OF BALLYHOO AND BEACH BALLS

Imagine my consternation in the early days of Willy Nilly when a short green bus pulled up to the curb in front of Dixon Place, and a slobbering mob of propeller hat-wearing troglodytes began to stumble toward the theatre, a spectacle reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead.

“Those can’t be the critics!,” I cried, clutching my director’s hand until he fainted from a loss of blood circulation. But alas, they were. Our suspicions were confirmed when we saw that some of the creatures held memo pads and number two pencils in their trotters.

 

By the time the dust had settled several weeks later, we were satisfied. Several critical voices –a couple of them major – expressed delight at what we’d labored so hard to bring them, and we wound up with a page and a half of superlative pull-quotes. Ah, but those first couple of nights! It was as though we’d been set upon by a coalition of the blind, the deaf, and the stupid (but unfortunately not the dumb). The unkindest cuts came from a couple of second tier scribblers from two of New York’s top ranking critical organs, who brought their prodigious storehouses of cultural knowledge and keen descriptive powers to bear in the service of deriding a wayward beach ball, which had managed to accidentally bounce from the set into the audience on opening night. This ball was apparently a sort of bete noir to these critics, possessing all the malevolence of Moby Dick. Like toddlers, or perhaps kittens, they were mesmerized by it. It was the sun around which their reviews revolved. Like fops of the Restoration, each scrutinized the ball down his nose through a pince nez, laughing the ball to scorn. Unfortunately (for me), somewhere behind, underneath, around the ball – unnoticed — there had been a play.

 

This is the story of my life. The independent theatre artist, of necessity, must wear many hats in order to bring his work before the public. In my convoluted career, I’ve learned something of marketing, and I’ve found it to be a double edged sword that cuts deep.  I have serious things I want to say. I express these ideas through comedy. And then I get out there and start selling. And the hard selling I do almost always backfires in the end. Part of the audience, expecting the unchallenging spectacle the hype seems to promise, exits the theatre disappointed and perplexed. (Hey, man, what was that? That was just weird!) Another part takes the hype at its word and watches the play through the jaded lenses I myself have ground. This bunch never does see the play. They merely confirm what they’ve already decided based on the marketing material. In sum, rather than looking with their eyes, they believe just what they have already been told. It is especially depressing when purported theatre critics are guilty of that level of superficiality; but it turns out most of them are.

 

With Willy Nilly, director Jeff Lewonczyk and myself, by joint consent, decided to announce the show as an “exploitation” and mirror the techniques of the mainstream media apparatus in cravenly making entertainment out of murder. By doing so, we hoped to make people think. Our hype almost always serves a double function – genuine marketing, and a simultaneous parody of marketing. This time out, the promotions fulfilled their more quotidian agenda. Filling the houses turned out to be no problem, at least on the initial run. But the bit about getting audiences to think is a tough nut to crack. As a general rule, it turns out audiences and critics believe everything they’re told – hook, line and sinker. If you paint a canvas entirely red and call it “A Study in Blue”, damned if they won’t see the blue – and only the blue – in it. We announce a work of exploitation, and many reviewers therefore leave their critical faculties at the door. (Others, perhaps, never possessed such faculties to begin with). The result: a passel of reviews that ought to be more embarrassing to their authors than the admittedly uneven play should be to its creators. Certain of their lapses amount to critical malpractice. Thus, for example, the lyrics to Willy Nilly’s opening song “Psychedelic Mushroom Cloud Cuckoo-land” (the title of which is a Joycean style portmanteau phrase compressing “psychedelic mushroom”, “mushroom cloud” and Aristophanes’ “cloud-cuckoo land”)  “failed to impress” one reviewer. To another, the climax of the show (which illustrated social breakdown by setting a Living Theatre style contact improv to a sonic collage modeled on “Revolution #9”) “just fell apart”. A number of these whiz kids demonstrated a lack of awareness of pop culture so great that they plainly had never heard of either Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In or Tiny Tim – phenomena at the pinnacle of mainstream prominence at the time of the play’s events (youth is no excuse for such a level of ignorance—at least not in someone who presumes to don the mantle of critic). By the same token, a few equated the presence of a square, deadpan narrator with Rod Serling (apparently the only such character they’ve encountered) rather than Jack Webb or the hundred or so other white-sock wearing cop and D.A. types more germane to Willy Nilly.

And, as always seems to be the case, the play’s more serious underlying themes went completely unnoticed, even by the show’s many champions. Even a page and a half long monologue of deadly earnest content justifying the author’s intentions (a blatantly Euripidean device I often resort to, one that would make Neitzche spin in his grave) failed to clue scribblers in. All I can do is take solace in the fact that comical writers with serious aims are rarely “gotten” the first time around. To Shaw’s contemporaries, Mrs. Warren’s Profession was just a scandalous play about hookers. Unless you announce yourself as serious, and then act serious, and then shove your serious intentions down people’s throats and up their asses, most people will only register the foolishness. If you think this maddening predicament isn’t what inspired Moliere to write The Misanthrope, you’ve got another thing coming.

 

Moliere knew his misanthrope from the inside; he thought the character’s dark thoughts at times, or he couldn’t have written them. But he also possessed the wisdom not to give in to despair. Cooler heads prevail in the play, and Moliere went on to write many other brilliant comedies. We profit by his example by climbing back into the saddle with Kitsch, which opens at Theater for the New City on November12. It is a farce, based on the Roman playwright Plautus’s Twin  Menaechmi by way of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. We hope audiences will merely enjoy themselves. It is a machine to make people laugh. In fact, we hope audiences never bother themselves with this essay. It will ruin the show for them.

 

On the other hand, we hold critics to a higher standard. We hope they will bring to the table more than a superficial working knowledge of Top 40 theatrical hits.

 

A familiarity with ancient comedy would help; the play derives more from Plautus (by way of translation) than from Shakespeare. The play’s main architecture is classical: it is divided into five acts, and maintains a careful geometric organization of characters and events that owes more than a little to Aristotle.

 

A knowledge of the early works of Brecht would also assist the critic. (Happy End and St. Joan of the Stockyards were particular inspirations). Young Brecht was a parodist. In the tradition of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Cervantes, and even Bach, his technique early on was to vacuum up cultural products and glue them into his theatrical vehicles; so much so that he was often accused of plagiarism. Yet Brecht was a man of his time and place. In fact, he is the foremost advocate of a theatre oppositional to classical values, even to our own times. Like Eisenstein and Meyerhold before him, he sought a way to theatricalize the Hegelian dialectic; his Epic theatre would build not to some single satisfying climax as in the Aristotelean theatre, but mimic the variety theatre and the novel by containing strings of discrete moments, each with its own point, flattened out over a picaresque journey. The historical moment described in Kitsch­ – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the momentary culture clash between the twin materialist philosophies of capitalism and communism – provides fodder to explore the dialectic (embodied here in separated twins who spend their lives in the two warring blocs – half money-grubbing decadents, half over-regimented sheep). In Kitsch, classicism wars with Epic technique (songs, intertitles, direct address). Ideas are thus embodied in the silliness, for those able and willing to look beyond the veil.

 

And to quote the television pitchman: “But wait: there’s more!” For the play parodies Brecht. In plays like Happy End, St. Joan and In the Jungle of Cities Brecht had betrayed (intentionally or otherwise) an imperfect knowledge of the America he depicted (a knowledge gleaned almost entirely from Hollywood movies and popular songs). We do the same with our own sketchy, romanticized idea of Berlin. The play is written in the voice of a translator, as though from across a great distance. The fabric of the play thus describes a world where communication within and across cultures is at the very least troublesome, and at its worst, impossible. For the playwright who grapples daily with such problems of communication (spawning, for example, this essay), the theme is a highly personal one. But the Timonist in me fears that the majority of reviewers (let’s not call them critics) will receive precisely none of these elements I’ve described, having been distracted by some untied shoe or unbuttoned fly.

 

 

 

The opinions expressed in this editorial are solely those of the author. His professional associates, past and present, had no hand in its creation, and are just as annoyed as you are.

Collisionworks

Sisyphus had his rock to roll; Hercules his labors. Ian W. Hill has The Collisionworks: An Annual Presentation of Theatre from Gemini Collisionworks. With a work ethic conceivable only in a Scandinavian born and bred in New England, for the past several Augusts director Hill has mounted his own one man theatre festival at our beloved Brick Theatre in Williamsburg. This year’s offerings will include Daniel McKleinfeld’s A Little Piece of the Sun, Richard Foreman’s George Bataille’s Bathrobe (not to be confused with George Takai’s bathrobe), Fassbinder’s Blood on the Cat’s Neck, and Sacrificial Offerings by Hill and David Finkelstein. As with Warhol, Hill’s art is largely about volume — keep in mind, if you see only one production, that it’s part of a much larger picture. And there are deals for seeing more than one show. Show dates August 7th through the 29th. For more info go to http://collisionwork.livejournal.com/ or http://www.bricktheatre.com.

Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, and Other Plays

Some major international theatre encyclopedia (I forget which, but I believe Geilgud was the titular editor) made me furious once for its dismissive description of Sam Shepard. The assessment was something along the lines of “amazingly inept in his early work but he eventually started writing real plays in the late 1970s.” This is a common attitude among the general public (insofar as they ever think about such things) but the G.P. can be forgiven for occasional philistinism: they’re too busy building bridges and serving lattes and driving taxi cabs to dwell much (at all) on theatrical aesthetics.

Critics and editors, however, should know better. As I recall, the edition of the book of which I’m thinking was from the 1980s or 90s. Shepard’s freeform experiments – as valid as those of Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock or Lester Young – were by then decades old, and clearly not a matter of ineptitude but bold artistic choice. And furthermore, they were clever, powerful, funny, poetic, and theatrical in a way that most conventional playwriting rarely seems to be.

Dismissal of this kind of experimentation has been my bete noir for decades. I came to New York with a trunk full of such plays, many of them produced for audiences of appreciative crickets. It turns out I was two decades behind the times, but also two decades ahead. There now seems to be a receptive audience again (if a downtown one) for wildly nonlinear work, largely I think due to the indefatigable proselytizing of artists like Mac Wellman, Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group. And you could have knocked me over with a feather when I discovered Young Jean Lee’s work was of the same type.

I’d seen her name (if not her work) constantly, reinforced by the branding masterstroke of her naming her theatre “Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company”, after the fashion of dance troupes. I’d seen but one of her plays “Christmas”, which must be the most economical play to produce ever written: it consists of a set (a tiny house) and taped voices – but no live actors. Other than this, her popular downtown hits (the ones contained in the just published Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven) are new to me. And new is the operative word. Her writing has remarkable freshness and spontaneity, as though she’s managed to switch off the inner censor that usually throttles the id before it wriggles out into the ether.  Consistency of character, voice, situation are all intentionally up for grabs.

What makes her work still more interesting is that this formalism (or antiformalism, which of course a kind of formalism) is mixed with devastating honesty. The freeing up her own voice enhances, rather than diverts from, the expression of her identity as an Asian-American, as a woman, as a Pacific Northwesterner, as a jack Christian, as a whatever else she is. Her work represents a new, far richer and more highly evolved state of affairs than the literal-minded, often autobiographical identity-based writing that was so popular in the 1980s. (The stridency of that writing can be forgiven though when you recall the presence of the character “Long Duck Dong” in the 1984 film Sixteen Candles. I am a vaudevillian and that character even offends me.)

Young Jean Lee deals with such stereotypes from a seeming position of strength. She can slap them around, she can explode them, she can ignore them, she can even pay them homage. In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals the purported villain is “Fu Manchu” — not the historical dynastic ruler, but something closer to the reprehensible stereotype once played by Peter Sellers. But not quite. The character is black, though dressed in Chinese clothes. In the original production, it was played by Thomas Bradshaw. And though he is the traditional villain, and seems that way for awhile, in the end, he and all the “oriental masses” are wiped out by a pair of stereotypical white people named Terence and Sheila (the supposed victims) using an “oriental killing machine”.

In The Appeal, “Coleridge”, “Wordsworth” and “Byron” fight like a bunch of high school girls, and even sort of talk like them. While they are poets and banter about poetry and philosophy, the names of the characters are carrying most of the symbolic freight. Their speech is contemporary and frequently moronic. (This is a technique I call the “Whatever Aesthetic” and credit to Gen X and the trickle-down influence of punk. The humor derives from a certain “fuck you” to the expectations of the audience. I’ll expand on this idea in a future post).

All playwrights with any self-awareness know that all of their characters are merely some version of themselves. Lee takes that fact of life and makes it manifestly obvious, in much the same way that many painters set out to show that paintings are “just paint on canvas”.  Her plays, despite the fact that many have several characters and “situations” (if not exactly plots) still feel like stream of consciousness interior monologues taking place inside the head of Young Jean Lee. Some stretches are like automatic writing – surreal. Some express modern angst, neurosis, self-doubt, self criticism. Some express racial bugaboos. Some express metaphysical questioning. Pullman, WA (named for no reason and for every reason in the world after her home town) contains all these streams, and are spoken by three characters who are “named” after whoever is playing them at the time. In essence it is a soliloquy.

These two tendencies (the free exploration of stereotype and this flattening out and splintering of character) come together in the title piece, in which the characters are merely divided into “Koreans” and “White Persons” and the theme of racial identity is kicked around like a pig’s bladder. A major color in her work is the latent cruelty in the seemingly gentle – it appeals to me very much. Traditionally, Asian women are socially docile. Layered over this, you have the Evangelical Christianity Lee was raised in. But bubbling and simmering beneath them both…let’s just say I wouldn’t want to take one of those kicks (but of course I have, every time one of her characters levels a shot gun at Europeans. Thank God I’m part Cherokee or I might be dead!)

And speaking of thanking God, the most recent play in the bunch Church deals with her religious upbringing.  An appropriate subtitle might be “The Revenge”. A bunch of smiling, bubble-headed Christians preach to the audience, the things they say growing crazier and more nonsensical as they go along, but their attitude remaining the same. Anyone who has ever watched JoelOsteen knows this isn’t absurdism, but kitchen sink realism.

Shuffling “Off”

While I’ve been waxing elegaic about various aspects of the indie theatre movement in these annals, a crucial strand in that yarn has thus far gone unspun. Today’s subject: the short-lived but much beloved (by me) indie theatre press of the fin de siecle.

By “press” I of course refer to the Guttenbergian sort. “Media” implies electrons, and that’s another story, one we are living at this very minute. But for a brief instant, the indie theatre movement had its very own meat-space rags, complete with ink, dead trees, the whole shmear (and the whole smear). Undoubtedly the original off-off Broadway movement had its own mimeographed broadsheets back in the day, but that falls outside the scope of this chronicle. What obtains here is that in 1996 David Cote and Jennifer Woodward launched Off, indie theatre’s very own ‘zine. Like the punk rock ‘zines of that era, it represented an interesting little chapter in the evolution of grassroots communications. On the one hand it made use of new technology; desktop publishing and graphic design software clearly went into its creation. On the other hand, it was physically distributed: photocopied, stapled and circulated to a few hundred (or perhaps a very few thousand) readers – much as had been done by college students and radicals for decades prior. While the internet and e-mail (and even the pioneering RAT-list) were already in existence, the Blogosphere was yet to come.  ‘Zines were therefore both old and new.

I had actually launched my own ‘zine The Herald of Freedom some months before Off, but its circulation was smaller, limited to my audiences and other supporters, with the extra copies dumped in downtown theatres and bars. When Off came along a few months later, I leapt at the chance to have my own column, which was the most jerry-rigged contraption imaginable. Called Frozen Theatre, the column used my reviews of eccentric museums (e.g., the London Dungeon, the Norman Rockwell Museum) as a springboard to pontificate on behalf of greater eccentricity, greater theatricality in the theatre. It was a very good column; I followed it religiously.

The fact that it existed was a testament not to the editors’ impeccably good judgment in hiring me, which is self-evident, but to the overall value of the publication. By its very nature the ‘zine (like an indie theatre, film or band) allows for much greater freedom of expression than is possible at mainstream publications. At Off (and in my own Herald) one could write about radical and experimental theatre, using a manner of expression that was itself radical and experimental. Needless to say, this is not the case at mainstream publications—even the free ones. This is a freedom I feel is vitally important and sorely missed. One longs for the reckless touch of the old Artaud on the page as well as the stage: dangerous, inflammatory hyperbole;  gross exaggeration; infamous slanders; and the occasional erotic love poem. Even then, I should add, Cote (who now edits the theatre pages of Time Out New York) was a responsible and balanced editor, both for Off and for the Fringe-organ Propaganda which he helmed from its inception. He hatched out of the egg as though he’d been already been an editor for twenty years – at least that was how it seemed to me. But being a smart one, he also knew this particular audience appreciated a diversity of distinctive voices, giving the title of his newspaper one of its many double meanings.

And then, Off—brief candle—went out. At first its absence wasn’t felt so keenly, because it was immediately succeeded by two other publications, each of which filled a different part of the vacuum. EdgeNY involved a lot of the old Off personnel including me and Cote. It attempted to be a slick glossy, reliant on ad sales. It was 1999; the economy was booming. For a time it seemed possible to make such a publication work even for the indie theatre scene. In a matter of months it was gone, however. The radical side of things was picked up by The Emergency Gazette, a periodical I cherished. It was literally a single sheet of legal-sized paper, printed on both sides. It was far more radical than Off had been in content and tone, cheerfully juvenile in its anarchism. The Gazette lasted a while longer, then, it too passed away.

What happened? Frankly, opportunity. I can only speak about my own experiences, but I’m assuming they’re not atypical. Long about 1999, I suddenly found a mother-lode of paying free-lance work, both online and in print. That year, I had my first article published in American Theatre and had my reviews published regularly in Theatremania and Citysearch (which paid before the dot-com burst) as well as OffoffBway.com (which didn’t). The following year I had my first pieces published by the Village Voice, Reason and Backstage and even wrote a review for nytheatre.com (March 30, 2000 which I believe qualifies me as the first writer besides Martin Denton ever to review for the site). In 2001, I began to write regularly for Time Out New York and became an Affiliated Writing Fellow at American Theatre. A few years later I began to crack the dailies, writing several reviews for the New York Sun.

I have the visionary genius of David Cote (and now that I think on it, fellow hired-gun John Devore) to thank (and the public has them to blame) for the lion’s share of these opportunities coming my way. To those and other supportive editors (Brian Parks and Martin Denton top the list), I send an antiquated English expression, one apparently no longer in use at my local supermarket: thank you.

And yet…one misses the ‘zine. The beauty of Off and the other ‘zines was that the fact that they were completely devoted to our scene and  reached real people – even real strangers – in real space, and were thus at least partially a potential advertisement for indie theatre as a whole. Potential new audience members could pick up an issue in a bar and get turned on to something completely they never dreamt existed. It’s rather a drag to know the economy will support whoopee cushions, Cheez Whiz and greyhound racing, but insufficient ad dollars can be found to use the print medium to inform – really inform, not list — the public about thousands of energetic geniuses bouncing around New York.

I point no fingers. At this moment in history, there seem to be insufficient dollars available for print, period. Just as the dot-com burst of 2000 took away the paying online gigs, the current economic collapse is hurting mainstream print. This year my favorite daily the New York Sun folded. The theatre sections at the weeklies, like the weeklies themselves, are getting smaller and smaller – practically tweets. On the positive side, I am now able to express myself freely on the platform you are now perusing. And, though it doesn’t support me materially, it does allow me to do this: ahavcyuegd!!! Whacka whacka!!! 97326348. Wooba wooba wooba!!!!!??? Universally accessible technology not only allows me to write this blog, but to do the Indie Theatre Now podcast and tv show with the New York Theatre Experience. Anyway, people don’t read anymore. They listen to MP3s, play electronic games, and text each other all day. While I’m saddened by the passing of print, you can’t swim against the tide, either. And that’s why from now, I’ll be filing my reviews as Aragon II, Playmaster of the Universe.

Attention: New York Theatre Festival Junkies!

Why wait until August to make your head explode with dusk til dawn theatrical engorgement? Stuff your brains with theatre now! You know you want to!

This June witnesses the unleashing of two indie theatre festivals certain to sate the discerning patron’s lech for affordable edification.

First, there’s The Antidepressant Festival, at the one and only Brick Theater, Metropolitan Ave. in Williamsburg,  June 5 through July 4. For the life of me I haven’t been able to comprehend the theme of this festival, but apparently most of my friends do because they have shows in it! I hope you will join me in patronizing:

* Lynn Berg, Becky Beyers, Audrey Crabtree, and Gavin Starr Kendall in …And the Fear Cracked Open

* Danny Bowes, Becky Byers, Patrick Cann and Guinevere Pressley in Booze, Sports and Romance

* Richard Harrington and Chris Kauffman in Cabaret Terrarium

* Matt Freeman’s Glee Club

* James Comtois’s Infectious Opportunity

* Gyda Arber and Aaron Baker’s Suspicious Package RX

* and Theatre Askew’s The Tale of the Good Whistleblower, etc. (I’m not typing the rest)

A lot of the other shows sound great, too, but who’s got the time???

You wanna learn more? Learn more: www.bricktheatre.com.

As if that weren’t enough, we also got Planet Connections, A New York Theatre Festivity, which runneth June 9th – June 28th, 2009.

If the very name of the festival makes you want to run out into the street and tip over a litter basket, not to worry. While the proceeds of the fest are being donated to worthy causes, for the most part the shows themselves seem relatively devoid of finger-wagging.

Of particular interest to this observer are Her Kind: The Life and Poetry of Anne Sexton, Hound (a Sherlock Holmes-related mystery directed by Rachel Klein), The Katrina Project: Hell and High Water, Those Whistling Lads: The Poetry and Short Stories of Dorothy Parker, Wagon Wheel (about the plight of the Romany people); The 40 Foot Tall Jesus Statue & Hate Myself in the Morning (a reading directed by my friend Amber Gallery, one of the festival’s organizers).

For more info, go to: http://www.planetconnectionsfestivity.com/

My New TV Show

As some of you may know, Indie Theatre Now the theatre podcast I host for the New York Theatre Experience is about to launch a television version on Manhattan Neighborhood Network. The pilot episode airs tomorrow night, with my guests John Clancy and Elena K. Holy talking about the NY International Fringe Festival and the League of Independent Theatres; Ellie Covan talking about the early days of Dixon Place; playwright Kirk Wood Bromley, who coined the term “Indie Theatre”; and New York Theatre Experience director Martin Denton himself, on the new edition of Plays and Playwrights.  Here’s where and when to watch:

• Wednesday, May 20 at 7:00PM on cable channel 56 (Time Warner)/ 83(RCN) and STREAMING ONLINE at MNN.Org
• Monday, May 25 at 11:00PM on cable channel 67 (Time Warner) / 85 (RCN) and STREAMING ONLINE at MNN.Org
• Sunday, May 31 at 11:00PM on cable channel 56 (Time Warner) / 83 (RCN) at MNN.Org

I repeat, the show is streaming online at MNN.Org. “I don’t get cable” and “I don’t live in Manhattan” therefore rank as excuses comparable to “My dog ate it” and “My grandmother was sick”. “I didn’t want to watch your stupid show” is much more like it, though, frankly, inconceivable. At any rate, I do hope you’re able to tune in, or at the very least, turn on or drop out.

Ghosts of Fringes Past

Trav in “Misshapen Jack” in 1998 NY Int’l Fringe Festival

The recent happy news that Piper Mckenzie’s production of my play Willy Nilly: A  Musical Exploitation of the Most Far Out Cult Murders of the Psychedelic Era has been accepted into this summer’s New York International Fringe Festival provides a nice opening for a long-contemplated post on the topic of the Fringe.

On the pilot episode of the tv version of Indie Theatre Now (cablecasting on Manhattan Neighborhood Network later this month), I remarked on the fact that the city now has scores of annual theatre festivals…at which point I heard something like a stifled snicker from one of the guests, essentially expressing the sentiment “Ffffffffp. Yeah.  Right. ‘Other’ festivals!”  I doubt the response came from Fringe Artistic Director and Co-Founder Elena K. Holy; she’s too ladylike. No, no. It could only have been her rambunctious, trouble-making co-founder John Clancy, whom I suspect also shot a spitball even as he collected tacks to put on my chair. But well may he gloat. His response (if he made it — it could have been the radiator) was the correct one. NY Fringe is the granddaddy, the Jabba the Hut of all the New York festivals. 95% of the others wouldn’t exist if this festival hadn’t blazed a trail. I won’t bore you with the impressive statistics (or impress you with the boring statistics). The bottom line is that the NY International Fringe is now a New York Institution, and it introduces tens and tens of thousands of people to all kinds of worthy and off-beat indie theatre on an annual basis.

My relationship to it over the years has been a complex one. I’ve probably looked at it through more lenses than almost anyone over the years: participant, conscientious objector, audience member, critic, adjudicator, FringeU panelist, gadfly, and even – just to keep me humble – rejected applicant. Its existence has enriched my life immeasurably. I want to marry it.

Here then a brief chronicle of me and Fringe over the years…

1997. As I mentioned in a previous post, the inaugural year of the Fringe was one of abstention for me. Disgruntled by the prospect of a participation fee and a selective screening process, the anarchist in me aligned with the RATs that year. (The NY Times and American Theatre both covered the brouhaha). More than this, however, after a decade of going my own way, I indulged in the ultimate act of alienation by presenting my own one man “festival”, which I called “Beyond the Anti-Fringe.” Productions consisted of my play Nihils which I presented at an Alphabet City squat called Bullet Space, performances of Misshapen Jack the Nebraska Hunchback in a community garden, and my two hander Hecate and Beckett the Existential Magpies
in Dead God, Dead Dog, Dead Ducks, which was included as part HERE’s American Living Room series.

1998. The depth of my commitment to abstention may be measured by the fact that it only took me one year to drink the Kool-Aid. In the Fringe Festival’s second year I presented my one man rant Misshapen Jack the Nebraska Hunchback, a very Fringey show, and was rewarded for doing so by mention in two New York Times pieces (http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/27/theater/theater-review-sometimes-delightful-never-easy-it-s-fringe.html and also http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/09/magazine/sunday-august-9-1998-theater-no-chickens-will-be-harmed.html).  I also performed in Surf Reality’s Fringe extravaganza “the 101st Congress of Unnatural Acts” and wrote for the Fringe journal Propaganda, then edited by David Cote who as at that time also editor of Off, which I also wrote for.

1999. Addicted to drama, in the third year of Fringe, I joined up with an ill-fated splinter festival called Pure Pop, formed by one of the Fringe’s co-founders Aaron Beall [see earlier post]. Earlier in the year I’d had a successful run of my American Vaudeville Theatre at Todo Con Nada. Since I had this association with the venue at the time, it was really only natural to extend it by being involved with Pure Pop.
But the whole thing started to melt down. For one thing, the “venue” turned out to be an Orchard Street  storefront that was being used a storage space. To use it, we’d have had to move some merchant’s junk for him. Find yourself another sucker, bub! After this debacle I ended up doing some writing for the Fringe journal Propaganda again this year.

2000. Having learned my lesson, in 2000 I brought my country musical House of Trash, which had had a successful run at HERE earlier in the year, to Fringe. While some folks had only seen the HERE version, and the play has been produced subsequently, I continue to consider the 2000 Fringe version (which starred me in the central role of Preacher Bob) as the definitive production.

Trav S.D. as Preacher Bob in the 2000 NY Fringe production of "House of Trash"

2001. This year, my follow up show to House of Trash was accepted into the Fringe Festival. This was my musical about the Manson Family called Son of Nothing (a.k.a Willy Nilly). As we started the process, the director of the show (for whom it was written) started to freak about the fact that he wouldn’t know the venue –or be able to design lights and sound for it — until the last minute, which is one of the admitted challenges of Fringe. So I was forced to pull the plug. The play is finally making its debut this year under the direction of Jeff Lewonczyck, who is very much making it his own.

But that’s not all the drama from that year! I was also invited to participate in a Fringe U panel on the subject of whether the Fringe should be allowed to exist. I really didn’t want to participate, but was guilted into arguing “against” because they couldn’t find enough panelists. The idea of publicly arguing against the Fringe’s right to exist filled me with no end of anxiety. So much so that I resorted to converting my participation into a sort of Dada spectacle, standing and spouting poetic non sequiturs rather than answer any questions properly. And, in it’s way, I suppose it was as good an argument against Fringe as any. Alexis Soloski describes it in the Village Voice here:http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-08-21/theater/britney-s-school-for-alien.

Also in 2001, Greg Kotis (creator of Urinetown) and I were asked (as two “Fringe success stories” to comment on our favorite shows from that year in Time Out New York. I also reviewed many Fringe shows (perhaps a dozen) that year for nytheatre.com.

2002. This year, I presented my show Sea of Love in the Ice Factory Festival, but I wrote thisVillage Voice feature about that year’s Fringehttp://www.villagevoice.com/2002-07-02/theater/theater

2003. Abducted by aliens.

2004-2007. During these years I was simultaneously out of work and writing and promoting my book No Applause. To keep a hand in, I mounted several extremely small scale, barebones shows from my personal repertoire in the Brick’s annual summer festivals (Cold Fire, Misshapen Jack, a vaudeville revue and Nihils). The core Bricksters, I should note, are mostly folks who either met in the context of the NY Fringe, or at Todo Con Nada, run by Fringe co-founder Aaron Beall. The organizers may affirm or deny this, but the way I see it, the Brick festivals, while imminently legitimate in their own right, are playful parodies of Fringe, acorns from the Fringe’s oak.

Also in 2006, I reviewed several Fringe shows for Time Out NY.

And in 2007 — my first rejection from Fringe. The show I pitched was uncharacteristic for me — an extremely serious work, a chorale about Sept. 11, which R.J. Tolan had signed on to direct. The script was very far from finished however (perhaps about 25% finished) and I hope it was on that basis the production was rejected! Also, this year, I interviewed numerous Fringe participants for the Indie Theatre Now podcast.

2008. My play Tenth Life of the Tom Cat (a.k.a Family of Man) was accepted into Fringe, but lacking funds, and feeling a need for rewrites, I withdrew. But I did cover the festival for the Village Voice again:http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-08-05/theater/the-new-york-international-fringe-festival-returns.Also, this year, I interviewed numerous Fringe participants for the Indie Theatre Now podcast, and reviewed nine Fringe shows for the Voice.

2009. Happy homecoming. I hope you will come see Willy Nilly this August!

Live Nude Elf

Reverend Jen Miller is the original sui generis. To hang any individual label on her (“writer”, “comedian”, “host”, “performance artist”) is to do her an injustice — it reduces a complex phenomenon to a mere fragment of the complete picture. A trained visual artist, she made a conscious decision while at the School for Visual Arts in the early 90s to make herself an artwork, and more than any single individual since Alfred Jarry perhaps, that is what she has accomplished. She founded her own religion (hence the “Reverend”); writes true and humorous short stories and articles; wears fabulous costumes wherever she goes; has hosted the world’s most democratic open mic night the “Anti-Slam” for about fourteen years; stars in Nick Zedd movies; has her own cable tv show; and operates a museum of troll dolls in her house.  (For more background see my Village Voice piece on her: http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-02-21/theater/slamming-back/).

Rev Jen is the most pleasant combination possible of Spalding Gray, Barbara Feldon and Leonard Nimoy. But that’s all kind of like saying, “Um…New York City has…um…Broadway…and, um…Yankee Stadium….and the Brooklyn Bridge…and, uh…” You’ll always leave something out, so what’s the point?

If my praise of her seems immoderate it is because I think of her as a fellow traveler. She grapples with the same struggles I happen to think are important, both as an artist and as a human being. To be an artist in America, you have to deal with the problem of show business. What is it? Is it art’s evil twin? Is it some parasite or vampire or succubus that sucks the life out of art? Are art and show biz two concepts that actually overlap? Are they two ways of looking at the very same thing? It seems to me the fundamental question for any American artist, on some level. In France, the question is settled. French Culture has its own cabinet position in the government. The country may be said to have a soul; its art and its national identity are one. That is taken for granted. This was once true of America, as well. If there is an American soul, surely it can be found in the work of Emerson, Whitman, Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie. Try to conjure that soul today and I’m afraid you are likely only to produce reflexive snickers or incomprehension. That’s as may be. But following the death of this spirit in the popular esteem, what have we put in its place? Apparently only a cash register. What is art worth? How can one best make a living by one’s work? Andy Warhol presented the question for public consumption most overtly, but I often think of others who embody it. What of the personal appearances of writers? Of Tennesee Williams, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, for example – personalities as much as prosodists, by necessity. What of Orson Welles schilling on the Merv Griffin Show? Art may or not be created, but having been created, it is an absolute given that it must be SOLD. What is this pageant? What is this parade, that creates equivalency where there is none, that tosses people of worth and accomplishment into the hopper with murderers and whores, and serves it up like some shit-frosted fruitcake?

And is it good or bad? I don’t know. Did you ever see The Agony and the Ecstasy? In the old days, a Michaelangelo needed to suck up to the Pope for his underwriting. Nowadays, an artist must attract the entire human race. You do it by being a walking, talking advertisement for your art. To some, this is distasteful. To me, it is a chapter subsection in the textbook for Life 101. You don’t want to sell your work? Good luck eating when it sells posthumously! BUT – and this is the crucial but, the but that so often gets lost in the shuffle in this universal marketplace – what then? As Epicurus put it (I believe) “Eat to live, don’t live to eat.” You make a living? So what? What are you that lives?

This has not been a digression! This is still about Rev Jen!  For a time, she was attaching the honorific “Saint” to her moniker. I always took the healthy self-mocking represented by that gesture as just more evidence of her actual, practical sainthood. Because not only is she one of the nicest human beings on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis, you will ever meet…but she is big enough to admit that she isn’t perfect – she punctures her own balloon. She practices not only an art, then, but an ethic. Her Anti-Slam is an exercise in unbelievable generosity and patience. Brilliant performers often take her stage. So too do literal, clinical, diagnosed mental patients. Everyone is awarded a “ten” (on a scale of ten) for their efforts. Rev Jen treats them all the same, and they respond by giving her passionate devotion. Poll her army of Arts Stars. I’ve yet to meet anybody who ever had a single bad thing to say about her. She is the Will Rogers of our time, one of the few people who would be equally at ease (and welcome) at the Whitney Biennial or a Hell’s Angels barbecue.

Rev Jen (smack dab in the middle, next to the gorilla) and the cast of the 2000 production of Trav S.D.'s "House of Trash", HERE Arts Center

Which brings us to her book. The volume Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen (Soft Skull Press, 2009) is essentially a collection of her sex columns for Nerve.com. To say the project was unworthy of her is putting it mildly. Not to say that I judge her or blame her. To be blunt, what the hell do you do to get ahead in this landscape of diminishing returns? I have done much I am not proud of, sold short my own art and supplanted it with lowest-common-denominator crap with which I wasn’t comfortable, just to sell tickets. (On one occasion, these choices actually led me to share a night club stage with porn star Ron Jeremy. Now those are strange bedfellows). As Jen herself writes, she has thousands of fans, and can’t even pay her doctor’s bills. So you take what opportunities you can.

So…at some point Rev Jen was hired to take over this pre-existing sex column. Don’t get me wrong. I think sex is the most interesting thing in the world. In fact, it’s so interesting it’s uninteresting, if you take my meaning. Everyone has it, everyone wants it, everyone thinks about it (I am at this very minute). But you don’t need a Rev Jen to write about it. Not to put too fine a point on it, on her worst day, Rev Jen is way more interesting herself than an entire factory outlet of butt plugs, vibrators, and blow up dolls. I know there’s always been an element of this in her work (Lord of the Cock Rings, anyone?) but my point is, it’s always been just one of her million facets, in the same way that her best friend happens to be a Chihuahua.  Anyone can be “Nude”, but only Rev Jen is an “Elf”. And that is the salvation of what would otherwise be the Amy Sohn knock-off that some marketing department somewhere is probably trying to sell this book as. The reality is, Rev Jen possesses what many writers would kill for and will never have: a voice. The Rev Jen patois is a hash of high school essay (parodied), stoner-speak, and Maryland dialect, full of droll coinages (“jackable”, “love-mayonnaise”) and bonhomie. She can write about anything – a trip to the bodega, for example – and make it hilarious or poignant or both. And so it doesn’t actually harm her here that her subject matter here consists of the lesser art of getting off. By definition, reading Rev Jen’s account of getting herself and others off is frequently hilarious, in the same way that reading Mark Twain’s account of same would have been hilarious. The title piece is one of the best in the book. It chronicles her brief career as a nude maid. No sex is exchanged. Jen merely shows up at the houses of her pathetic clients, disrobes, and cleans their bathrooms and kitchens wearing only Playtex living gloves and elf ears. That is a New York story. Jen gamely plows through a number of such adventures (many of them much sexier than that — although, as a saving grace, Jen usually bungles her attempts at pick-ups and orgies in some way). But as time goes on, we see that she herself is losing interest in the project. What she wants is a soul-mate.

And the fact that the rocket scientists at nerve.com cancelled her column when the Rev started to write about falling in love with some lucky dude (who then broke her heart) will give you a good idea of how much she outclassed the enterprise to begin with.

Note to publishers. Rev Jen is a writer. Let her write. About anything. And she will produce a kick-ass book. So I hope this one flies off the shelves so she is given that opportunity.

Oh, and by the way, happy birthday to vaudeville and opera impressario Oscar Hammerstein I, born on this day in 1847.

A Morning Mini Manifesto

Lacking material for a new post (although a flood is heading this way), I hearby attach my artistic statement for a pending grant application, written at about four o’clock this morning. Those are ways the best ones, because the censor is off. I have been writing and re-writing the sentiments expressed therein since I was a teenager. I hope one day to get better at it.

Probably the most pernicious and unnatural aspect of the performing arts in America (and increasingly elsewhere) is the schism between the two artificial constructs called “popular culture” and “the arts”. Unlike the theatrical cultures of the Greco-Roman world and post-Renaissance Europe, America’s did not grow organically out of the nation’s religious life but, having been banned by officialdom, sprang up illicitly in close association with vice. “Entertainment”, like the traffic in sex, booze, drugs and gambling with which it was long associated, became a pleasure industry, without the same social mission – the social glue — that characterizes old world theatre. Recognizing this as long ago as the 19th century, certain individuals and groups in the U.S. made a counter-revolutionary effort to establish an “art theatre” that could compare with Europe’s. That it has failed in this mission may be attested to by the simple bellwether that its audience consists of a tiny minority of intellectual and economic elites. Millions appreciate the products of Hollywood, Broadway, and the music industry; a tiny clique cares anything about “art films”, “important plays”, or “serious music”.

And rightfully so. “Art films”, “important plays”, and “serious music” are unspeakably boring. I avoid them whenever possible. Art, which reaches us through the senses, should quicken the pulse, excite, draw us to the theatre in the same way as the products offered by bordellos, saloons and casinos do – commercial producers at least know this much. Business sense is SENSE, after all. On the other hand, pimps, drug dealers and gangsters are all scoundrels. That is the definition of someone who places personal gain over public welfare, is it not? Do commercial producers fall into that category? I’ll be careful and say “Not all of them, and not always”.

My philosophy has always been – always (I found my voice as a writer as a teenager) – that neither of these approaches is suitable or adequate for a great culture. America now clumsily bestrides the world in farm boots and a baseball cap like a drunk and retarded Gulliver on a spree through Lilliput. Wherever it goes, it deposits jingoistic Hollywood fireballs and misogynistic rap lyrics like a hundred thousand diplomatic turds. This from the nation that produced Emerson, Poe, Whitman and Melville.

And yet I love America’s popular culture. I love it with all my heart and soul. I am inspired by its originality, its individualism, its dissonances, its iconoclasm. I love its diversity, its populism, its accessibility. I love the new forms it is constantly inventing. Jazz, the blues, vaudeville, burlesque, rock and roll, Gothic horror, freak show…all of these form have played a major, defining role in my work.

At the same time, I think I reflect the true national character by being a bit schizophrenic. I am not someone who thinks life ought to be lived as one long, perpetual party. I am enthralled with the dime museum and the amusement park…but at bottom, I am a Jeremiah. I have been a critic almost as long as I have been a playwright and producer, writing first for ‘zines, then for major publications like the Village Voice and American Theatre and now on my blog Travalanche. Many of my plays have long, Shavian style didactic prefaces. And while I have presented hundreds of vaudeville and burlesque shows, Barnumesque exhibitions and pop and folk music gatherings, have written books about pop culture, and always seed my plays with elements like original pop music, borscht-belt humor, vaudeville style characterizations and burlesque dances – all that aside, my plays tend to mix that love of popular American forms with a) themes and forms that anchor us in the world by evoking tradition and history; and b) rather stern, angry satire in the tradition of Aristophanes, Swift and Voltaire. I consider it my mission as a playwright and as a citizen both to make theatre that elevates the sensibilities of the audience (i.e., not to “dumb down”), and to make them think about the cruelties and follies being perpetrated in this world, often in their name. Commercial entertainment has the power to bring us all together – but, having no greater agenda than pleasure, annihilates that power. But in a democracy, we are more than consumers, we are citizens. “Entertainment value” should not be a mode of escapism, it should be the spoonful of sugar that contains the medicine.

Immediate Antecedents (Featuring the Gratuitous Use of Bold Faced Names)

This photo was taken during my first New York production Universal Rundle, which was performed at the Vortex Theatre in 1988, a couple of months after my wife and I had premiered it in Portland, Maine. The star of the New York version, Tom Wright (shown) was an old school friend of my sister-in-law’s, and the owner of the Tribeca loft where the two of us stayed for several months when we first moved to the city.

Memories of Tom crashed over me like a wave recently upon meeting film director Bette Gordon and reviewing the documentary film Blank City, both featured in the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival. The latter film depicts the underground film scene in New York in the 1970s and 80s, a movement that has in retrospect been dubbed “No Wave”. Central players included Amos Poe (Blank Generation, 1976); Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, 1984, etc etc etc); Gordon, (Empty Suitcases, 1980; Variety, 1983); Eric Mitchell, Steve Buscemi, Nick Zedd, Lydia Lunch, Debby Harry, Susan Seidelman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cookie Mueller, etc etc etc. Tom Wright—the guy in the picture above—was a total player in this scene.

IN FACT, the year before he starred in my play, he’d directed his buddies Steve Buscemi and Mark Boone Jr. in a two man show at LaMama. A few years before, he’d had a central role in Eric Mitchell’s film Underground USA, along with John Lurie, John Waters regular Cookie Mueller, and Taylor Meade, the seminal experimental theatre and film actor and member of Warhol’s Factory. (Jarmusch was the sound man!) Tom was a frequent collaborator of Taylor’s. I got to meet him a few times; in fact I believe he came to see Universal Rundle. (Bohemian royalty notwithstanding, that early production of U.R. was such a blip that I was able to present a rewrite as “new” at Soho Think Tank’s Sixth Floor Series featuring myself, Jeff Lewonczyck and Hope Cartelli. We hope to mount a full production before too long)

I often denigrate the off-off-Broadway scene as I found it when I moved to New York, but I want to take a moment now to write about the delicious scraps I found here and there in the late 80s that nourished and inspired me, and, to my mind, provided a sort of bridge from the halcyon days of the original off-off movement of the 1960s to the current flourishing indie theatre movement.

Case in point, while we were living in Tom’s loft, we would often walk up Greenwich Street to an amazing theatre called Cucaracha. Run by this bizarre character named Richard Caliban (whom I later got to know at the MacDowell Colony a few years later), Cucharacha quite possibly remains my favorite downtown theatre company despite its demise a decade ago. There was an astounding amount of activity there, and a palpable energy. We would go weekly to see the latest installment of their “Underground Soap Opera” which featured performers like the late Adrienne Shelley and Martin Donovan, whom Hal Hartley was to plunder for his own cinematic stock company.

Also flourishing on the West Side in those days was the Westbeth Theatre Center, which featured a weekly cabaret featuring the likes of the gilded-eared Frank Maya (who later died of AIDS), and Carmelita Tropicana. PS122, naturally was a breeding ground for these types of performers, as was Dixon Place, which was then located in Ellie Covan’s apartment in Alphabet City. My favorite of them all – you could see him/her perform at all these spaces — was the great Ethyl Eichelberger, probably the only performer I’ve seen in my twenty years years who made the slightest impression on me…in the sense of “I want to do that!” (Not the drag, just the SIZE of his performance). He was a great sloppy, improviser who messed with the classics – he could fill a room with the violet fog of his hamming. Rob Prichard of Surf Reality too had known and admired Ethyl—a big portrait of the performer hung in Rob’s apartment behind the club. Alas, Ethyl killed himself rather than suffer the slow decline that would have been inevitable given the AIDs he’d been diagnosed with. The disease had also taken Charles Ludlam, whose artistry by all reports put Ethyl’s to shame, a couple of years before I moved to New York. But I was fortunate enough to catch many performances of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which was then led by Ludlam’s lover and successor Everett Quinton.

(In the early 90s, I worked up the nerve to ask Everett to star in my Columbia, the Germ of the Ocean…he declined, but when we finally got a production going at Chashama, I was thrilled that it did star a real, live ridiculous alum, Julia Pearlstein, who’s since become my gun moll. But Everett did attend, and the production also featured Tim Cusack who later cast Everett in his production Lord Cornbury, so the events follow a sort of satisfying trajectory. Incidentally, that production of Columbia was directed by Ian W. Hill at the Bindlestiff Palace of Variety and also featured Edward Einhorn, Art Wallace, and several other notables. Anyway, much later, I learned that the thread of Julia’s life also connects her to the very wellspring of this movement, Andy Warhol himself, who moved to NY from Pittsburg with her father the realist painter Philip Pearlstein).

Lastly, far, far from the Lower East Side, Tribeca or the Village, I made my first pilgrimage to Coney Island USA in 1989. The place threw me for a loop and it still does. (Go here to hear me gab about the experience for the Coney Island Oral History Project: http://www.coneyislandhistory.org/voices/index.php?g=voices&s=details&object_id=676). Dick Zigun, a Yale educated playwright, found some kind of crazy aesthetic consonance between punk culture and side shows. In fact – to tie it all back together, Charles Ludlam performed at that venue…and I know a lot of the seminal punk bands did too. I was so taken with the place (and the Mermaid Parade, which it produces), that I wrote my play Sea of Love, which I first produced in 1989 on a double bill with Misshapen Jack the Nebraska Hunchback. The opening act was a Coney Island character named Sailorman Jack, and the original production featured Sarah McCord, who has a role in Stanley Tucci’s The Imposters. This double-bill was a blip, too, of course. That’s why I was able to produce a rewrite of Sea of Love at Soho Think Tank’s Ice Factory in 2002, with choreography by Julie Atlas Muz, and a cast featuring Kate Valentine, Bambi the Mermaid, Jeff Lewonczyck, Robert Pinnock, Moira Stone, and Sarah Jane Bunker. And of course, Misshapen Jack has been revived many times, notably in the 1998 NY International Fringe Festival, and the Brick Theatre’s Moral Values Festival. And Sea of Love finally came home to Coney Island in the form of a reading in 2007.

Tony Millionaire’s postcard design for Trav S.D.’s Sea of Love

And now, a shout out to a couple of compeers who must share something like my vantage point on the old world and the new. One is Kevin Draine the Bitter Poet. We met – yikes – twenty years ago — when we were part of the now-defunct Manhattan Punchline’s intern unit, the Comedy Corps. Essentially, in exchange for improv classes, we did all the shit jobs at the theatre. (I ran the light board, a harrowing nightmare that was without a doubt and to this day my worst experience in the theatre). The Punchline was based on Theatre Row, and for the most part the Comedy Corps was a very uptown scene, with at least one foot in the comedy club world. The most famous member of our group ended up being Ileana Douglas. Of the two dozen or so in our year, Debbie Rabbai is the only one I’m aware of who’s still going strong in NYC. And Kev, whom even back then I would bump into at downtown venues like the Home for Contemporary Theatre and Art, which later merged to form HERE. Afterwards, he became the Bitter Poet, an Art Star-like creation that makes me think of him as a kind of old war buddy. Unlike me, he’s retained the Dorian Gray-like ability to look precisely as he did in 1989, so I don’t know what he’s got to be bitter about.

And on the subject of Art Stars, I can’t go without mentioning the Mother Superior of them all, Saint Reverend Jen. She came just a bit afterward, but she is such a fully realized being, and so much the full flowering of so many of those named above that I feel that she, much more than your correspondent, is the strongest link to the previous age of bohemia. The fact that for a time she was the girlfriend of Nick Zedd is only a sidecar to the story. In and of herself, she is a perfect, walking work of self-created art. Indeed, she fully deserves her own post, which she will receive in just a few days, in conjunction with the release of her terrific new book Live Nude Elf (Soft Skull Press).

Until then,

I remain,

Loquaciously yours.