This weekend past (thanks to an old friend) it was my privilege to check out Andre Belgrader’s production of End Game at BAM. The ensemble (John Torturro, Max Casella, Alvin Epstein and Elaine Stritch) was stellar, and the production very enjoyable, if not precisely relaxing. I love Beckett. Some of my earliest plays (Ezekiel’s Wheelchair, The Dorothy Building, Hecate and Beckett) are essentially knock-off copies of his early work. But the thought occurred to me upon seeing this production of End Game how very long ago the twentieth century now seems. Honestly, the play felt as antiquated as Chekhov in a certain way.

Just think: all they cared about back then was the end of the world! And the thought apparently filled them with, at most, nausea and ennui. After all, if we’re all dead (or soon to be) from a nuclear war — and there’s no heaven or hell to die to, to boot — what’s there to do but wallow in the trough of this predicament? Today, we face a more terrifying reality — the fact that in all likelihood, we will SURVIVE.  Oh, yes, there will be destruction, but it will be piecemeal.  City by city, neighborhood by neighborhood, individual by individual. He who goes last will envy he who went first. H’m….come to think of it, that’s what happens in End Game. Never mind.

POSTSCRIPT: As an aperitif following my Saturday night Beckett-feast, I checked out Slightly Known People at 45 Bleecker. These cheerful, energetic young people bring great enthusiasm to their endeavors, and furthermore, hand out free alcohol. Thus is socialism, if not anarchy, loosed upon the world, one Dixie cupful at a time.

What is bouffon?

A difficult question — one finds oneself worrying it like a cold sore or a bad tooth.

The novice is immediately misled by the similarity of the form’s name to “buffoon.” But that is a blind alley. “Bouffon” is to “buffoon” as a wet gremlin is to a dry one. To complicate matters, many bouffon practitioners are also clowns, and similarities exist between the two forms. The get-ups and behavior are grotesque; laughter is produced. But if these are clowns, they are cousins to Stephen King’s “Pennywise”, or the real-life John Wayne Gasey, that inveterate serial killer and sometime children’s birthday party entertainer. No one is jolly in bouffon. The carnation squirts acid; the joy buzzer releases a thousand volts. One laughs uproariously throughout,  but one is constantly checking oneself: “Was that okay? No, that wasn’t okay. It goes against everything I’m supposed to think and feel as a civilized human being. If I laugh, it must be because I am possessed by devils”. Actually, one only starts to think those thoughts before being cut off by the next appalling remark or action onstage.

The best known of American bouffons is Red Bastard, a creation of Eric Davis, whom I first knew as “Mr. Mustard” when he played my little vaudeville show at the Bindlestiff Palace of Variety in Times Square six years ago. When I reviewed him as Red Bastard a few years later, I had this to say:

…a testament to truth in advertising. He’s nothing if not red, and definitely a bastard. [The Show] is almost entirely improvised, combining impish head-games with the audience with a rich vocabulary of gestures reminiscent of commedia dell’arte. He calls the style “bouffon”—whether anyone besides Red Bastard practices it is unknown to this reviewer. Dressed in a union suit full of what I imagine to be soccer balls, the performer resembles a tumorous tomato and comes across like the evil cousin of one of the Fruit of the Loom guys. This Red Bastard, too, seems a descendent of Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen. Like a Wonderland character, he combines a harsh, school-teacherish authoritarianism with arbitrary (but comical) cruelty. Audience members are picked on, and then berated for doing the very thing he requested. Archly pacing the stage like Don Rickles in some demented dream sequence, he savors the audience’s uncertainty and embarrassment, enjoying the spectacle of the fucked-with almost as much as the audience does itself.

In subsequent conversations with Davis and his colleagues (about whom, more below), I have since learned that bouffon is indeed practiced by others – Davis himself learned it at the hands of teacher Sue Morrison. Bouffon is a form with deep Medieval roots. Like the Sacred Monsters it evokes, it has lain festering in the swamp just outside the village these many centuries. As with Freemasonry, one feels the modern-day practitioners are less part of an unbroken chain of initiates than merely inspired by the Carnivalesque rituals of the Dark Ages.

No matter. If a vampire sleeps for centuries, it is no less a vampire when it awakes. I can’t help thinking that the Prophet of bouffon’s resurrection must have been Antonin Artaud, with his talk of plague, all-consuming fire, alchemy, disorder and madness. The characters, all freaks from humanity’s fringes, reflexively deride, degrade, mock, and disrupt everything and everyone they see and touch – including themselves. At the same time, they take such pleasure, such relish in their actions, that it is impossible not to root for them, and even wish to live vicariously through them. They live like bogies in  the sub-basements of our own psyches…beneath ego, beneath superego, and even beneath id. It is a performing style for Rabelais’ Gargantua, for Jarry’s Ubu, for Richard III, for the Grinch.

And, surprisingly enough, for the timeless American classic, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. The play’s three main characters are, after all, grotesques – a retarded cripple; an alcoholic homosexual (back when it was considered a mental illness); and their delusional and controlling mother. As directed by Davis, and played by the members of Ten Directions, these characters become subjected to something like an interpretive highjacking. At the top of their version, The Bouffon Glass Menajoree, they crawl out of a box like the evils of mankind from Pandora’s Jar. Aimee Leigh German plays Amanda as a 350 pound heifer, alternately gobbling a stick of butter and a banana she pulls out of her bra. Her monstrousness seems to stem from the fact that she doesn’t know what she’s turned into. Her attempts to be sexy or to play the suburban Midwestern mother both seem as horrifying and as unnatural as if they were being performed by the Shmoo. Lynn Berg plays Tom as a ballet-dancing hunchback – one with the spirit of a salesman or a game show host. This gives his relentless verbal cruelty an added thrust, a sort of unbearable ring of truth – a Mrs. Danvers who would laugh to see EVERYONE jump out the window. As Laura, Audrey Crabtree is the most disturbing of all – a sort of post-mortem suicide victim in a hospital johnny and adult diapers. It is Crabtree who goes farthest out on the psychological limb, playing head-games with the audience and the other characters, until we begin to wonder how much of a “performance” this is.

Indeed, something rather extraordinary seems afoot. For neither are German, Berg and Crabtree “playing” bouffon characters, nor are their bouffon creations playing the Williams characters. It would be more accurate to say that the performers have “summoned” these bouffons and are possessed by them, rather like the little girl in The Exorcist – and then the bouffons proceed to play with and blow off the Williams script.

Something metaphysical has happened. Yes, the nervous systems of three popular performers are providing facial expressions and movements we connect with the people who usually inhabit these bodies, and whom we’ve seen in other contexts, in other performances. But their souls have been replaced. Genies have been let out of bottles. As Ed Wood put it, “creeping things crawl out of the slime…”

While the production cleaves surprisingly strongly to the original William’s script, the main business at hand is the interaction with the audience. Some of this business is obvious (Crabtree picking and eating her own scabs) some of it so amazingly subtle and perverse you really need to have your antenna out (Berg passing out free beers and coming close to—but never giving a beer to—a cranky audience member). In every performance, an audience member is chosen to be “The Gentleman Caller” and he becomes a sort of stand-in for us, and we get to live through him, wishing we were truly among these magical creations as we all wish to be Max in Where the Wild Things Are.

The beauty of the theatre is that it is a safe space, and this is why it must always be as dangerous as possible. It is the one place where evil may be enacted and thus purged without harming a soul, because its transgressions are make-believe and symbolic. The high may be made low; the low may be made high. The ugly may be made beautiful; the beautiful ugly. Like death, it is the great leveler. Ultimately, I think a partial answer to the question “What is bouffon?” is that, whatever it is, it is not a noun, but a verb. Bouffon must be witnessed first hand.

The Bouffon Glass Menajoree will be at the Green Room, 45 Bleecker, NYC, through May 27.

One of the ironies of show business (and by extension American culture) is that the grossest stereotypes are often perpetrated by the misrepresented groups themselves. Exaggeration is the elixir of comedy; liberally mixed with “write what you know”, a heady cocktail results, one that is only partially composed of veritas (despite what the worst among us seem to think)

Thus for over half a century, the wider culture has been on the receiving end of a misconception of Jewish women cooked up by Jewish comedians of both sexes: that they are domineering, materialistic, frigid in the bedroom, and lacking in both self-restraint and taste. Now, your correspondent has enjoyed – no, had – no, been with – uh, no – uh, been involved with – yeah – been involved with approximately a half dozen Jewish girlfriends over his long career as a Hebrewphile, and he is here to tell you that they are NOT frigid in the bedroom. Uh, or the rest of it.

As the great Bert Lahr used to put it, “Where do you get that stuff?” Apparently things are different in Long Island, because in Manhattan (at least my Manhattan) you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting some brilliant, sexy, funny, down-to-earth Yiddische Mama. (I hit one with a dead cat only today, but that was on purpose. It’s a little game we play).Granted, I am in the theater, and the downtown theatre at that. It attracts the crème de la crème of any ethnicity. Nevertheless to my mind, for every Leah in New York there are a hundred Rachels, and I will always strive to be the first in line for their belly-dances. And if you don’t know what that means, we have nothing more to talk about.

Now, as Billy Crystal said (too often) in Mr. Saturday Night: “Look what happened”. Up at the Zipper Factory, Goddess Perlman, a comedienne I’d previously known only by reputation, and because she’s in my new film, has re-launched her long-running Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad show, a mix of stand-up, sexy dance numbers and funny songs. These Nice Jewish Girls have not gone bad because they are past the expiration date. If anything, they have gone good. To my mind, the show is above all a showcase for Perlman’s talent, which combines comical ability, musical skill, and most importantly, in the best vaudevillian tradition, will power. “Goddamn it, this is me, this about me, I am up here, I exist, I love it, and don’t kid yourself, this why we are all here.” Personally, this is why I go to the theatre; in my view, on some level it’s why the art form exists. I don’t want to see a bunch of people in black leotards breathing at the same time. It may do something for them; it does nothing for me. On the other hand, a Fiddler on the Roof strip number – that’s art with a capital A, a capital R and a capital T. In addition to her own schtick, Perlman presents what she calls “a Pupu platter of Jews…or a JuJu platter of poos.” A rock/Klezmer arrangement called The Foreskins is the back-up band, there is a cast of cute Jewish chickies of vastly different shapes and sizes for the chorus, and the variety bill consists mostly of stand-up comediennes with respectable tv credits – none of whom are remotely like Joan Rivers or Henny Youngman’s wife.

If no Jewish men will date these women, I’m currently available.

I believe the show is up through April and there’s info at nicejewishgirlsgonebad.com.

London Friends, and Friends of Those in London:

This is an invitation to see and hear my first play to cross the Puddle. Grey Light Productions is presenting readings of my experimental play EZEKIEL’s WHEELCHAIR in their American Voices series on March 11, 14 & 22 at 7:30pm at the Greenwich Playhouse, Greenwich Station Forecourt, 189 Greenwich High Road, London.

In this Beckett-flavored one-act, two women obsess about the man in their life: a Stephen Hawking-like genius who has drained all color from the universe…

For more info: 020 88589256
boxoffice@galleontheatre.co.uk
www.galleontheatre.co.uk

I hope you can make it!

I remain,

yours,

Trav S.D.

Rare are those moments – horrible and wonderful – when our waking lives assume the heightened quality of a strange and unexpected dream. Surely that is what Ann Bannon is thinking these days, given the Second Coming of her Sapphic Savior Beebo Brinker over a half century after she was created. Penned in the closeted fifties and early sixties, cherished by a small but avid cult following since, this series of lesbian pulp novels has recently been turned into an off-off (and now an off) Broadway stage play called The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, inspiring fans of the book to travel from as far away as San Francisco and Saskatchewan to see it. The Beebo Brinker creators know what the producers of The Bible knew – it pays to adapt a classic.

To folks in the lesbian community (of which I am merely what you might call an “interested observer”), the Beebo Brinker novels are apparently a sort of founding scripture — the “tablets”, if you will. More than just the steamy exploitational outings their paperback covers might suggest, the books seem to have offered their fans feelings of validation and acceptance, and to have cast a much longer shadow than most similar so-called pulp publications. They tell tales of house wives and farm girls coming to the big city, finding and joining the gay community – and not getting struck by lightning.

The producers of the play were and are adamantine in their determination not to have this production be a mere exercise in camp. While the play contains many light and (if you’ll excuse the expression) even broad moments, the main tone of the production (currently playing at 37arts in NYC) is one of earnestness and respect. And here, by God, is where they really, really get it right.

The late Susan Sontag was of the opinion (certainly borne out by the historical record) that the gay community was a principle driving force behind the invention of camp in the first place, which is ironic. But as Sontag pointed out, the camp attitude is sort of one of despair. It is a disowning of the thing one loves. One feels guilty for loving Mildred Pierce. One feels even guiltier for wanting to dress like Mildred Pierce. So Mildred Pierce is hung in effigy. There is a cruelty in it, an ungenerousness, a killer instinct, one at least partially directed against oneself. Furthermore – it is superficial, and it is easy.

The step beyond that tone of mere destructiveness was there from the beginning, ironically. Charles Ludlam, often considered one of the founding “mothers” of camp, is said to have brought tears to the eyes of his audiences with his Camille. Compassion and humanity – isn’t that what the theater is for? Cruelty is for the coliseum.

I felt a kinship with the philosophy behind Beebo Brinker. A number of years ago I was fortunate enough to take part in the Ed Wood Festival produced by Ian Hill and Frank Cwiklik and their respective companies (GeminiCollisonworks and DMTheatrics). I was overjoyed to be able to do, having been a fan of Wood’s movies since the early 90s when I was introduced to them by my psychopharmacologist and pedicurist Robert Pinnock. (Prior to that, I’d only really known about Plan 9, because it was the name of a garage band in Rhode Island.) My colleagues and I have had many a discussion on the silly topic of Ed Wood, and there’s an attitude about him and his work I believe we all share. All of us, at some relatively early stage, moved BEYOND a mere scoffing at Ed Wood’s ineptitude as a film-maker (which, don’t get me wrong, is near total in every conceivable way) to an APPRECIATION for the virtues he possesses. Anyone can laugh at something “bad.” And I assure you, I continue to howl all through Wood’s films, and to quote his terrible lines, and to impersonate his terrible actors. I must, or I wouldn’t have watched these films dozens of times.

And this is the crux of it. Something about these films compelled me to watch them dozens of times. And not just me, but many strangers from around the country – as though we all had the Close Encounters tune planted in our heads. I’ll be damned if I know what it is. I do think Wood is very good at conjuring up an atmosphere. I also think that since HE was such a huge film fan, he was able to transcend his ineptitude by conjuring countless visions planted in the collective unconscious by the Hollywood dreamsmiths: Bela Lugosi, Vampira, Tor Johnson, flying saucers, mad scientists, noir era hoodlums and gangsters. They don’t have to be in any plausible story, what they say doesn’t have to make sense – they just have to be there, as though someone had thrown some comic books, Universal horror posters and 45 rpm records into a blender and made movie slaw. And that’s kind of how dreams are, isn’t it? And, probably most important of all, Wood went at it with heart, with an absolute, vulnerable assurance – a vision – that every choice he was making was the right one. He believed in it. Belief – in this cynical world – is a rare and beautiful thing. And that virtue – that simplicity – in Wood’s films is to me a superior quality to the impulse to ridicule somebody else for some obvious but harmless fault.

And so, too with Beebo Brinker. Bannon’s storylines (here adapted by Linda Chapman and Kate Moira Ryan) about Greenwich Village sexual awakenings, trysts and triangles could easily be the stuff of a rude guffaws. Good Lord – Hitler took a bunch of 20^th century modernist masterpieces on a museum tour of Germany for the Nazis to laugh at. It is a boorish impulse.

These days the museum world has a firmly established category for folk art, or naïve art. There, it is treated with respect, talked about, criticized. Often such painting will have a didactic aspect that is anathema to “above all that” high-brows. Some years ago, I was at a gallery opening for a show of paintings by the Rev. Howard Finster (best known perhaps for supplying the Talking Heads with an album cover). Rev. Finster’s paintings are religious – and how the wine-drinkers chortled at his pronouncements of faith, right to his face. The man had a vision, and it ought to have been respected, no matter how uneven his hand in applying the paint. In the film world, the closest thing we have to a similar idea is the auteur theory, once controversial, but now so mainstream no one even thinks about it anymore. Essentially, it is the idea that some films previously considered “pulp” – say Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night – are worthy of serious appreciation by critics. In the theatre, some have extended a similar respect to actors, or, that is to say, non-actors. Many fine directors have realized many fine productions in forms we call “community theater” or “pageantry” using untrained, but enthusiastic amateurs. So why not the text? Naïve art for the theatre. I say it has a legitimate place, and requires no plain brown wrapper.

I remain,

Your humble and obedient,

Trav S.D.  

P.S.: Also, this play has two chicks making out.

WHAT IS TRAV S.D.?

Trav S.D. n. 1. Travesty…parody, satire, burlesque and the grotesque. 2. A potent hallucinogen resembling LSD.  3. The alter ego of Donald Travis Stewart (born Westerly, Rhode Island, Nov. 8, 1965)

 CAPSULE BIO

Performer, writer and producer Trav S.D. is the author of 50 plays, 200 published articles, and the book No Applause, Just Throw Money, The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous (Faber & Faber, 2005). A frequent radio guest and public speaker, his voice has been heard on the Leonard Lopate Show (WNYC), The Joey Reynolds Show (WOR), Cat Radio Café (WBAI), and a dozen others throughout the country. He is currently the host of the nytheatrecast, a regular podcast on nytheatre.com. He has contributed to American Theater, the Village Voice, Time Out New York, the New York Sun, Reason, and many others. His play House of Trash was published in Plays and Playwrights 2001. His works have been presented at Joe’s Pub (the Public Theatre), Theater for the New City, LaMama, the Ohio Theatre (Soho Think Tank), HERE, and, regionally and internationally, in London, Portland, Minneapolis, Austin, Seattle, and Providence.

 INTERESTING FACTS 

• Once worked as a personal assistant for international singing sensation Tony Bennett

• Has interviewed: Margaret Cho, Bill Irwin, Harry Anderson, Penn & Teller, the Upright Citizen’s Brigade, Jules Feiffer, Andy Borowitz, Rose Marie, Oskar Eustace, David Ives, Jay Johnson, Ralph Bronner (of Dr. Bronner’s soaps) Uncle Floyd, and dozens of other unique American characters.

• Presented hundreds of vaudeville, burlesque acts and other performers since 1996, including recording star Lizzie West, political performance artist Reverend Billy, sideshow artist Todd Robbins (Carnival Knowledge),  bearded lady Jennifer Miller (Circus Amok), the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, clown Red Bastard,  burlesque dancers World Famous Bob, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, and scores of others.

• Began doing stand-up comedy as teenager, winning a state-wide comedy competition in his home state of Rhode Island.

• One of his high school friends was Pulitzer-prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri.

• Was an early co-producer of Tim Haskell’s Nightmare haunted house

• Never finished college, but has lectured at Columbia University, the University of Kansas, the Brooklyn Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Barnum Museum, Makor (92^nd Street Y), the Theater Museum, Eldridge Street Synagogue, the Ziegfeld Club, the Moisture Festival (Seattle), and numerous other institutions.

• Has literally played the Palace

• Is 1/64^th Cherokee Indian

• Is on the Board of Advisors of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus

• Attended NYU film school, where one of his fellow students was Drea de Mateo (Joey, the Sopranos) who appeared in one of his films

• Grew up in the area of Rhode Island written about by John Casey in his novel Spartina. It is across the Narragansett Bay from where Spalding Gray grew up

• His mother’s family has been in New England since the 1630s

• His father was from rural Tennessee, and grew up in a family of sharecroppers during the Great Depression (true fact).

• His parents were never married

• First started using the handle Trav S.D. in 1986, while a student at Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence.

• Interned at the Manhattan Punchline Theatre in the early 1990s, where scene partners included Ileana Douglas and Kevin Draine the Bitter Poet

• Founded a theatre company The New Facktory for Excentrick Acktors in 1992, which became Mountebanks in 1995. An elaborate 60-page manifesto was written and distributed at the founding, excerpts from which may occasionally be exhumed for this blog, mostly for the purposes of ridicule.

• Is a former altar boy, crossing guard, and hall monitor

• Does not drive

• Was born with a potentially life-threatening condition called pyloric stenosis, which was treated with an operation at age six weeks

• Is the father of two exceptional boys