Special Events At Yale To Begin With Finley

NEW HAVEN — Yale Repertory Theatre announces the return of the “grand dame of performance artists,” Karen Finley. As Ms. magazine wrote recently, “Ms Finley’s art rips big, unspoken, and difficult-to-articulate secrets out of closets… Finley dismantles borders separating grief and celebration.”

Ms Finley will open the theatre’s 2000 Special Events Series with a performance of her newest work, Shut Up and Love Me, on Saturday, January 22, at 8 pm, at Yale Repertory Theatre, at the corner of Chapel and York Streets.

Karen Finley last appeared at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1992 in a highly acclaimed performance of We Keep Our Victims Ready.  Featuring the confrontational sexuality for which she is famous, Shut Up and Love Me mines the exploitative and darker elements of sexuality. She does an awkward striptease to a disco beat and delivers a tale of a woman whose failed romances closely mimic her relationship with her father.

Ms Finley has been named the Woman of the Year by Ms. magazine and the Artist of the 1990s by the Coagula Arts Journal. In 1990 her performance of We Keep Our Victims Ready was one of the four works to be selected by Sen. Jesse Helms as “obscene,” igniting the NEA funding controversy, which ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ms Finley was labeled by conservative critics as a shrill, raunchy performer with a tendency to smear her body with chocolate. For the last nine years, she has battled the government as a member of the NEA Four. In 1998 they lost their Supreme Court battle to the Clinton administration to de-limit funding for art based on content.

During the 1990s she has been a regular on television programs such as The Dennis Miller Show and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Her film roles include her portrayal of Tom Hanks’ doctor in Philadelphia. She has had numerous art exhibitions including “Memento Mori,” a requiem for AIDS victims, at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and was included in the monumental “The Nude in Contemporary Art” at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield last summer.

Tickets for Shut Up and Love Me range from $12 to $25. To purchase tickets call the Yale Rep box office at 203/432-1234; box office hours are 10 am to 6 pm weekdays and Saturdays, and until show time on performance days.