theater

Somewhere between Jonathan Safran Foer's immigrant song Everything Is Illuminated and the dangerous doom-opera of Diamanda Galás, with a little of the Greek cultural attaché that is Nana Mouskouri—that is where you'll find Lili Bita. She has toured the planet as a poet (Anais Nin: A Poem, Lightning in the Flesh) and as a performance artist, attending Philly's Fringe Festival with her The Greek Woman Through the Ages piece, essaying classical characters Medea, Electra, Clytemnestra, Hecuba and Lysistrata through monologues, movement and music. But it is as an author that she's most emotionally effective. Take her novel, The Scorpion, and its torpor-filled texts tearing into the pigheaded insensitivity of man. This is no easy Men/Mars/Women/Venus tome. Her visceral screeds show Greek womanhood as nothing but subservient to cruel, dull men. This is as close to Kathy Acker as you can come without slicing someone—though Bita does crucify a dad and urinate on a husband's grave. Yikes. Still, little prepares you for the tortured but tender socio-political memoir that is Sister of Darkness. A life started in beauty—the island Zakynthos—quickly disintegrates into military occupation (damned Nazis), civil unrest (damned Greek parliament) and earthquakes (damned nature) that destroy all that is beautiful of her Greek island world, literally and culturally. All before her teen years. Yikes. Still, she rises, by book's end, above the demon that is man and the devil that is circumstance to find beauty in theater and literature—her own, Kazantzakis—and to become emboldened to leave her country and to forever fly the independent-woman-feminism freak flag.

Lili Bita, Tue., Jan. 10, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.