About

Extreme Women
Jayne Mansfield
Ulrike Meinhof
Mother Teresa

Extreme Women was Iris Rose’s most demanding show. It was a one-person show in which she
played three intense roles, moving almost constantly and holding the stage alone for 90
minutes. The set consisted entirely of two metal folding chairs. Her subjects were 1950’s
movie star Jayne Mansfield, German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, and Mother Teresa. These three
women represented amplified versions of recognizable female roles – the sex goddess, the
intellectual, and the devoted mother – who together formed a trinity of physical, mental, and
spiritual extremes.

For the first section, Jayne Mansfield, Iris wore a curly, shoulder-length blonde wig and gold
lamé pants that had belonged to her mother back in the Jayne Mansfield era. Her gold
“Springalator” shoes with a patented elastic feature under the instep that clamped them onto
her feet, her gold tiger-print stretch top, and her push-up bra with extra pads were all
purchased at the actual Frederick’s of Hollywood on Hollywood Boulevard during
Watchface’s trip to perform in Los Angeles’ Fringe Festival the month before. The real Jayne
was an avowed Frederick’s fan: “I don’t know what I’d do without my Frederick’s catalog.
They say a girl can be just as sexy in high neck dresses, but that’s the hard way. If handled
tastefully, cleavage seldom fails.”

In this section, as she did throughout the show, Iris narrated the story and played various
characters within it. Sometimes she did both at the same time by using her voice and body
for contrasting purposes. The previous February, she had used this same seamless
combination of first- and third-person storytelling in The Serial Killer Series, which also
consisted of solos based on true stories, performed by Iris, Chazz Dean, Kurt Fulton, and
They Might Be Giants’ John Flansburgh.

Iris was in constant motion throughout Extreme Women, illustrating, portraying, and evoking all
of the people and events necessary to provide the essential details of these women’s lives.
In the first few sentences of Jayne Mansfield, for instance, she portrayed in rapid succession:
Jayne’s parents holding their new baby; little Jayne at the movies and balancing on a log;
her father having a heart attack; and Jayne’s plaintive reaction. At the same time, Iris
narrated:

Congratulations to Herbert and Vera Palmer on the birth of their new daughter Vera Jayne!
Little Jaynie’s daddy is going to be the president and little Jaynie’s gonna be a movie
star, like Shirley Temple.
An untimely heart attack puts an end to the political career of Herbert Palmer.
Daddy!

The story continued through: Jayne’s first marriage; the birth of her first daughter, Jayne
Marie, soon afterwards; and Jayne’s tireless drive to be a star. Success on Broadway and in
the movies followed, plus a second marriage to bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay and four more
children. Eventually, she suffered the decline of her career, later dysfunctional relationships,
and her notorious death in an automobile accident.

At the end of Jayne Mansfield, the lights blacked out and what looked like headlights
scanned the room. At last the lights came to rest on Iris sitting awkwardly on the floor. She
was leaning back against the chairs with a black scarf covering her face and head. In her
research, Iris learned that Jayne was not decapitated, as most people believed (what
appeared to be her head on the hood of the car in photographs was actually her wig), but
Iris was already attached to the concept for this image, so she kept it – opting for the myth
rather than the more complicated and less graphic reality.

Between each of the three sections, there was an intermission so Iris could change into her
next character. There was never any question about Jayne Mansfield being first, since it
would have taken much longer for Iris to put on Jayne’s tight costume and plentiful makeup
then to take them off.

For Ulrike Meinhof, Iris wore black pants, a black T-shirt, and a black wig with bangs and
shoulder-length hair. Iris’ research included Ulrike’s essays for her husband’s magazine
Konkret, which Iris’ downstairs neighbor, artist Marlene McCarty, translated from the German.
An example of Ulrike’s writing for Konkret, directed to Farah Diba, the wife of the Shaw of
Iran:

You say: “Summers are hot in Iran, and like most Persians, I and my family travel to the
Persian Riviera.” Most Persians are peasants with an annual income of less than $100.
Most Persian women lose every second child to starvation, poverty, and disease. The
children that knot carpets for 14 hours a day – do they too travel to the Persian Riviera?

The story followed Ulrike’s progression from political writer to activist to notorious criminal
fugitive.

Iris’ fascination with Ulrike Meinhof had begun when she saw a photograph of Ulrike in prison,
her arms on her head and her hair roughly chopped off. For the show, Iris purchased
enough cheap black wigs to be able to hack off her hair with scissors during each
performance.

For Mother Teresa, Iris made a facsimile of the Missionaries of Charity uniform, a cross
between a nun’s habit and a sari in white with a wide blue border. A wooden crucifix pinned
to her shoulder and a pair of sandals completed the outfit.

The story progressed from Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu’s childhood in Albania to the day, as
Sister Teresa, she walked out of a convent to begin her own order by literally picking up a
dying man from the gutter. It then covered the years she devoted to building her network of
services for the poor and concluded with her eventual fame and worldwide empire of
missions.

Extreme Women was presented in the downstairs space at PS 122, where The Serial Killer Series
had also been performed, for two weekends in October 1987. PS 122 program Iris’ show shared
the space with James Siena’s Shades of Gray, his own one-person show about the
rationalization of war. His show played on Fridays at 10 PM and Saturdays at 8 PM, and her
show played on Saturdays at 10 PM and Sundays at 8 PM, so on Saturdays they could be seen
as a double feature.

After seeing Extreme Women, Marlene sent Iris a very special fan letter. Marlene’s fan letter
After one performance, Watchface fan Conrad Cummings – Iris’ future collaborator on
Pioneers of Aviation – pointed out to her the odd fact that all three women had lost their fathers
before the age of twenty. Iris had noticed this but only as an unlikely coincidence; she didn’t
attach any real significance to it until Conrad brought it to her attention. The more she
thought about it, the more she became convinced that there was meaning in the three girls
all losing their most important male authority figure and thus their tether to the strictures and
judgments of conventional society. This somehow gave them license to go beyond what
most women would dare. Iris, whose own relationship to her divorced father was distant and
strained, saw something of herself in these women’s willingness to go to extremes.

Since the beginning of Iris’ performance career, it had been a challenge to get good video
documentation of live performances. The sound quality was often poor and the picture was
not much better. Hiring a videographer was expensive and resulted in a straightforward,
single camera recording that was often dull in comparison to the live audience experience.
Iris longed for something more cinematic and edited, with close-ups where appropriate. She
had received a Franklin Furnace grant of $1,500 in support of Extreme Women, funded by the
Jerome Foundation. All of the expenses of the show, including a half dozen expendable
wigs and Jayne’s Frederick’s of Hollywood wardrobe, only used up a third of the grant. That
left $1,000 she could devote to making a satisfying video.

One of Iris’ jobs at the time was working the door at the nightclub Siberia, taking money
once a week on Girls Night. The short-lived, performance-friendly space was managed by
fellow Watchface member Chazz Dean. One night Iris met the girlfriend of one of the
bouncers, a young woman named Amy Harrison, who declared herself as a feminist and a
filmmaker. Soon they discussed the possibility of working together on an Extreme Women
video, and Amy convinced Iris to use her $1,000 to shoot a 16mm film instead of the usual 3⁄4″
video. Unfortunately, the budget would not cover the cost of shooting the entire ninety
minute show on 16mm film, but Iris was convinced to sacrifice a complete record of the
show to get a really great-looking sample that could be shown to potential venues or
funders.

Amy’s friend, Jennifer Ross, joined the project as well. Iris, Amy, and Jennifer talked through
shooting the scenes Iris had selected as most representative and cinematic. Jennifer
storyboarded the script, Jennifer’s storyboards and Amy assembled an all-female, volunteer
crew from the NYU film program. Chazz arranged for them to shoot at Siberia in the wee
hours of the night after it closed. The shoot, like most film shoots, was challenging and
stressful, especially since the budget and the limited timeframe allowed no room for
mistakes. The final edited film, though only ten minutes long, had the richness and warmth of
film and looked like nothing else in the Watchface video library.

Extreme Women was never performed again, neither in its entirety nor as excerpts, though
clips from Watchface’s most ambitious and expensive video were generally included in
compilation tapes from then on.

In the spring of 1991, Iris was a graduate student in the Performance Studies Department at
New York University. One weekend she went to an out-of-town wedding and didn’t read the
assignment for her feminist studies course. Before Monday morning’s class, she asked her
friend and classmate Christine Larchian to give her a quick synopsis of the reading. “Well,”
Christine told her, “you were in it.”

Iris quickly opened her book, Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, to
the article “Women’s Performance Art” by Jeanie Forte. Performing Feminisms cover Two pages
from the end, Iris found this:

I noticed another trend in performance on both coasts. This trend is toward
conventional acting and all the parameters that it implies – which in turn invites
assessment of the piece on the basis of the conventional standards by which acting is
usually judged, i.e., technique. As Linda Burnham noted in her recent essay for The
Drama Review, prior performance art may indeed have included role-playing, singing,
dancing, whatever, that was frequently not “good” by ordinary standards, but that very
discrepancy led viewers to consider a different perspective on the work. The piece was
not about “doing something well,” but about something else, including the
re-examination of those standards. In 1987, performances by Iris Rose of Watchface
and John Fleck in “PsychoOpera” depended crucially on the ability to “act well” and on
a coherent overall dramatic structure. Instead of deconstructing theatrical convention,
performers now seem to court it, encouraging judgment of the work on more technical
grounds.

Although Jeanie Forte had not identified the exact performance to which she referred, to Iris
it was clear that she meant Extreme Women. Iris also decided there were worse things than
being a prime example of “acting well.”