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February 18, 2015

A hopeless actress with a genius for self-promotion, Adah Isaacs Menken straddled a few decades of the mid-19th century, often onstage, occasionally on horseback. She shared poems and beds with a dizzying host of artists and boxers and intellectuals. If that era had invented Instagram, she would have been its queen. Trav S. D. (the pen name of the neo-vaudevillian Travis Stewart) both honors and derides Menken with Horseplay: or, The Fickle Mistress, a Protean Picaresque, produced by Theater Askew at La MaMa. A framing device finds Adah (Molly Pope), in her early 30s, in Paris on her deathbed, recounting her life story to her manager at the time, Frank Queen (Chuck Montgomery). But Queen is frustrated by her contradictions and evasions. “You hint that you’re black, you proclaim that you’re Jewish, you dress like a man and turn heads like a woman,” he grumbles. “Who aren’t you, I’d like to know?”

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