This goes some way to explaining why A Hole feels so uncategorizable. Is it a piece of theater? A work of performance art? Or both? Or neither? “I’m not keen on the idea of it being physical theater, but then performance art feels a bit cringe to me too,” she says, after mulling it over for a moment. “It’s what sits in between that’s interesting to me, and I think I even play with that inside the show.” McMenamy has always been drawn to artists who blur the boundaries between disciplines, and prefer to sit in those gray areas, she explains. “I remember doing an essay for my A-levels about whether Yohji Yamamoto was really a fine artist,” she notes. “I think it’s just a lot more fun when you think about something in the wrong context.”
Perhaps the most surprising element of A Hole is just how funny it is. (It’s aided by a brilliant, hyperactive soundtrack crafted by McMenamy’s partner, the musician Felicita, as well as her extensive work with a movement director and a voice coach; in McMenamy’s words: “I’ve been stepping my pussy up, baby!”) Neither is it humorous solely for the surreal effect of McMenamy’s whiplash-inducing pivots between identities—a sleazy French lothario; a Valley Girl begging to be “tagged like one of your French girls”; a goofy genie with a SpongeBob SquarePants voice—but also for the sharpness of the writing. (Unlike with most of her prior pieces, McMenamy actually sat down and wrote a full script for this one, and it shows.) Was she expecting the kind of laughs she got at that show in Paris? “In my head, I’m like, I don’t want to be doing comedy,” she says. “But then as soon as I get on a stage, I live for the laughter.” She cites Nuar Alsadir’s book Animal Joy, a poetic and psychoanalytical study of laughter, as being especially influential in her approach to humor. “The writer goes to clown school, and she talks about how you only really laugh when you really relate to something,” she continues. “It’s this emission that also says: Huh, yeah, I know that! So that’s sort of what I’m chasing.”
Which brings us back to that title, A Hole Is a Hole. Where did that bracing string of words, with its blend of vulnerability and vulgarity, come from? “I was just in my flat, in my bath, and I noticed there was a hole in it,” she says. “So I started thinking about the word hole, and also thinking about this cubby hole in my house where I put all the shit I don’t want to like deal with. It’s a metaphor—geddit? And then I also thought about that expression as something some gross macho guy would say, and how it’s kind of a reclaiming it. Because the show is about beauty and ugliness and gender and men who want to take from you, right?”