Canada loves Leigha
(the full article from the Montreal Mirror)
Sneer campaign
>> The Unbearable Lightness of Being American takes the piss out of all things USA
Making fun of Americans is hardly foreign in these parts. Chalk it up to an inferiority complex if you want, but it's not like those fatsos ever do it themselves. Well, okay, they do - take Minnesota's Ministry of Cultural Warfare, in town this week for the Fringe, for one.
What's appealing about this Minneapolis company, beyond their poking fun at the right, is their poking fun at the left. Their one-woman show, The Unbearable Lightness of Being American dishes up 13 snippets of Americana, satirizing everything from war to malls to fleeting lesbian chic. "You know when all of the sudden it became über-cool to be gay?" says actress Leigha Horton. "One of my favourite monologues to do is about this clueless valley girl talking about the love of her life, Emily, who she just met on Wednesday. We take pot shots at lots of things. If we're going to be attacking other people, we should definitely attack ourselves."
"My favourite thing that's been said about the play is that I'd picked my targets so democratically it felt patriotic," says Ministry writer and mastermind Matthew Foster. "The only thing all the characters have in common is that they're all women. They range from very annoying university students, to the cat lady who's anxious about becoming middle aged - it's 13 aspects about American society that bug the hell out of me."
Foster, who claims to be wearing a John Kerry baseball cap on the other end of the phone, could almost pass off as Canadian, peppering his sentences with "I guess," expressing his disdain toward Stephen Harper and hope for the Flames (this was Monday), theorizing that Canadian Stanley Cup victories coincide with Democrat victories in the U.S. "Well my friends in other states call Minnesota ‘Baja Ontario,'" he justifies. I asked him if he's proud to be an American. "I guess I'm not really proud to be an American," he says. "I'm proud to be a Midwesterner, and I'm proud to be from North America. You add that North there and it gets rid of the nationalist bullshit that comes with saying you're proud to be an American."
As for Horton: "I love being an American, but I'm not proud right now. I love the fact that we can criticize our president openly and not, oh, dissappear, but the things that Americans have done to other countries… there are so many things that don't get press attention, at least here, that we're doing all the time and that's really frustrating. I think that right now America's in a really gross transition, and I hope it turns out okay.
