SYNOPSIS:

Lady Madeline, the Madame of the fictional, mystical San Francisco Speakeasy Pussyhat’s, wants a baby desperately. Awash in love letters from Napoleon (as she believes she was once Josephine) and drunk on champagne, she confesses the angel in the fire escape outside her window that she is at her wit’s end. Evan Roche, the Mayor of San Francisco, the owner of Pussyhat’s and Madeline's lover for many years, wants no such thing, especially since she refuses to quit her job. Madeline has Creole Priestess Ramie, one of the three girls that work for her, cast a spell for her to become pregnant, or send her a man that will do the job. We learn in the beginning of the play that Zoe, one of the other girls and the youngest, is pregnant. Zoe tells Chamille, the middle girl, that she went next door to see a doctor to fix the problem but that he turned out to be a psychotherapist and now, with her intense visions and dreams, does not want to get rid of the baby. Zoe is a nervous wreck. Her doctor, Dr. Supine, who recently moved in next door, arrives with his loyal protégé Peter Simpson to help Zoe by smoothing things over with Madeline. However, when he meets Madeline to tell her of Zoe, he and Madeline instantly fall for each other, Madeline also believing this is the man to get her pregnant and set her free. Dr. Supine forgets to tell Madeline Zoe’s pregnant at first. The Mayor senses this connection and is talked into proposing to Madeline by Chamille, who wants Madeline’s job. Yellow, the journalist in love with Chamille, places a bet with Father Gender, the priest who frequents Ramie’s room, that he can write an article worth his salt before Father writes a sermon worth his salt. Father is in a crisis of faith, unable to reconcile his love for woman with his vocation and his deepening sense of true Christianity, all inside a mid life crisis. Yellow is dying to write an article that challenges Mayor Roche’s (the owner of The Gazette) editorial control over him, having evidence that could implicate the mayor in a murder cover-up scandal. Charley Who-Horse, the resident trumpet player, talks to everyone including the audience/camera, listens to everyone, loves his wife who constantly leaves him. After sleeping with Madeline in his office, Carl finally tells Madeline Zoe is pregnant. Madeline flips and then, after accepting Mayor Roche’s marriage proposal, slowly convinces Zoe that the baby is really Madeline’s. Zoe’s visions has Dr. Supine convinced, as Yellow finds out and attempts to print, that she may possibly be giving birth to a special child – a prophet, a Messiah. As Madeline and Zoe both begin to slip into madness in their own ways Yellow chips away at Chamille’s resistance in loving him, Ramie breaks in Peter Simpson’s youth and naiveté with cocaine binges and sex and Dr. Supine descends into a drunken withdrawal, a wedding is prepared to be held inside Pussyhat’s for Mr. Mayor and Madeline. The rest of the play follows their individual plights all interwoven, related, connected into a rum-slide of a Napoleonically themed wedding/shooting/mass/spontaneous bap-jism, leaving all these rumpled souls with achy piles of laundry at their base awash in a sea of motives, deaths and renewals. Whorapy a is a full-contact sensual event, stroking all of the senses through language, set, fashion and physicality to create a lush, poetic, musical and sexual film. There is suggestive nudity and ‘coitally driven’ behavior.