Salacious Drag from Ancient Greece

Comments (0) By Evan James Wednesday, Apr 28 2010

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First staged in 1972, Hot Greeks mixed the homoeroticism of college football with the dire stakes of the Peloponnesian War. It’s loosely modeled after comic playwright Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece withhold sex from their beaus in order to persuade them to negotiate peace with their enemies. And now, riding high on the runaway success of their bawdy Cockettes revival, Pearls over Shanghai, the Grand Guignol theater company Thrillpeddlers brings the only other scripted show from that motley drag crew back to life. Though the Aristophanes version is full of cheeky obscenity and sexy double entendres, the Cockettes took it — as they always did — to a more lawless level. In their rendition, Athens U. takes on Sparta Tech in an annual football match. Along the way, the Tri Thigh sorority girls boogie down to the hits of Aristophanes, anarchic kids make their way through ruins to consult the oracle of Delphi (renamed “The Hot Twat of Tangier”), and find victory on the gridiron thanks to quarterback Pendulum Pulaski. Sexed up, uncensored, and set to the big-band hit parade songs of the 1940s, it’s classic Greek theater fetishized and filtered through the imaginations of San Francisco’s most legendary drag mutants.
Thursdays, Sundays, 8 p.m. Starts: May 2. Continues through June 27, 2010