It's not like 17 year old Bernie O'Connell will die if she doesn't become a Radio City Music Hall Rockette, but when she blows the big audition due to 10 extra pounds, and ends up sleeping with the hippies on the lower level of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, death starts to look inviting.
Bernie had run away from home on the same night that her religion-obsessed father called her a whore and kicked her out. Dieting and desperate, she accepts a job from a new Port Authority acquaintance that leads to a violent assault for which nothing in her Catholic school (abstinence only) sex education could have prepared her. Shaken to the core, she drops the weight, becomes a Rockette, and puddle-jumps her way through the primordial gunge of American culture en route to spiritual awakening and the discovery of what she should really be asking for.
As directed by Tony nominee Lynne Taylor-Corbett, "Asking for It" is a joyful kaleidoscope of faith and femininity, repression and redemption, humor and humility. Spiced with dance and song, Rush takes her larger-than-life experience and filters it through the prism of humor. She portrays a colorful cast of characters ranging from uptight clerics to sexy chorines, to growing boys of all ages. Hilarious, irreverent and moving, JoAnna Rush's "Asking for It" leaves audiences – male and female, of all ages – invigorated and inspired.