Will Strip For Food

No, you don't have to bring a hot dinner to HQ and feed it to the actresses onstage - you just have to listen to their entertaining - and sometimes harrowing - tales of woe and strife. And if you lend them a sympathetic ear, then they'll give you a sight for sore eyes in return.

The five women onstage are real-life exotic dancers, but with typical American all-roundedness, they can also act, write and sing - they can also shimmy up and down the pole which stands proudly centre stage.

In a strip club setting - incorporating bar, dressing room, toilet cubicle, lapdance seat and pole - the girls relate how each got into the sex industry, and detail their daily life as a stripper. There was the college girl who needed the money to pay a loan back to her parents, the self-loathing lass who had been brutally raped at 12, and the loving, Christian wife who discovered her husband was leading a double life. The stories were based on fact, but sometimes they felt a little overstated.

While the audience - 70 per cent men, 30 per cent women - shift uncomfortably in their seats, not knowing quite what to expect, Raelle Tucker, the woman who conceived this play, gets right down to the stripping, bringing the first applause of the night.

Now that the ice is broken, we start to relax into the narrative, which includes some funny, insightful observations on sexual and gender politics, walking in high-heels and how to give a proper lapdance.

But there's also a heckuva lot of exposition on the plight of the poor lapdancer, as she grinds her hips and bares her soul for a roomful of strangers every night, with only $1,500 a night to console her.

Inevitably, the girls over-egg this pudding, and the play sinks into a soufflΘ of bad prose, forced entreaties and constant reminders that they're human beings too. The message seems to be, don't judge these ladies who strip selflessly for you - and don't forget to tip.

So, is this a thinly-disguised strip-show, dressed up as a play? Hardly, even though the girls do bare all at the finale.

This is using sexuality as a weapon to drive home a point, and the (occasional) nudity isn't half as cringe-inducing as some of the dialogue.