Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

There’s an unnerving glitter and queasy hilarity to the satire that launches the season at Theatre Network.

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“I dreamed you, I manifested you,” proposes the figure who appears before us — a tarnished angel? a wicked fairy? — out of the darkness at the start of Pochsy IV. Yes, that “you” would be Us, in our “save-the-planet Patagonia vests and super-lightweight eyeglass frames,”  as Pochsy sweetly suggests.

Pochsy, we’ve missed you. As the world glides, slides, drifts into oblivion, the poisoned and poisonous kewpie created and performed by Karen Hines has returned, ageless after many years, to her people. And in this newest show from a fearlessly witty and original artist (directed by another fearlessly witty and original artist, Michael Kennard of the horror clown duo Mump and Smoot), Pochsy wraps us in her toxic embrace. She’s a fount of capitalist sloganeering, consumerist clichés, pop-culture truisms, market-driven mantras, cultural pieties, religious blandishments, self-help enlightenment….  Hot topics like AI and gender identity have been added to the Pochsy cosmology. And Pochsy, a star-gazer who actually assigns star ratings to stars, packs it fulsomely, with her signature mixture of malice and good cheer.

Karen Hines in Pochsy IV, Theatre Network. Photo from Theatre Network website

You’d call the show an hallucination if hallucinations were as expertly constructed as Pochsy IV. Or maybe a nightmare if nightmares were as funny. Pochsy IV (Pochsy 4 or Pochsy IV as in IV pole) exfoliates especially when it’s at its most sugar-coated; it loops a noose of flirtatious charm around us.

Pochsy arrives onstage on a sort of raised bandstand with a ramp (set design by Sandi Somers). Instead of an IV pole she has a microphone stand. And in breathless amplified voice,  Pochsy sings pointed and prickly songs (composition and sound design by Chantal Vitalis) that complement the lyricism of her flights of fancy. Feel free to sing along, she invites us. Or sing along more quietly. Or better yet just stop singing along. “We don’t need everyone (pause). We’ve never needed everyone.”

She’s packed her own gummies; when you’re “pondering nothingness,” you may need something for “um, mild anxiety.”

Since last we met, in Citizen Pochsy and O Baby, Pochy has lost her “super-safe” job at Mercury Packers (a subsidiary of LeadWorld), where she packs mercury, first in shipping, then in receiving. They’ve moved their operations off-shore, where “inhuman hours” become “human,” because of the time zone. And she’s been replaced by a robot (her severance package includes a LeadWorld ball cap and a $20 Sephora gift card). She has, she confesses, been having trouble “pivoting.”

Where are we? With Pochsy on a cruise into, hmm, the modern apocalypse? The afterlife? And she even gets a couple of upgrades. We’re sailing on a sort of contemporary River Styx — or possibly Pochsy has already arrived on that deathly far shore. “There is no pinkness from the blood behind my skin,” she says, as she unlocks for us a climactic vision of cosmic chaos. There’s a lethal euphoria about Pochsy’s travelogue.

Karen Hines, Pochsy IV, Keep Frozen Productions at Theatre Network. Photo by Gary Mulcahey

A tiny acid-tipped Tevye, Pochsy has called on God before to step up. In Pochsy’s Lips, for example, she accuses him of an attitude problem. This time Pochsy, who identifies as “a neo-revolutionary foundationalist,” is looking for a sign, something to shed light on the mysterious state of the world, including “neo-banking.” And if she makes allowances this time — “just sending good vibes to you!” — maybe it’s because God is wearing “a splendid hoodie over an awesome T-shirt.” Like many celebrities, she tells us, “he looks different in the flesh.”

Pochsy’s prayers are, in themselves, a narcissist’s sound score. “Forgive me for appropriating trauma,” she says to God. “Help me to find a way to blame others.”

Hines’s dark comic muse works, high-speed, on juxtapositions — as very funny clusters of “trigger” words or AI prompts demonstrate. It’s a distinctive satirical expertise in bringing a character’s logic to absurdity and an intricate barrage of non sequiturs. And it’s assisted materially, indispensably, by the timing and sweet vitriol of Hines’s stage presence and delivery.

Pochsy, like her creator, is a born performer. And the sentimental and romantic clichés that attach to theatre, or babies, or scallops on toothpicks disintegrate in the acid of her pixie presence. Pochsy IV is a funny, tough-minded exploration of modern anxiety about everything from dating apps to what atoms know, and what you hear in the world, from your financial consultant and from yourself. Laugh, and wince, my friends.

“I am. I can. I will.” If as Pochsy claims, the future is now (OK, a terrible thought if you parse it too much), see Pochsy IV immediately. Get yourself a ticket; you don’t have a moment to lose. Pochsy is magic.

REVIEW

Pochsy IV

Theatre: Keep Frozen presented by Theatre Network

Created by and starring: Karen Hines

Directed by: Michael Kennard

Where: Theatre Network at the Roxy, 10708 124 St.

Running: opening Thursday through Nov. 5

Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca