IN PRAISE OF FREAKS

Memo to publicists and producers:

One sure fire way to get me to NOT come to your show is to take this approach: “You’d better make your reservation quickly. Tickets are going fast. We’re almost sold out!”

Not because I think it’s a ploy, although I suspect it often is. If it’s a ruse, in my case, it backfires. It will prejudice me against your show all the more if it’s true.

I’ve never been interested in hits. The show that everybody wants to see? That’s the show in which I have no interest. My happiest experiences in the theatre have tended to be when I was one of a spoiled handful in the audience, sharing some unique, seemingly accidental event with the lucky few. I don’t want to be part of some stampeding New York herd. I don’t want to jump on some band wagon. And I definitely am not interested in some phenomenon someone else has already discovered.

New York is supposedly the most sophisticated town in the world, but at times it seems like it’s full of lemmings. “You’ve just got to do this! You’ve just got to do that!” That’s not why I moved to New York, to conform. Thousands do, of course. They flock to New York burning with ambition to perform in Oklahoma!, One Life to Live, Cats, and The Death of a Salesman. To me, they constitute a George Romero scenario: Theatre of the Living Dead. But as Romero illustrated so wittily, you can find zombies at your local shopping mall. Why come to the capital of the world to be one?

Give me freaks. This is my thesis. This is why I am here. New York’s supposed to be where oddballs come to flower into themselves. Let the beautiful people flock to California. Here, we’re supposed to cultivate a tough and poisonous substance. Here, you need to take what we’ve got to say like a pill. Who wants the Before and After pictures to look the same? I’ll tell you who: tourists. Give me the rara ava. I happen to know two different women with the relatively run-of-the-mill name Jennifer Miller. One is a professional Bearded Lady; the other is never seen in public – including the grocery store – unless she is wearing a pair of joke shop elf ears. Now: there must be a million other Jennifer Millers in this country. I can see them now, with their “Garfield” coffee mugs, their Lionel Ritchie CDs and their devotion to daytime television. I’m sure they’re very nice people.

If you’re one of the Borg, I don’t wanna know ya. Give me performers who are not pretty or conventional looking, with faces and bodies and voices that ensure an unringing telephone. Those who are bent, short, twitchy, toothless, fat, pockmarked, bug-eyed and otherwise deemed unfit for commercial consumption. Give me the people with personality disorders, the geeks (literal and otherwise), the drag queens and closeted transvestites, weirdos, the promiscuous, insomniacs, chain-smokers, manic depressives, drunks, hopheads, people with dark secret lives. Faces with tics…actors with speech impediments and crooked noses and two left feet…beanpoles, the queer, the wall-eyed. Give me the angry, the unbalanced, people too cantankerous, outspoken, and idiosyncratic to make it in any scene that prizes surface over substance. Oh, you can be pretty, but you’d better be brilliant or crazy to compensate for that flaw.

I want to see some people in your circus. I don’t write for no damn fashion magazine.

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As a postscript, and in no way an elaboration on the previous point, I’d like to proffer props to some wacky, way out kids I saw in the Frigid Festival a few days ago. Number 11 Productions presented Jet of Blood, a piece by the insane French theorist Antonin Artaud. It would be a mistake for any critic to review a work so purely experimental as a “show”, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed myself – probably almost as much as the cast, who tackle the dense and darkly symbolic work with the energy and playfulness of a group of neighborhood urchins playing cops and robbers. The production contains constant surprises, a couple of moments of genuine power, but above all, a quality of youthful verve and humor too often missing in non-linear outings of this type. Any production in which a woman shoots milk out of her breasts like two squirt guns is okay with me.