Penny Arcade: Longing Lasts Longer
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Penny Arcade: Longing Lasts Longer

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Performance artist Penny Arcade is a one-of-a-kind comedian who is well known for her debut with John Vaccaro’s Playhouse of the Ridiculous in 1967, as well as becoming an Andy Warhol Factory Superstar in 1969. Penny has always been credited for her unconventional and awe-inspiring ideas; she last toured Australia twenty years ago with her show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, which explored themes of sex and censorship,and now she’s back in Australia to perform her new show Longing Lasts Longer, which is part theatre, part stand-up, part memoir and part manifesto.

Penny left her home in Connecticut from a young age, which she did out of survival rather than simply following her dreams. “Everything I did for the first fifty years of my life was driven by survival,” she says. This is why I have a passion to support individuality in other people. If you are someone who is sensitive and needs support, and you cannot get this from your family, you are at risk for a series of unfortunate decisions as you try to find this approval in other people. Me being a performer is a result of my nature which is playful and expressive,” she says.

Being 65 years old, Penny certainly has a lot of life experience, but that doesn’t necessary mean she’s actually grown up. “I’m sixty-five and nobody can out rock me, because I never grew up. I didn’t get pushed into growing up. Young people in their twenties are being pushed into growing up and being grown-ups in their twenties,’ she says. ‘The twenties are the last time you’ll have any freedom and every single one of you is giving it up. Every single one of you wants a career, every single one of you wants a mortgage, every single one of you wants to eat in a fancy restaurant with tablecloths, every one of you thinks nothing of drinking, of fucking fifteen dollar cocktails, and basically it’s all those things; we’re supposed to be waiting for you as the compensation prize for not having sex all the time when you’re fifty.”

Penny discusses how young people have always been the ones critiquing the culture, because they deem themselves the observers. In her opinion, young people are no longer observing the culture anymore, because they already consider themselves to be experts. “We could have adventures and live an experimental life,” she says on her generation. “But you guys have been totally sucked in to being experts, and to defend your point of view at your age which is absurd, how could you just develop a point of view, if your point of view is supposed to develop between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five?

“It’s not fair to you guys, but nobody’s talking about it and I think that is why my show has been such a huge hit with people under thirty, because nobody is saying the things I’m saying. The only person who can give you a perspective that is sex, drugs and rock n roll is somebody who is over sixty, because we’re the ones who have lived it.”

By Christine Tsimbis

 

Venue: The Spiegeltent at Arts Centre, 100 St Kilda Rd, CBD

Dates: March 24 – April 17. 

Times: 7pm (Sundays 6pm)

Tickets: $30 – $40