Ron Megee
For most of his career, Ron Megee has performed past the bedtimes of most Midwestern folks. Like a thief in the night, he purloins the plot-lines of television sitcoms and B-movies, runs them through his chop-shop brain with the help of a veritable art army of co-conspirators, re-packages them with genders re-assigned and original intent seriously re-aligned, then re-sells them to audiences capable of staying awake past midnight and unafraid of venturing to alien venues, in exchanges more resembling drug deals than traditional show business.
Since the early 1990s, Megee has produced a prodigious number of unconventional performances in a host of unconventional spaces throughout the city. Megee and his nomadic band of collaborators have largely operated under the name “Late Night Theatre,” with performances at Quality Hill Playhouse, the Westport Coffee House, the Hobbs building in the West Bottoms, the Old Chelsea, a former porn movie house in the City Market, and a former downtown bank building.
While Megee’s performances are fully rooted in a Camp tradition that dates back to the 19th century, the pop culture of the latter half of the 20th century is the junkyard he returns to, scavenging for the stories, characters, images, icons, taboos, and totems that make up our collective (and mass media-shaped) experience. The titles, like the pop culture he exploits, are familiar—Valley of the Dolls, The Birds, Bonanza, Disaster 2004 (a pastiche of 70’s disaster movies)—or are often perversely hot-glued to equally familiar names such as A Scarrie Carrie Christmas Carol and Dangerous Dirty Little Liaisons.
If all this pop culture is fodder, what is it fodder for? Once again, in the tradition of Camp, Megee asserts that there is a good taste of bad taste. With men assuming all the female roles, the trashy melodramatic narrative of The Valley of the Dolls is taken to its most ridiculous conclusion, thereby unmasking the misogyny of the original. In A Scarrie Carrie Christmas Carol, the soft-core pornographic shower scene is laid bare as the male cast dons flesh-colored unitards complete with absurd amounts of glued-on fake pubic hair. With his characteristic upending of gender roles, Megee always returns to his most salient theme: how contrived and inhibiting the rules and restrictions on gender are as conveyed and confirmed through the popular media.
Drag performances or parody of pop culture are nothing new. Megee’s talents as a performer and his keen sense of the theatrical take drag and parody from the merely ridiculous to the uproariously sublime. He not only subverts the narratives of these media creations, he mocks their multi-million dollar budgets and high-tech special effects by transforming the cinematic into the theatrical with everyday objects on a shoestring budget, delighting audiences as he exposes the artifice and manipulation.
Ron Megee has not only created a body of work that is both outrageous and wildly popular. He has been in the vanguard of Kansas City theatre and served as a provocative pied piper, drawing artists and audiences to his performances— no matter the location or time of day.
-Lisa Cordes
