One of my favorite things to see in a performance - is for something to go wrong. Not because I want to laugh at the artist, but because it's endearingly human to mess up.

In the case of Ann Liv Young's new performance work Cinderella, what went wrong Friday night was the final gag she's perhaps best known for: no matter how hard she tried, Ann Liv Young just wasn't able to take a shit onstage. First time it's ever happened to her, apparently.

For all the talk of how Young attacks her audience, for all the rehashing in The New York Times, Artforum, and Movement Research's Critical Correspondence of her notorious appearance at P.S. 1 earlier this year - where another artist had to be physically restrained from attacking her, and the director of the museum cut the lights and power in the middle of the performance - what I'll remember about my first experience of Young's work was the oddly touching communal experience of being in a tightly packed crowd of people all encouraging and trying to help the artist go number two. It wasn't shocking. It was quite sweet in a very odd way.

To back up a bit and explain Young's schtick for the uninitiated, after a few years as a successful choreographer, Young switched track to performance art and theatre, creating a character named 'Sherry', a Southern woman who can be by turns charming, solicitous, and downright mean, who in turn puts on the shows such as Cinderella. In other words, Young is playing with several layers of interpretation at any given moment, having a character play other characters, which in turn lets her explore a dynamic relationship with the audience, sucking them in only to turn on them like a rapid dog, violating the performer-audience trust in order to explore issues of gender, sex, and power.

The problem is, if Friday's performance is any indication, the schtick has run its course. Young's performances may be notorious, but that was because in the past she managed to create very original, dangerous moments on stage. Now, the audience that shows up is in the know, and like the people who show up for an insult comic, they're gleefully waiting for her to turn on them. But in Young's case, this comes at the expense of the content she's playing with at any given moment.

Cinderella unfolds as a series of monologues each interpreting different parts of the fairy tale (with explicit reference to the Disney film), interspersed with Sherry singing long to a series of pop and rap songs played from her iTunes library, and otherwise talking with the audience. After each monologue, she stops and asks if anyone has any questions, trying to draw the audience in, to generate a dialogue and get people to lower their guards. But instead, what she got was a crowd dominated by people who just wanted to be insulted. One guy, who looked utterly drunk, set the tone early by just insulting Young, informing her after some twenty minutes that she wasn't 'doing anything'. Another young man, sitting in the front row, spent most of the performance desperate to get her attention. Another man, grinning ear to ear, took every opportunity throughout the night to ask inane questions in the hope of getting a rise. Trouble is, none of these people were paying any attention to what Young was talking about, and their questions weren't remotely leading where Young wanted to go. Unfortunate, as the portrait she was drawing of Cinderella was quite interesting. Young casting her as a sort of Beckettian, tragicomic character doomed by boundless hope and optimism, with distinctly feminist overtones (what does it do a woman, being completely dependent on a man to rescue her from the plight of her life?).

It took Young nearly an hour before someone gave her opening, when a young woman asked why Young was performing in a circle of knives. It was a protective circle, Young explained, because sometimes it's dangerous to have feelings. You can be hurt by exposing yourself, she said with a rather dangerous sort of sincerity, Young quickly turning the tables on the questioned and seeking to have the young woman open herself up. The entire vibe of the room quickly became expectant, as the audience hungrily waited for the young woman to offer something personal up for Young to tear into her with. But after about an hour singing songs and reading monologues, Young proceeded on to her apparently standard finale of publicly defecating, which seemed to have come out of nowhere and had nothing to do with anything.

She tried for a half and hour, took advice from the audience, and seemed to actually feel bad she'd let everyone down when, ultimately, all that was left in the bowl was an inch or so of urine with a couple of beads floating in it.

From there, the work meandered on. Young, apparently deciding she had to do something shocking to please her audience, tried to seduce someone into making out with her. After another 30 minutes, and Young having taken off the guy's shirt and kissed his chest in order to get him to finally deign to kiss her on the lips, I finally just left, joining the roughly half the audience who'd already done so. I'd been there for more than two and a half hours. And I had a sinking suspicion that Young was really just trying to keep people around until she could finally do her deed and take a crap onstage.

'Cinderella' by Ann Liv Young, 3-4 September 2010, ISSUE Project Room (New York City)