The Current Fakebook with John Waters

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More About

• John Waters
• William S. Burroughs
• Mary Lucia
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Theater

John Waters wants to be your ambassador of filth. In "This Filthy World," his one-man show, he quips: "All young people need someone bad to look up to, and I think I can do that—sort of a filth elder, if you will." Waters has always had a wide-eyed glee for things of spectacularly bad taste, and the show is no exception, as he enthusiastically tells tales of pissed-off, leering strippers who walk onto the stage already naked, and suggests that students would be much more academically enthused if they learned to spell words like "analingus" along with Mississippi. It may be easy to pass off the 61-year-old as simple camp, or as William Burroughs once suggested, "the Pope of Trash," but that would be selling Waters short. His films may frolic in poop jokes, cross dressers, and B-level dialogue, but under the grotesque fabulousness lurks deeper meaning: Hairspray was about tolerance and racial integration, Cry-Baby was about love and friendship between class lines, and anyone who doesn't feel for morbidly obese cross dresser Divine, as her idealized suburban-housewife world falls apart in Polyester, simply has no heart. John Waters will perform his one-man show, followed by a chat with the Current's Mary Lucia. The God Damn Doo Wop Band rounds out the evening.
Sat., Nov. 10, 8 p.m., 2007