Stars of the AVT #23: Red Bastard (Eric Davis)
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!
The anthropological phenomenon that is Red Bastard first started causing a stir (a pretty big one) around the middle of the last decade. To the layman I would describe Red Bastard as a devilish improvisational clown, who resembles a cross between Lewis Carroll’s pedantic Red Queen and one of the Fruit o’ the Loom guys. To be accurate, the Bastard is not a clown but a Bouffon, a sort of anti-clown whose job may or may not be to amuse, but also to provoke and unsettle. For more on Bouffon go here and here. But truthfully, audiences for the most part neither know nor care about the backstage machinations that generate performances. All that the Bastard’s fans knew was that he was funny, edgy, manipulative, rude, and extremely weird.
When I first knew his creator Eric Davis, he was rocking a vastly different character, one Mr. Mustard. Unlike the Bastard, which (by way of soccer balls, I imagine) has an entirely different shape than Eric, Mr. Mustard worked with the artist’s string bean physiognomy (he’s built kind of like Jimmy Stewart). As I recall, Mr. Mustard was a dog, with two beagle ears, a black nose and a pumpkin-colored turtleneck. The visual effect was not unlike Goofy. Mr. Mustard was mischievous but more innocent than Red Bastard. His favorite thing to do was cause havoc throughout the theatre with scotch tape. At any rate, he played several performances of my American Vaudeville Theatre when it was ensconced at the Bindlestiff Palace of Variety in 2002. Later in 2006, I got to to present Red Bastard in a show I did at Makor (92nd Street Y) where he appropriately terrified and confused the small uptown audience of little old ladies. (That was the year he co-founded the Clown Theater Festival at the Brick Theater). Since 2009, he’s been affiliated with Cirque du Soleil — and now lord knows where you can see him. Kalamazoo? Taipei? You’d have to get the skinny from him, his website is here.
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.
