Interview: Marga Gomez of SPANKING MACHINE at The Marsh Returns to Live Performance With Her Hilarious and Intensely Moving Memoir of Growing Up Brown and Queer

In what feels like a long-awaited, much-needed breath of fresh air, The Marsh is back in the business of presenting live, in-person performances at their San Francisco location. Even better news is that they've chosen the perfect performer to return with - Marga Gomez. It's a full-circle moment, as the award-winning performer and writer was the first person ever to perform at The Marsh's Valencia Street location back in the early 90's. Gomez will perform Spanking Machine, her latest and possibly final, one-person show on Friday and Saturday nights from September 17th through October 23rd. Spanking Machine is her funny, intense and heart-rending memoir of growing up brown and queer in Washington Heights. Childhood pranks, Devil Dogs, sadistic nuns on poppers, assault, and suppressed memory play their parts in Gomez's shift across gender, latitudes, and generations. Gomez was prompted to create the show by an unexpected and complicated reunion with her childhood friend Scotty after several decades. He was the first boy she ever kissed, and it made them both gay forever.

Tickets to Spanking Machine must be pre-purchased through TheMarsh.org website before arriving at the theater; no tickets will be sold at the door. To ensure a safe space for all, The Marsh will require all patrons to be fully vaccinated and show proof of vaccination during check-in, and wear a face covering while inside the building.

I recently caught up with Gomez as she was still in the midst of rehearsing her new show. A longtime fixture on the Bay Area theater and comedy scenes, Gomez has performed her solo memoir shows all over the country to much acclaim, including rave reviews from The New York Times. Chatting with her is always fun and interesting, and any conversation with her is bound to go off in any number of anticipated directions, mixing serious insights with her irrepressible sense of humor. The following has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

How does it feel to be going back in front of a live audience after all this time?

Well, it's surreal, I have to say. I know people who have already done it, but I still feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle. I'm gonna be sort of like I took 2 hits of acid or something onstage, like "This is a dream, isn't it?" I mean, this whole 18 months has been some sort of weird dream. I really appreciate people coming and I totally want to be on my A+++ game, to make it really worth their time. I don't take it lightly.

And it's really sweet how this happened with The Marsh, that I'm the first live show back in their San Francisco theater. It's kind of full circle, cause I was the first show to ever be on their stage in San Francisco in - I think it was 1991. Anyway, so [Marsh Artistic Director] Stephanie Weisman and I are friends and I had invited her to a Zoom birthday party I was having in June. We had cute little games and silly stuff, and then in the midst of the birthday party we started talking about theater and I said, "I think I'd like to start doing some live shows." And she just said, "Well, we're gonna reopen." And I said, "OK, I could do Spanking Machine." And that was it.

What does the title of the show refer to?

It's a metaphor really, cause the title means different things at different points in the show. It can be anything that we're afraid of. The essence of the show is "How do we deal with fear?" Fear that is used to control us, manipulate our natural inclinations. So that's the spanking machine. One of the characters in the piece says, "It's something we never see, but we're afraid of it our whole lives."

Spanking Machine is the story of two people, my story and then this boy I knew in 3rd grade. We became very, very close and it was obvious to everyone that he was gay except to himself. So it's funny how flamboyant he was and you know how he just thought he was this little playboy, but then he compensated through the Catholic Church. So Spanking Machine begins with a description of a threat we all received in Catholic School that if we misbehaved, we would be sent to the "spanking machine."

None of us ever saw it, but we knew we never wanted to be the first one to be sent to the spanking machine. So it was just a nightmare introduced to us little brown children by the Irish nuns. No offense against Irish people, but you know the nuns did happen to be all Irish, and it was like "How did we get these brown kids?" [laughs]

Spanking Machine is about you growing up brown and queer. As a kid you must have gotten lots of messages that it was not okay to be who you really were, but you seem to be the kind of person who has this sort of internal compass that allowed you to get past those negative messages. Do you have any idea where that strong sense of self came from?

I think it could be from being an only child. My parents were in show business, and they were self-involved, so it really was me, you know? I didn't have any mentors and I didn't have too much parenting. I think there is something about this go-it-alone determination that is sort of a natural fit when you don't have a lot of other emotional support and guidance in your life. You have to be your own parent. So I think that you that's part of it.

And my parents were strong also. My dad was an immigrant, my mom came from Puerto Rico, not an immigrant but treated like an immigrant. So even though I didn't get that much parenting, I was witness to how their determination helped them triumph in their creative pursuits. So I always saw that as "You can do anything" and that of course was the American dream, right?, A person can do anything. And I think that message, for better or worse, is what also informed me.

And then I also didn't know how to be anything else. I was a misfit, and when you're a misfit you are more self-reliant and you have to be strong or you're toast.

As a writer and performer, you have a gift for taking experiences from your life that probably were not funny at all and finding the humor in them. When you're creating a new show, how do you get that balance right, between the funny parts and the serious parts?

It really is part of the process of developing Spanking Machine since 2019. Cause I wasn't gonna do any more solo performances, I was going to start to write for other actors. But two things happened. I got this email out of the blue from this childhood friend from 40 years ago, and at the same time I received an invitation to be part of this Cold Read Festival at Syracuse Stage where they wanted something that had never been performed before. I had written 12 one-person shows, but they didn't want that. They wanted something that was still being rewritten up to the point you go onstage. And because this person from my past contacted me and that story was quite complex, I realized I need to write about that. So I thought, "Okay, one more solo piece."

But to answer your question, there's comedy and then there's parts that are difficult and painful and traumatic. I describe the show as a combination of drama with humor. It gets into the parts that I've never looked at in my life. I've never looked at this sexual trauma I experienced as a young woman, as a girl, never. But as I started to write about it, [I found] there is the resilience in my story and in the story of many women, and men, who are survivors of sexual trauma. And I've always thought of humor as a survival tool more than anything. That's why people want comedy now so much. And you do just kind of have to put the brakes on it. Yes, there's gonna be funny stuff, but it's not all escapism, it's not all sugar-coated. I'm gonna be real with this.

And how I find the balance is sometimes you just have look outside yourself at people's behaviors and how stupid and incongruous some events are, where something is just super-grim, but then something ridiculous happens, which just makes you laugh. It can be a rueful laugh, but the laugh is what gets us to the next day. Does that make sense?

Spanking Machine is my story of the bad treatment that happens because of the way women are used and abused in this patriarchy. And it's a story that is being told by others, but there still needs to be you know my piece, and Nanette and other pieces about it, because we haven't quite figured it out. Sexual predatory behavior is so deep-rooted in our society, in this power structure that we're all unfortunately still in. It's really important for women to look at that in their own lives, at things they kind of just pushed to the back burner. I sure did.

And this piece, again it began in 2019, was going to be something completely different. It was going to be just the comedy that's in it. It was just gonna be campy and kitschy about queer Cuban kids in Catholic school and Washington Heights and all this fun stuff. Then as I began to write it, I realized, "Oh, actually, but this happened to me, and that happened to me." I mean there's nothing graphic in this, and - full disclosure - I did escape. But you never get away, you know, from these sorts of dangerous situations, and this fear, which Spanking Machine symbolizes.

You grew up in Washington Heights, a neighborhood that has suddenly become well-known because of the film version of In the Heights. Have you seen the movie or the show?

I saw it on Broadway, I've seen the trailers for the film ....

Does that portrait of the Washington Heights neighborhood jibe with your memories?

No, and not even the Broadway show because Broadway musicals are very Disneyfied. I am a fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda, but I don't quite understand how he let this film project get away from him. But you know I had my years in LA and I know that sometimes things just get taken out of your hands. It's just really a shame because this neighborhood does not look like the neighborhood that I see in the trailers of In the Heights. I will see the film, but I'm still kind of broken-hearted that this was an opportunity to really show the African influence and heritage of the people that I grew up around, and the leads are not Afro-Latino. Everything I've heard about the movie in itself is that it's very well done and pretty great, but it's a little heartbreaking that they missed the most important thing.

And I believe there's a few more projects coming out, I think for the new West Side Story they sort of picked the fairest-looking Latinos, you know? It's exactly the way the telenovelas are on TV. It's like the darker skinned actors in telenovelas are always the servants and then it's like there's just this incredible supply of blond, blue-eyed Latinos [cast as the romantic leads].

Earlier this year, you were part of Clubbed Thumb's virtual production of The Woman's Party, Rinne Groff's play about the early fight for the ERA. You were part of a terrific cast, including veteran actors like Rebecca Schull and Emily Kuroda. What was that experience like?

That was a great gig. First of all, those actresses were amazing. And the acting was so subtle. I learned there's acting on stage, there's acting for film, and then there's acting for the virtual medium, and that's a whole different thing. I'd never done any of these Zoom plays where they like ship everything to you - the laptop, the webcam, the little microphone so the sound and picture would be uniform for everyone. I just thought it was so amazing how they planned it, how they filmed it, the art design, set design, how all that was put together. So yeah, definitely send me more virtual gigs!

I also got a kick out of seeing you play a character very different from yourself, this sort of stern religious fanatic who was constantly spouting Bible verses. How did you find that character?

The funny part about being this character is that she was a Christian Scientist and she read the works of Mary Baker Eddy. And then as shit started going down, she started reciting Psalm 91, again and again, like forever and ever. I tried to talk them into letting me do it like hip-hop style, but they were like "No, just do the psalm." I had to google Psalm 91 and then for the longest time I kept getting like all these religious popup messages. [laughs] You have to be really careful, you have to do incognito searches. Important for actors to know!

Circling back to a comment you made earlier, is Spanking Machine really going to be your final solo theater piece? Please say it ain't so!

Well... I really did feel satisfied with what I've done in this genre of memoir as performance, and I kind of thought that I'd talked about everything, but I hadn't. I had not talked about the sexual trauma I experienced as a young woman, and the fun stuff we did growing up as little Catholic closet cases in Manhattan. All the pranks - we were terrible, terrible little children. Catholic schoolkids are the worst!

So, yeah, I don't feel the need to do any more memoir, and I really am moving towards creating pieces for two actors. That's really where I was going and then this became a solo piece. When I performed it at Syracuse Stage in 2019, I told the audience "This is gonna be a two-person piece" and they were all "No, no, you just do it!" [laughs]

But I'd love to work in a duo again (I've done that a couple of times in my life), I'm going back to standup comedy, and also I'm working on a radio play. In a sense that will be a one-person show because I'm gonna do all the voices. It's a fantasy, sort of a Mister Rogers meets Pee-Wee Herman meets the apocalypse. It's about non-binary youth, but told in this satirical, comical, hopefully upbeat way.

And I've invested in some recording equipment and I'm going to record some of my solo pieces. Rather than publish a written collection of my work, I'm going to do an audio collection, and I'm excited about that. Sometimes I get contacted by schools and they want to study my work and it's never been in any kind of form that I feel comfortable handing it out. But this way it'll be like "OK, here is the audio."

I mean there's just so many other things I want to try, so it's not like I'm saying never [to solo performance]. I guess all I'm saying is I want to challenge myself to do other styles of theater and storytelling.