very funny descriptions of lesbian-themed movies are Ms. Gomez’s comic tales of her own sexual experience.