Stars of the AVT #8: Reverend Billy

This post is one of a series profiling the hundreds of performers I’ve presented through my American Vaudeville Theatre in celebration of its 15th anniversary. Don’t miss the American Vaudeville Theatre’s 15th Anniversary ExTRAVaganza in the New York International Fringe Festival this August!

Activist/ performance artist Reverend Billy is nowadays on some level a nationally-known figure, thanks largely to the 2007 Morgan Spurlock-produced film What Would Jesus Buy? (although he’d been in two previous documentaries and certainly winds up in and on the news enough with his anti-consumerist disruptions at places like Starbucks and various Disney stores (and even Disneyland).

I first knew him in the late 90s when he was a freshly arrived migrant from San Francisco and the utterances of the Reverend Billy character were still a theatre piece. His 1999 show in the New York International Fringe Festival is probably what put him on my radar. Around that time, I did a piece called “The Reverends of Comedy” for a periodical called The Comics Bible, a quarterly for stand up comedians. There were and are a lot of faux “reverends” walking around in the muic, comedy and theatre worlds. (In fact, another one of them will be profiled here tomorrow.) But suffice it to say, at that early stage, there seemed to be more theatrical distance in what he was doing.

Over time, he became known more and more as a flamboyant activist. Just where the character stopped and where the original inhabitant of that pompadoured head, a guy named Bill Talen, began, became more and more impossible to pinpoint. For all intents and purposes he became Reverend Billy. Talk to him offstage and for the most part you will get that same guy you see at the street actions and performances of his Church of Stop Shopping Choir. He IS an evangelist of his particular creed.

And yet I booked him for my vaudeville show. It’s not so crazy. First, because actual evangelists and activists like Aimee Semple McPherson and Carrie Nation definitely “performed” in vaudeville. Second, vaudeville thrives on the assumed persona, even especially when it spills over into real life. Think of Olga Petrova, the London cockney who never dropped her fake Russian accent onstage or off.

SO…there was a lot of ferment in 2004 because the Republican National Convention was in New York, in a symbolic bid to exploit the tragedy of September 11. A few years earlier (around the time of the Seattle protest and some other subsequent ones), I had done a lot of research for a piece on protest theatre for American Theatre that got aborted. I picked up the thread of it and wrote about the protest theatre surrounding the RNC in this article for the Village Voice. Naturally Billy figured in the story. I also did this profile on Billy specifically for the libertarian journal Reason.

So…Billy was on my radar and these events were on my mind, so I decided to do a protest themed vaudeville July 4 show at the Brick Theatre in Williamsburg with Reverend Billy as the headliner. My last vaudeville show prior to this had been in late 2002; the intervening time had been spent researching and writing my book No Applause.

It was my first experience producing at the Brick, and easily the best. We had a nice packed, energized house. Of course, Reverend Billy went over his allotted 10-15 minutes by about another half hour, and his “act” consisted of his patented preaching, but this was an audience primed for this sort of thing. Anyway, it’s no different than Jerry Rubin going on The Mike Douglas Show. Sometimes America is just one grand, colorful parade.

To learn more about vaudeville past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.