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21/One: Twenty-One Shows in One Hour
3 Plays About Your Mom
Antarctica
ARE YA WORKING?
Being Something: Living "Young" and Growing "Old" in Oakland
Bound and Gagged
Brilliant Disguise
Brother #1
Cervix With A Smile
Chinese Clown Cabaret
CornTato
Divided We Fall
Do The Clam
El Camino Loco

Fear of a Brown Planet
Fresh Meat
Go Kibbitz
go!
Got Lucky
Green Bamboo Hermitage
Here to There
LOUNGE-ZILLA!
Love Scenes

Magnificence of the Disaster
MEDIAVOID
Name You Can Trust, A
nEO-sURREALISTS
Paper Dolls
Playing in the Dark

Politics on the Edge
Revolving Madness
SHIFTINGS
Show me where it hurts

Slow Moves, Rich Tales
Sperm Warfare
Thersites
Waiting for the Relevance
WALKING BACK TO BROOKLYN
Werewolf, The
When You Stand Alone
Yellow Tunic, The
You May Now Kiss.... My Sass

Play: Cervix With a Smile
Reviewer: Craig Ken
3 Stars
It's hard to reduce a performance like Cervix With a Smile to one number, given that it's a literally a cabaret of songs. Some were 2's, some were 4's. The dominance number felt like something that would play on an inexpensive cruise ship for people from a less worldly part of the country. "Look, Mabel, she jest tied up that there guy in the chair and is teasing him!". Santa number was much funnier. The woman was struggling a bit (havng had to cancel the performance the night before due to illness. If you're looking for a 2nd or 3rd show to fill out an evening, consider Cervix With a Smile (the title felt stolen from a Joan Rivers monologue from years ago). If you're planning on seeing just one show in an evening, take a pass this year.

Play: Cervix with a Smile
Reviewer: Muzz
3 Stars
Campy? Yes. Bawdy? Yes. Original? Well, the story ideas may be but the punchlines mostly aren't. This show has lots of potential, but it ends up falling short and being neither hilarious nor disturbing as the description suggests. While topics like bondage and bestiality have a lot of shock potential, the skits somehow give you the feeling that you've seen/heard this before.

Play: Cervix with a Smile
Reviewer: Tori
4 Stars
Who can resist the title?? Elisa isn't a great singer, comedian, or actress. Yet she manages to keep you entertained with a high level of confidence that shows through her stories, lyrics and stage antics. You walk out of her performance feeling very satisfied.

Play: Cervix with a Smile
Reviewer: Anthony Barreiro
3 Stars
When Elisa DeCarlo first comes on stage in "Cervix with a Smile", in a modest blue dress and flat shoes, she doesn't look like a sex diva -- she's not glamorous, thin, or young. But over the course of the next hour she reveals the depths of her raunchy imagination and her healthy libido. DeCarlo also has a good singing voice and great skill at characterization -- Big Red Berkowitz, a low-life lothario in a tough spot involving one too many beers, a step ladder, and a willing okapi, is a particularly engaging creation. The musical accompaniment by Tracy Stark on electronic keyboard is sparse but adequate. Some of DeCarlo's sketches need more development, and the pace lags at times. But "Cervix with a Smile" is good fun for people who enjoy campy cabaret singing and outrageously bawdy humor. The material is more powerful coming from an unapologetically real person. Warning: the audience-participation bondage and discipline demonstration is for real.

Play: Cervix With A Smile
Reviewer: Yolanda Shoshana

Interview in New York Cool
I met Elisa Decarlo and her publicist, JoeTrentacosta at a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan. Decarlo had just finished a rehearsal for her show Cervix with a Smile, which she is performing for the 2005 Midtown International Theater Festival.
Elisa Decarlo was destined to become a performer. One of the houses she lived in as a child had a theater in the attic. According to Decarlo, "The previous tenants had actually built a small theater with a backstage and a dressing room. My older sister staged shows and forced her younger siblings to be in them. She's a lot older than me so I didn't have any choice."
Decarlo came into the city to see musicals with her family. She also listened to musical albums, over and over again. She was a self declared "dumb stage-struck teenager," but due to being a hundred pounds over weight, she was type-cast in old lady roles. "I really wanted to be a star and I was an old movie freak. I wanted to be Heddy Lamar. I really wanted to be Marilyn Monroe, but I looked like Rod Steiger," said Decarlo with a big grin on her face.
At her first audition for an acting job, Decarlo was accepted into an improv company. The only catch was the fact that she did not know how to perform improv. Luckily, she was able to take improv classes and fake-it-until-she-made-it. She performed sketch comedy for a few years and then began to lose interest. It was at that point that Decarlo saw a show which inspired her to write. "I saw Eric Bogasian's show Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll, explained Decarlo. And I thought... I want to do that. So, I started working on I Love Drugs.”
Decarlo won San Francisco Best of Fringe Award in 1995 with her show I Love Drugs. Two years later she returned to the San Francisco Fringe to win Best of Fringe with her show Cervix with a Smile.
Decarlo's shows are packed with lots of characters. One of the characters Decarlo created drives straight women wild - her drag king persona, Big Red Berkowitz. Decarlo told me how she became one of the first drag kings, "Big Red started when I wrote a skit for three men and we only had two actors. It was a talk show called ‘Broads Christ’. One man was the sensitive new age man, the other was a G. Gordon Liddy witty type and the moderator was a big stupid idiot named Big Red. I showed the sketch to my husband, he read it and said, “Big Red is you.".
So she put on overalls, a hat and a flannel shirt and then she stuck a tube sock down her pants and became Big Red Berkowitz. Decarlo is so convincing as a man that straight women throw their underwear on stage and stay behind to talk to “Big Red” after the show.

Decarlo has quite a few projects in the works. Her solo show Toasted has forty- five characters and may be performed Off-Broadway. But this time Decarlo would be stepping aside to let a celebrity take on her role. I could not get any juicy details out of Decarlo because the deal was still in negotiation. The Exit Theatre in San Francisco is also interested in doing a project with her that is tentatively called The American Dad. "It's about me and my late father; he died in late November of last year. I took care of him the last couple of months before he died. I learned a whole lot of stuff about his side of the family. [It was] all news to me [that] would have been nice to know, “said Decarlo with a serious look, Decarlo keeps it real, what you see is what you get. She has over ten years of performance and writing experience. I asked her if she had any words of wisdom for other performers, what they need to make it. She thought for a second and replied "a tough skin." Well, D!
ecarlo may have developed a tough skin, but she is also a woman with a lot of heart.

Play: Cervix With A Smile
Reviewer: Jeff Probst, Backstage.com
Reviewer Email:

Review of Cervix With A Smile when it played at New Yorks Mid-Town Festival in July 2005.

Elisa DeCarlo's new one-woman show, "Cervix With a Smile," gamely puts both a comic and tragic face on the plight of women as sexual objects. In a series of monologues and songs (composed with Ellen Mandel), DeCarlo brings a wide array of characters to the stage with the assistance of Tracy Stark (on electronic keyboard) and dresser Sally Regan.

DeCarlo, a rubber-faced comedian with wide eyes and a broad smile, takes on both sexes in "Cervix," and one of her most complete transformations is into a redneck man, Big Red Berkowitz, who finds himself having to explain why he was discovered stark naked in the okapi cage at a local zoo. Here, with a heavy Southern drawl and an increase in her not slight stature, DeCarlo immerses herself in the character, generating both laughs and a modicum of pity.

DeCarlo is equally adept when she transforms into an aging German lesbian chanteuse, who reminisces about her experiences entertaining the troops (she was most beloved by the WACs) during World War II. In this portrait, the actor adopts a delightfully caricatured German accent (mixed with some Elmer Fudd) and delivers one of her many comic numbers, "Love Lobotomy" (DeCarlo's lyrics are wonderfully felicitous throughout).

Other segments of "Cervix," though, are less successful. For instance, her ultimately touching portrait of a teenage girl who is used by the most popular boy in her class for sexual gratification seems contrived with regard to the young woman's mix of sophistication and naïveté. An audience-participation segment feels equally strained, as the perky hostess of a "helpful hints" show gives tips on how to dominate a spouse with kitchen gadgets.

Director Rod Cassavale's use of Stark and Regan as occasional foils helps to broaden DeCarlo's canvas effectively, creating an evening that will leave audiences tickled, if not entirely satisfied.