"It's going to be the weirdest ever beauty performance-art banquet of humor, pathos, spookiness, seriousness, discomfort, exaltation--everything!" the Need's Rachel Carns tells me, and she's completely serious. She is giddy about being a key player in an upcoming rock and roll cabaret, to the point of waxing nonsensical. First, I balk at the title. I think it's stupid, so I ask her what it means: "Nomy [Lamm, writer/performance artist and featured cast member] pulled that staggering name right out of her ass!" Carns says. "At its first breath, Dr. Frockrocket's Vivifying (Re-Animatronic) Menagerie and Medicine Show became the perfect monster mash to showcase each performer's peculiar vision and starry heritage."

The show involves live music and performance art, broken into a series of vignettes, all of which are threaded around a principle character (Dr. Frockrocket, played by Jody Bleyle of Team Dresch and Hazel). Each vignette is presented by Frockrocket, a self-proclaimed medicine man who creates an elixir that transforms the animals in his care into mythological creatures. Throughout the show, Frockrocket introduces the cast of characters as "oddities," and in doing so, it seems that each of these characters, all of whom are outsiders, will be ultimately revealed as something beautiful. According to Carns, "The narrative thread follows the course of Dr. Frockrocket's metamorphosis as he faces the true mystery of his wayward menagerie, their portentous angles and unbridled acts, and above all himself." Frockrocket, then, is the connector, and though the piece is accordingly threaded, the vignettes themselves are separate entities, written by the people who perform them.

The instant appeal of The Medicine Show is that it boasts a talented cast. Along with Carns, Bleyle, and Lamm (the self-proclaimed "badass fatass Jew dyke amputee, performance artist, writer"), the production stars a motley assortment of highly political women, including filmmaker/performance artist Tara Jespen; Betsy Kwo, guitar player for Olympia's Ibobuk; Inga Muscio, author of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence; comedic actor Betty Ruption; Spider, an activist/performer and self-proclaimed "dominatrix military leader"; and actor/musician Beth Stinson. All the women will be performing, but the music will mostly be taken care of by Bleyle on vocals, Carns on organ, Kwo on guitar, and Ruption on trash drums and scrap metal. "The score is intended to sculpt a moving set for Dr. F and the individual artists involved," Carns tells me. "In my mind, it's less like musical theater than theatrical music."

A medicine show is a great motif for these women to toy with. The medicine man offers no cure: His is an illusionist's life, and the promise of his elixirs is, ultimately, empty. Each of these women, in her own life, has gone through a public healing process mediated by female-centered, activist art suffused with pain. Team Dresch, for example, was a progenitor of the Northwest queercore movement, and though that was likely empowering for Bleyle, her fans love it when she gets sick--when she publicly displays her own grapplings with mental illness and emotional isolation. The fact that she is in rock bands creates an illusion of healing and empowerment, but as transformative as these sorts of artistic experiences can be, they are not curative.

Boil The Medicine Show down and it's just excited outsider art. It will probably be terrific entertainment, but when the lights come up, all illusion is stripped, regardless--cast and audience alike simply go home, transformed only a little bit, if at all. Each of the highly political artists involved in The Medicine Show survives as both medicine man and oddity, publicly and professionally, in what must be a confusing, dichotomous daily lifestyle.

"These 'curiosities' have enormous other lives," Carns says. "They're rockers, musicians, word speakers, singers, dancers, actors, filmmakers, writers--I've collaborated to varying extents with many of the performers and feel lucky to be working with such significant creatures of brilliance."