“Verbal violence and live sex. Audience are free to leave the theatre at any moment.” This notice appears before the staging of Lithuanian-American director Yana Ross’ show, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men – 22 Types of Loneliness, adapted from David Foster-Wallace’s cult novel of the same title.
Ross violates all taboos, and she is the first director to stage Wallace’s work using a female cast. Those ‘nasty men’, those ‘junkies’ are depicted in feminist perspective, in a staging so deliberately provoking that Ross employed porn industry professionals to investigate the themes of masculinity, sexuality, perversion, loneli- ness, old age and to penetrate what is often unspeakable intimacy
