Murray Hill and Linda Simpson In New Shows!

Photo: David Shankbone

But last week, they made us buy double the tickets by veering off into separate projects
that combated New York's gentrification with aggressive gender-fication.

At PS122, Murray co-hosted the wacky revue Avant-Garde-Arama's Wrecking Ball on Friday, though when I saw the show on Saturday, the emcee was wry "aging hipster" Uncle Jimmy.

Jimmy brought out a succession of acts that proved performance art is still as looney and inspired as back in the day, from Koosil-ja and Lance Blisters screeching "U.S., why do you torture? Money, money, money, money, lie, lie, lie, lie," to Lisa Kron remembering playing the black maid in You Can't Take It With You, though they changed it to Irish so there wouldn't be any racial stereotyping.

"But they didn't change the dialogue!" recalled Kron. "I had to say, 'Yassir, I sure is glad I's black' in an Irish brogue!"

And the accents are British in a sort of East Villagey way in The Emperor's New Codpiece, a medieval drag-queen-vs.-go-go-boy sketch-turned-play that Linda Simpson wrote (playing Fridays at the Laurie Beechman Theatre).

Linda is a pisser as the Castle Club hostess who drinks diet ale and snarls at an underling, "Thy mirth is as lame as a cripple."

Patrick Johnson shines as the knitting and scheming Hildegarde, who tells jokes like, "What does a peasant girl do after she sucks cock? She spits out the feathers."

Nicholas Gorham, Michelle Ojeda, and Buenaventura Rodriguez are also game, and the director, Tim Cusack, happens to be an LDM regular, so he's obviously got miles of taste.