FringeNYC 16: Immaculate Degeneration

I hate the idea that one person shows, or one woman shows in particular, are in need of any sort of special pleading, but I find that is so often the case. I like seeing people tell their stories and the stories of others, lives as led and adventures taken and embarked upon, both fictional and true, hilarious and heart-rending and all stops in between. And it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog, that the lives of American teenage girls are of endless interest to this particular critic.

Pamela Sabaugh's Immaculate Degeneration hit me on a lot of those levels. I share with her a suburban/urban punk rock girlhood (mine in NYC, hers in Detroit), the need for escape and the wanting of better things common to most artists of all stripes.  The great thing that distinguishes Sabaugh's journey to independence in these United States as an artist, is her partial blindness, caused by a congenital disorder (juvenile macular degeneration) which presented itself in Junior High. She talks about how the onset of blindness interfered with her social life, her schoolwork, and her badass-ery. And most movingly, about how it limited her freedom, about growing up in the motor city unable to drive. 

Sabaugh's story, like all deeply personal stories worth telling, is bigger than herself. She tells about growing up in a subdivision in which pedestrians are viewed with suspicion. About a decaying city in thrall to the almighty automobile, in the epicenter of the public transportation-free rust belt. Her visual impairment made her dependent on others in a way that was both humiliating and sometimes dangerous (having a friend wander off with a guitarist at a local rock fest when the bus never shows). For her, moving to NYC meant not only artistic freedom, but having a true personal autonomy. She has a song about the MTA that actually made me cry. Her songs and voice are are lovely. I was really hoping there would be a CD in the press kit as I would have immediately loaded them onto my ipod.

Mostly, this is a joyful piece of work. Sabaugh is a delightful person to spend 90 minutes with, and in the spirit of full journalistic disclosure, I have to say that I do know Pamela, and her director/husband Fred Backus has long been a friend and a collaborator on various projects throughout the years. I'm not certain if Fred has directed before, but Immaculate Degeneration hits that really difficult balance of being both really tight (there's nothing I would cut, and I almost never say that, friends or not), yet being loose and casual enough that you feel a part of the event in a really nice way.

Pamela has had a lot of challenges, but for my money, her considerable gifts, both personal and artistic have enabled her to embrace them and allow them to inform but not define who she as as both a person and an artist. A very difficult balancing act, which it was my pleasure to watch her not only achieve, but transcend, with grace.

Immaculate Degeneration (click for tickets)

Woodward Avenue Productions

Writer: Pamela Sabaugh
Director: Fred Backus
The Huron Club, 15 Vandam St.
Remaining Performances: Tue 14 @ 4pm, Sat 18 @ 1:45,  Sun 19 @ 7pm,  Wed 22 @ 4:30

FringeNYC 16

You know how when you get together with your siblings or cousins you can say super disparaging things about your grandpa or aunt or mom? But how if some person not in your family said awful things about your grandpa or aunt or mom you'd be really, really mad? Yeah. That basically sums up my feelings about criticism of FringeNYC in a nutshell. Unless you were in certain rooms round about 1998 or 1999, I don't want to hear about it. However, if you were, let it fly!

The 16th edition of the New York International Fringe Festival begins tonight, something that makes me feel shockingly old. This also marks the first festival since the very first in which I am a complete civilian. I haven't been on the festival staff since 2003 (nine years!). For better or worse, I did all my mourning for the early years of the festival in slow motion while I was still involved with it so, honestly, what I mostly feel is relief.

Let me explain.

A number of years ago I attended a book event at which art and performance luminaries of the 70s and 80s spoke about the downtown art scene back then, and about the state of the current art and performance scene. I remember Bogosian speaking and a few others, and person after person went on and on about how much more creative, what a better sense of community, how exciting it all was compared the scene now. Needless to say, I was furious.

Then the sainted Michael Musto got to the podium. The very first thing he did was blast (nicely) all the previous speakers for their criticism of the current young artists. He said (and I'm paraphrasing wildly - this is from my memory of an event like seven years ago), "It seemed so great back then because we were so young! Of course everything seemed so much better, we're all old and cynical now." Bless him!

I'm old enough that those (now curmudgeonly) 70s and 80s artists were a part of what my idea of the world of art was like. Downtown lofts and punk rock and nightclubs (the kind without all that table service nonsense) and galleries in Soho. I read the Voice (back when you had to pay for the privilege) and Interview (when Andy was still alive). I smoked cigarettes in the East Village, I saw bands play at CBGB and The Ritz. I wrote short stories about paranoid, displaced Lizard People living in New York. I became an actor. I drew pictures. I dreamed of Cafe Cino. In the 90s I interned at Circle Rep, Lanford Wilson's company and I became a playwright. That led me to the Present Company and FringeNYC.

You'll likely be reading lots about the early days of FringeNYC in my memoirs one day so I'll keep it short. We were so young. We worked so hard. It was messy and dirty and punk rock. We had the best time and it was hell. It was equal parts magic and exhaustion. We were very, very young. And I want to be very clear about one thing: FringeNYC gave me my life. I can't even imagine what my life would look like now without it and the downtown theater scene of the late 90s, because my life would look 100% different.

So, I look at Fringe NYC now and it looks like an institution. I was a participant last year and there are a lot of rules. I look at the kids working there and all I can think is, "my god it looks dull" and "poor things, they'll never know the fun and horror of what we had". And then I realize that I'm just old. Nothing is new to me and these young people need to find their own way as I did. And their community seems a little invisible to me because I'm not a part of it, and I'm not welcome because I'm not in the trenches. I can keep my memories of the festival's gritty, punk rock past intact. The festival as it now stands may not be my festival, but that's okay. It's theirs. I'm sure I'll be reading some of their blog posts 20 years down the road, writing about how very young they were in 2012.

The New York International Fringe Festival begins today. I will be covering it from the depths of my cold, black heart. Check back frequently.

Speakeasy Dollhouse: Murder, Dolls and Cocktails in Coffee Cups.

Back in 1935, Cynthia von Buhler's grandfather, Frank Spano, was murdered. Possibly a gangland hit. Possibly tied to Dutch Schultz. This is the kind of bloody family past that is so potent, so laden with untold secrets, it's kind of inevitable that the bodies cannot, will not remain buried.  Miss von Buhler wants to figure out what happened. This true life jazz age murder in her family has inspired her to create a multi-platform exploration of the crime, performed by dolls, actors (including the completely ubiquitous friend of The Cabinet Jennifer Harder), chorus girls and the audience.

I haven't seen the book version, save for the photos posted online, but from what I've seen, they are elaborately designed little worlds, and I hope they are exhibited at some point. Inspired in part by Frances Glessner Lee's Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, she has meticulously designed and created tiny little sets inhabited by dolls which enact her grandfather's death, the events surrounding the murder and scenes from her own life.

A couple of Mondays ago, me and a select group of my lady actor/artist friends attended the human size portion of Miss von Buhler's project which crops up every few months in The Back Room - what used to be Lansky's Lounge, and way before that, an actual speakeasy in back of Ratner's. It's best described as a combination of interactive theater, art installation, cabaret and fancy dress party. Guided by cops (dirty, of course) into a bakery area in which cannolis are proffered, one is then led one party at a time into the speakeasy proper. Heavy on atmosphere and fun, and light on narrative, the attention to detail impresses. Howard Fishman's combo perform period perfect jazz, cocktails are served in coffee cups, everyone looks fabulous. The one criticism I had would be that I would have liked a bit more direction in terms of where one should be looking. But, that's just a quibble, it hardly matters.

We drank many cognac based cocktails out of our coffee cups, saw the lovely Veronica Varlow perform, at one point, I heard someone playing a ukulele, turned around and Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer were right above me, singing Makin' Whoopie.


It's a beautiful space and we had a lovely time. No murders were solved when I was there. It's not some cheesy, interactive whodunnit murder game. It's an excavation of the past, an attempt to find at least the feeling of the truth by recreating it whole, and to simultaneously host a lovely party.

The past is a mysterious country, and as I've said so many times here before, all of my past is tied to this glorious city. Most of my New York Irish ancestors were lawyers and judges and newspaper men and real estate developers. Most of my family's contributions to this city have been definitively erased by time and rebuilding and short memories. At the time Miss von Buhler's grandfather was shot down, one of my illustrious great uncles was working at the Manhattan District Attorney's office, prosecuting high profile jazz age murders. I have to wonder if any part of this story made its way across his desk. This city is sometimes a surprisingly small place, so it's possible. The ghosts of the past never stop walking.

The next performances of Speakeasy Dollhouse are August 4th and 6th. Tickets are available here.

Photo credit: © Cynthia von Buhler, 2012

All illustrations © this blog.

What Caviglia Did On Her Summer Vacation!: An Introduction

As has been briefly mentioned here, and as everyone is both buzzing and complaining and celebrating about: this June is madness. Theater abounds. Nearly everyone I know is involved in something. People are having birthdays, Same Sex marriage is now legal in Gotham. I'm at work on various projects, some involving pictures, some involving words, some involving both. And then there's the constant business of keeping it all afloat, AKA paying the bills. So there's been little time to spare to write it all up and I'm vaguely overwhelmed with the task, truth be told. But, never on to shrug off a challenge, here I go!

The following posts are a much boozier, artier, gorier version of the typical "What I did with my summer vacation" essay. At left is a picture I drew at Jazz & Sketch last Thursday at the Society of Illustrators (two minute pose, lovely model). Here at The Cabinet, we refuse to be either bored or idle in this City of our Dreams!

Miss Saturn!

My delightful inamorato is posting a series of pieces on modern vaudevillians he has featured on the stage of his American Vaudeville Theatre in honor of its 15th anniversary and the attendant FringeNYC show celebrating this occasion.

Today's post is all about the lovely Miss Saturn, so I decided to pull a sketch I did a few years ago out of the archives.

Jasper Jaxon at Dixon Place and a Minor Ode To the Forgotten Pinup Girls of Yore

It's sometimes a sad old world, isn't it?

Last month, 1959 Playboy Playmate (July if you're curious) and B-movie actress Yvette Vickers was found dead in her house by a neighbor. Now, don't get the wrong idea, there was no scandal per se, she died of heart failure at the age of 82 or so. The thing is, she's been dead for nearly a year the medical examiner said, as her body was actually mummified.

Which, in a startling segue, leads me to my inamorato (the man self-styled Trav S.D.) and his performance of The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon at Dixon Place. The performance was lovely, if I do say so. Jasper Jaxon is based on real life bank robber Elmer McCurdy, who upon his death in 1911 was over-embalmed and was displayed in various traveling side-shows and theater lobbies with various purposes until it was forgotten who this fellow had been or even that he was an actual mummified person and not just a prop. Like all great true American stories it is both tragic and hilarious.

Along with her Playmate of the Month fame, Miss Vickers had a pretty impressive monster movie career. She has the typical career of small roles in big pictures (her debut was in Sunset Boulevard!) and big roles in small pictures. Most well known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, she worked in television through the 1970s and appeared in other B horror movies, including Attack of the Giant Leeches, whose wonderful poster you can see below.

The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon is a long, rambling and extremely catchy song in the style of Woody Guthrie with definite shades of Bob Dylan. There's a certain species of Americana that seems to have fallen out of favor recently in our glittery techno present, and it's an awful shame mostly. In general, a sense of history is slowly being eroded. The internet in some ways both helps and hinders. There's such wonderful access to nearly everything, but the ease of finding whatever piece of whatever what puzzle one comes across, also serves to flatten it somewhat. The screen with which we view everything can decontextualize nearly everything until it's all just floating in a digital present.

Yvette Vickers cheerfully attended film festivals around the country in her old age. The fact that she could have disappeared for so long without anyone noticing breaks one's heart a little. The world is a lonely place for so many people, and one of my biggest fears, as it is for so many childless people, is that an end like that of Miss Vickers awaits us in the future. Both Yvette Vickers and the hapless crook Jasper Jaxon lived strange, picaresque and particularly American lives, only to wind up mummified, stuck in the parts of the newspapers designated for the weird and the uncanny, ready made to be turned, as all good American stories should be, into folk songs and B movies.

The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon will go on, no doubt and I will be sure to let you know of an recordings or return engagements.

Win Free Tickets to Five Things!

Well, one thing. And that one thing is Five Things.

Recession blues got you down? Have you been pining to see a show with comedy, romance and a song about Nathan Fillion? Want to see a delightful show in The Brick's Comic Book Theater Festival?

If so, today is your LUCKY DAY.

Just head over to my delightful inamorato's blog, and you can have the opportunity to win a pair.

My rave of Five Things is here.

The Comic Book Theater Festival: Five Things

We seem to be going through a phase. And by "we", I don't actually mean "me". I mean people, or really, our culture seems to be going through a phase. We seem to be going through a phase in which in order for any sort of art to be taken seriously, awful things must happen in it. Even art for children! There is death and torture and apocalypse and dystopia of all stripes. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the gloom as much as the next person, but not, dear lord, to the exclusion of all else.

I am of the mind that qualities such as "charm" and "humor" and "good heartedness" are due for a comeback. I mean, they are certainly less plentiful than the gloomier ones, so doesn't that make them more valuable? Which brings me to Jillian Tully's play Five Things which is being presented as a part of the Brick's Comic Book Theater Festival. I saw it's premier performance yesterday afternoon and was thoroughly charmed by it.

On its surface, it's about terribly twee and simple things: a girl and her ukulele ode to Nathan Fillion, her genius, scientist cat who attempts to create a pair of opposable thumbs, a Fairy Dragmother, dates both bad and good, and tap dancing (done by the cat). But, like in Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books, the glittery surface is just a way of engaging larger ideas: those of identity and growing up and of making a real connection to other human beings. As always, in the spirit of full disclosure, Jillian is a friend, and her mode of communication is as much tap dance and pictures as it is words. The comic book aspect of the play is done through thought bubbles and signage of sound effects and wears it all lightly and well. As someone who loves comic books, but has pretty much zero interest in Superheroes, this was likely my sort of Comic Book Theater Festival show. It's very funny and sweet and well worth an hour or two of your life. There is science and romance and tap dancing. How many shows can one say that about, really?

Five Things

The Brick, 575 Metropolitan Ave. Brooklyn, NYC

There are three more performances: Sun 6/5, 6:30pm, Fri 6/10, 7pm, Sun 6/12, 6pm

Purchase tickets here

Below, see Jillian doing research for her role:

Top photo: Ruby (Jillian Tully) and the Girl (Sarah Eliana Bisman), photo credit Beth Hommel

Bottom photo: Ruby (Jillian Tully) communes with a civilian cat, photo credit Beth Hommel

Todd Robbins: Play Dead

Many, many years ago, boys and girls, they used to have outdoor rock concerts on Pier 84 on the West Side. I remember seeing tons of bands there at one point: you could drink cheap under-age beers, and there were promoters giving out free packs of crappy cigarettes. I mean, can you picture that happening now? I can't remember everyone I saw there, but I do know I saw The Psychedelic Furs (awful), The Cure, The Smiths and other people I can no longer remember. They were all-ages and general admission shows and afterward, we would walk over to Times Square and go to the (now departed) Howard Johnson's.

It was essentially a diner with a ticky tacky bar at the back, and they'd let you sit there for hours nursing your diet coke. It was late at night and aside from us and some of the usual late night Times Square weirdos, there was always a table of magicians. I can't remember if we recognized Penn & Teller from television or what (this was around '86, long before they were as famous as they are now), but we somehow wound up chatting with them one night.

A couple of years later, when I was 18, I saw Penn & Teller's show off-Broadway with my boyfriend at the time who was (among other things) a juggler who had attended the Ringling Bros's school down in Florida. As you can see, there has been a kind of striking consistency to my life. I was plucked from the audience and levitated (see below).

Fast forward a decade or so, and I'm working at FringeNYC where one of the first things I hear about our Production Manager is that her boyfriend eats light bulbs. When I met him, he seemed terribly dapper and affable and not at all what I pictured when I heard he ate light bulbs. Well, my former co-worker is now Mrs. Todd Robbins, they have a delightful son, and I've seen him perform many, many times over the past decade or so: at FringeNYC, off-Broadway, and at Monday Night Magic. Todd Robbins is something of a carnivalesque Renaissance Man: actor, sideshow freak, Ragtime piano player (he performs frequently with Woody Allen's band), and magician. For a long and entertaining post about Mr. Robbins, go here. If you walk past the sideshow at Coney Island, and you hear a voice beckoning to you from the loudspeakers: that voice is his.

All this self-indulgent prelude brings me to the spooky wonderment that is Todd Robbins's and Teller's Play Dead. I'm embarrassed to say, that last weekend was the first time I'd seen it, as it's been open for some months now. I blathered endlessly about myself, partly because I don't want to say too much about the show as so many of its pleasures are contingent on surprise.

As you enter the Players Theater on Bleecker, you first see a dire warning above the Box Office. That if you are claustrophobic or prone to panic attacks, please alert the staff before entering, as parts of the show are performed in total darkness. Now: I am someone who is claustrophobic and prone to panic attacks and all sorts of general jumpiness. But, this is a spook show and I intended to be scared. And I was. And I was completely and thoroughly entertained. The show is full of magic and scares and tall tales and misdirection and gaffs and frights. In other words, it is a near perfect thing.

I love horror, but as I've mentioned in this blog before, I am seriously distressed by what passes for entertainment, what I like to call "torture porn". I don't understand it and I think it points to a sickness in our culture that people watch such fare as "entertainment". Todd's horror and frights are of a more old fashioned sort, and he demonstrated that if done right, with great authenticity and skill, they can be very scary indeed. At bottom, the show works because Todd is such a terrific performer and teller of tales. This total scardy-cat knew she was in thoroughly good hands when the lights went out.

Even if those hands were covered in blood.

(Photo credits: picture of Todd Robbins by Carol Rosegg, picture of Howard Johnson's via ephemeralnewyork)

Class: Cephalopoda

My fascination with squid and octopus and all the members of the illustrious Class of Cephalopoda (Phylum: Mollusca, Kingdom: Animalia) began almost ten years ago as I worked on what I referred to as my 9/11 play. It remains unfinished and is likely unfinishable. I called it Tricks With Make-Up and it is set in a barroom in which all surfaces are obscured by a dull gray ash. Whether it is purgatory or some kind of post-apocalyptic liminal neverland, remains unclear. In it, a Bird, a Killer, a Spy, a Victim, The Last Leopard and The Second To Last Leopard (Felidae Panthera Pardus) enact various power plays. Bird, in particular, is a monstrous, Stalin-like figure (in her home forrest, she sports the title "Chairmistress of Freedom, Animality and Discipline").

But it was a mess. A Frankensteinian creature created from pieces of other projects, ruminations on Jack the Ripper, reading I'd done on animal behavior and the deep, strange nihilism I felt after the fall of the towers which engendered a certainty in me that the human species was a complete failure in evolutionary terms. And I had an equally crazy design concept. I thought there should be a giant, animatronic squid suspended from the ceiling with enormous tentacles that wrapped around the audience. During the play, the tentacles would move with a barely perceptible slowness, the audience unaware of what was happening until the tentacles were everywhere, trapping them in their seats.

Now, I realized that the the chances of this design concept coming to fruition were, to say the least, low. But in preparation for the momentous day when my most extravagant dreams could become perfectly realized, I started researching squid and the other members of the family cephalopoda and became, in a word, obsessed. Giant Squid seemed more like creatures from the imagination of a 19th century fantasist, rather than something that could actually, you know, exist. Where we have water in our bodies, they have ammonia. Their espophogus bisects their brains. They possess a starting and uncanny intelligence. They use tools. Octopuses are prone to nervous upset and have been known to start eating their own arms. They are beautiful and other-worldly. They are nearly all venemous to one degree or another. They are beaked. There may be even larger, completely undiscovered squid that live in the deepest, most unknown parts of the ocean (some electrical pings indicate that this is not fantasy).

I joined all the squid list serves, I read all the latest scientific findings. They are amazing. I think one of my fascinations with these remarkable creatures is that they are nothing like us. They are completely, to their core, other-worldly and unknowable. Chimps and Bonobos are near relatives; dogs and humans have co-existed for millions of years and likely evolved symbiotically (for example, humans exhibit dog-like pack behavior that doesn't occur in other primates); dolphins, if fish shaped, are fellow mammals, and seem at least somewhat willing to interact with us. But with the clever cephalopod, we have no common language of any kind. Any attempts to get through have been met with a blank wall of nothing.

In our depictions of the residents of other planets, we most often have dreamed up humanoid creatures. Even if they were hostile, we could still interact. And if they were utterly unhuman (like Aunt Beast in a Wrinkle in Time) we could still breach the difference through touch or sound or something. Thus far, there has been no cephalopodean Rosetta Stone of any sort. To be honest, I don't know if I want one.

But I'm an artist, not a scientist.

My BFF sent this to me yesterday, a gorgeous film of a Dumbo Octopus. You can watch it here, as Blogger is being all fiddly and will not upload it.

Playwright Wars 2011: This is the way things work when they are broken

The thing is, art doesn't exist in an empty, airless space. And merit is as merit does, but things - paintings, novels, plays, whatnot - become a part of our larger culture, not in a self-replicating, Tribble-like way, but through familiarity. Also, people are freaking lazy and the same stuff gets cited and produced and then people will have heard of whatever the artistic thingy is and then it will be seen and mentioned and Presto! it's a part of the culture.

Which brings me to what I've dubbed "The Playwright Wars of 2011".

In theater there is simply not enough pie for anybody. Playwrights can't make any money, the big not-for-profits have the producing style (by and large) of frightened, penny-pinching industrialists, and if you don't have an MFA from a fancy-pants school you're in big time trouble. And if you're not a boy: watch out! And if you're not white: oh no! and if you're not rich: Sorry, you don't have a chance! But even if you are all those things: Still - not enough pie.

For those who haven't been paying attention:

Julia Jordan's Introduction to Opening The Curtain of Playwright Gender (FYI - I was at the meeting at New Dramatists she mentions, along with nearly every woman playwright I know, or have ever heard of for that matter, barring the ones who are dead or not in NYC)

Theresa Rebeck's Laura Pels Keynote Address

My blog posts on the Wendy Wasserstein Award debacle (and here is the complete text of Michael Lew's letter to the prize committee)

Michael Kaiser's deeply problematic post about finding quality new work for the HuffPo

Joshua Conkel's great and rabble rousing response, about the issue of class on the Youngblood blog

Dripping with privilege and entitlement, Mat Smart's post in which we find out why we're all a bunch of failures

Kari-Bentley Quinn's lovely and thoughtful response

So. Yeah. It's broken. All of it. There's lots of lovely work, but nobody is making a living hardly. There's not enough pie. Lord knows, I have no answers: except this. People don't go to theater much because most of it is really boring and it's expensive. And when things are broken people respond with conservatism rather than bravery. The first casualty are the new, the untried and the un-obvious. One of the great addictions of modern times is the listening to of people one agrees with. Olberman, Maddow, Beck, O'Reilly, all of them. There was a study published that demonstrated how people get a little endorphin rush when they listen to television talking heads say things with which they agree. It's fascinating, and I think people on all points of the political spectrum are addicted to the feeling. And I can't help but think that people of course want to feel that feeling all the time, that people have lost any sort of tolerance for unease (if they ever had it).

Easy choices are called that for a reason and the easiest choice of all is to pick work by white, straight guys, as they are, you know, neutral. I've so many times read or heard the phrase "voice of his generation" referring to some white guy, and by that they mean the voice of everyone. And then the phrase "voice of her generation of women" or "or voice of African-Americans today" or some such, as if women only speak to (and for) other women and African-Americans only speak to each other. That might not be what the person means, but there it is in the language, plain as can be. And hardly anyone ever means anything by it (except maybe Mat Smart. I think he meant every word), but the thing is, language is all we have. Culture is all we have. Otherwise, what separates us from chimps? So, of course it matters

I think in some ways if it was intentional, it would almost be easier. Because then one could just shun the jerks. But in this situation it's perfectly nice people who just don't think. Because, mostly, they don't have to. Because they ARE the default. It's not even a question of like being drawn to like. It's not a question of critics and artistic directors and writers championing their own. I think it's deeper than one's personal associations. It's cultural. That's why when women make lists they include plenty of men and often exclude women. White guys are considered the default, neutral. Everyone else is like an added flavor kind of. Like a topping. Like they are the only ones who get to just be playwrights. Everyone else is a "woman playwright" or a "gay playwright" or a "black playwright" or an "Asian playwright" or a "lesbian playwright" or what have you.

I'm not placated by "special" posts on Women in Theater or festivals of "Women Playwrights". It's not good enough. No more exceptionalism. No more of that bullshit.

But it's so hard, as I said, as there are so many permutations of all sorts. There's stuff like "talent". Merit plays a factor in getting pie, but the best pie, the Christmas pie with a gold sovereign in it, seems to be given to the same people again and again, and we all know that other people are better. And if we're talking about privilege, what people with it don't understand, is it's mainly the privilege of not having to worry about shit. So many times the issue of privilege can seem like an endlessly complicated game of rock-paper-scissors in which the rules are always changing. Like, I have boatloads of it being a white, thin, straight, conventionally attractive person.

Though everything has its flipside. Just talk to the person who was my boyfriend for most of my twenties. Being with me essentially changed his world-view forever, as he watched for years as people assumed, before meeting or speaking to me, that I was stupid, and behaved accordingly. I am many things, but one of my particular bits of privilege is that I'm smart as all get out. But still: people assumed I was stupid because of a certain physical presentation.

The other day, a downtown playwright, in a quickly written blog post, listed a bunch of playwrights he admires that have been published by the New York Theater Experience to introduce a podcast interview he did with Martin Denton. And they were all a bunch of white guys. Look. I know there wasn't any intent to slight. But I think it's a very useful example of what happens sometimes in a world with very little pie. As I've mentioned many times here before, Martin has done a really terrific job of featuring theater artists of all stripes in his yearly anthologies (even someone as prickly and unprolific as myself). We have so little, you know, all of us. So it seemed like such a shame, really, that the default system runs so deep. Something needs to break.

What would that list looked like if the editor of this particular series was a woman? Maybe the same? Possibly. We don't know. What if the editor of the theater section at Time Out was a woman? Or at the Times? Or at the Voice? See? The thing is we just don't know. Because none of them are, so we have no idea how the conversation would change, if at all, if that were the case. I'm not saying David Cote or Brian Parks are biased (I don't particularly think they are, though possibly the people who hired them are), I'm just vaguely curious to see if anything would be different if suddenly the percentages were flipped, everywhere, all at once, in terms of who was running things: editors, artistic directors, all of it. Wouldn't it be interesting, just to see?

What always gets to me, and what I spend a lot of time doing on this blog, is focusing on lots of writers and artists I find interesting. They're not all women, but lots of them are. Because their work just tends to interest me more. There's, again, not a great deal of intentionality there. But if the whole world was like me, men would be getting the short end of the stick, no doubt. That is exactly what the world is like for women. So many times it's pointed out "Look! I [wrote a feature on, produced, gave money to, curated] some woman [this one time!]", and I'm supposed to respond as if that person is Martin Luther King or something. Like they want even more pie for featuring some woman that one time. Yeah. I'm over it.

I realize I'm talking about too many things at once here, and none of them are easily solvable. Theater is a mess mostly because of the afore-mentioned pie issue. But c'mon. Really. Every mention in every publication ever in every blog post in every article adds to the sum total cultural currency of whoever is being mentioned. So everything matters. Just think, maybe about the aggregate factor of mentions in public places. It all just compounds and snowballs and just one tiny slight doesn't seem like a big deal, but when it's on and on and again and again it does, because it's not just this one small thing, it's a part of a much larger whole.

The Mad Ones: The Tremendous Tremendous

Please check out my review of The Mad Ones' new show The Tremendous Tremendous at the New York Theater Review blog.

I loved it. You should go.

THE MAD ONES and the Brick Theater
present

THE TREMENDOUS TREMENDOUS
March 31st-April 16th, 8pm
Tickets

Vampire Cowboys: The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G

Yesterday was a long and varied day, consisting of a matinee of Trav S.D.'s Tent Show Tetragrammaton (4 shows remaining!), celebrating World Theater Day at Dixon Place, a quick swing by a gallery opening, finally culminating in the opening performance of Vampire Cowboys' The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G at Incubator Arts. And - my inamorato did most of this with what I worry is some sort of mildly broken arm.

But this post is going to be all about the Vampire Cowboys show, which is a rare and perfect thing.

There are many different kinds of playwrights - but I think if you take a look at all of our work, it's all autobiography, isn't it? In some way or another, even if nobody else knows. Even if the play is about pirates or serial killers or ape men or ninjas or aliens or any other fantastical thing that has no literal correlation with the life of the person who is writing, who - chances are, was never a ninja or a pirate. I've written tons on this blog about how I am most comfortable with metaphor, as both a reader and a writer. I've never had much interest in superheroes, but I love fairy tales. I often say how literalism feels sometimes over-specific and unrelatable, and often leaves me cold (but not always). I also think that audiences' perception of theater can be shockingly conservative, and there are people who if they don't see a living room set get instantly nervous.

There are a lot of ninjas and superheros and fighting (awesome, gorgeous fighting) in Qui Nguyen's plays. It's what he does. They're always beautifully staged and realized by his collaborators, and here, too. The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G is a personal, explosion in the genre factory, comic book style battle royale between playwright Nguyen (beautifully played by African-American actor William Jackson Harper) and the story of his cousin and adopted brother's crushingly tragic journey from Vietnam to Arkansas. Writing is hard. Writing truthfully about stuff that really matters to us is brutally hard. So the fight is epic. Qui Nguyen (and "Qui Nguyen") brings out every stylistic weapon in his and director Robert Ross Parker's arsenal.

Genre flourishes abound - noir and western and spy and martial arts rattle hilariously around questions of race. There's a rap war between Qui Nguyen and David Henry Hwang (who wrote a play "Yellow Face" in which there was a character "David Henry Hwang" which in turn parodied the Miss Saigon casting controversy), there's a large muppety creature called the "Gooky Monster" who tries to school Nguyen in what an "Asian" play should be about. The best response to all this is Nguyen's own: "This is a Vampire Cowboy show, bitch!". It's purposely and hilariously full of narrative and racial clichés. I don't know when the last time I saw a show in which I laughed so much consistently throughout. But it's not just a comedy (though, comedy is so fucking hard, calling anything "just" a comedy, isn't fair either), it digs awfully deep.

With all the lovely choreography, all the hilarious meta flourishes (not only is Qui a character, but his wife and Vampire Cowboy producer Abby Marcus appears as well - full disclosure: I know her lovely RL self), the muppet, the rap war, the cowboy shadow play, the spy intrigue, the cannibalism, the slick and pretty design elements, it all comes down to one thing in the end. And that's the simply told and devastating story of Nguyen's family.

I'd be lying if I said this play didn't bring me to my knees in about three different ways. I'm the least prolific of playwrights, something I'm sort of desperately trying to remedy. I have trouble writing without complicated design elements and structures and dance breaks and fairy tales and people rising from the dead in some way or another. I've been questioning some of this recently as sometimes I think I use all the dance breaks and intricate structural stuff as a tool of self protection. Of course, lots of it is stuff that I like, and I am in no way a minimalist by nature, and I began and remain a visual artist first so what stuff looks like matters to me - I mean I think the semiotics of design are important and transcend simple aesthetics. But, I think I may use some of this business because even if this sort of business really matters to me, I think it might be easier for me to deal with stylistic and genre flourishes then with emotional content. I think this is some of what Qui is getting at with this play.

We're all still telling stories round the fire, outside of our caves or tents, even if there are fancy lights and ninjas or clowns playing polar bears or whatnot. And the really basic questions remain the same. Who are we as a species and as Americans and who were we before and how did we get here and who is my family and what does that mean?

Trav S.D.'s Tent Show Tetragrammaton

The premier of Trav S.D.'s Tent Show Tetragrammaton is rapidly sneaking (or, really, trampling) upon us, and with its thrilling approach has come a distinct lack of sleep and lots of hard work here at The Cabinet's (now happily shared) Headquarters.

But it's all in the name of excitement and wonder, so who can complain? Not I! Ape men! Realistic fighting! Music of ALL KINDS! VooDoo! Hope Cartelli (who is 8 1/2 months pregnant, so WHO KNOWS what will occur!)! ALL of Piper McKenzie! Mummies! A Baby Grandma Witch! Fortune telling! And spaghetti! For a delightful teaser, see below.

And if this isn't a hard enough sell : yours truly is directing one of the pieces contained within!

But enough of this hyperbole. The man who has self-styled himself Trav S. D. has written a couple of lovely and illuminating blog posts about two of the short plays contained in the Tetragrammaton: The Strange Case of Grippo the Ape Man and The Universal Rundle which are well worth a read.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I read and write about fairy and folk tales an awful lot. I'm not a particularly huge fan of the ultra-literal. I heartily believe that aping the details of everyday life doesn't make something particularly more like life. In other words, just because something isn't real, doesn't mean it's not true. Trav's offerings all live in that place, the liminal spaces that exist somewhere in the boarderland of history and myth . Dripping with Americana, music and folk tradition.

I'm also so beyond thrilled to be involved in a show at LaMama. I feel that there are all these odd lineages in New York Theater, and mine feels so directly tied to the work and people that sprung out of the Caffe Cino back in the 60s. I've been working away in the realms of Downtown Theater for what feels like a lifetime, and to be doing something in the House that Ellen Stewart built is an honor and a thrill.

Information and tickets can be found here.

The Continuing Story of Carla Rhodes

I've been meaning to catch Carla Rhodes's act for a while now, and finally made it down to her monthly jaunt at Arlene's Grocery a frigid Sunday night a week ago.

Carla is a cool rock 'n' roll ventriloquist who escaped a miserable childhood and adolescence in Kentucky to make it to the big time here in Gotham. After seeing more solo shows (both live and on video) than, well, most people, I think she possesses in spades the most important element: being the sort of performer that people are happy to watch for an hour. It sounds so simple, so obvious. Yes, it's sometimes ever so elusive.

Carla is full of self-deprecating Southern charm, and her interactions with the awful under-bed alligator, a homeless squirrel and disturbing vaudevillian Cecil Sinclaire (pictured left) are all hugely entertaining. The show as a whole needs some work. Though Carla is a terrific performer, I felt the need for a little more forward momentum. The show is divided between her bedroom at home and her arrival in NYC, and there are simply too many numbers that all take place in one setting and don't really lead her anywhere new.

This really does seem to be ventriloquism week here at The Cabinet! That said, feel free to give Miss Arkansas a miss, and head downtown (or, uptown or into town, depending on where you're coming from), and catch Carla's very cool show. She'll be back at Arlene's Grocery on February 20.

Photo: Leslie Van Stelten

Dainty Cadaver!

Just a reminder, boys and girls, that I will be participating in an exciting theatrical experiment brought to you by the delightful folks at Piper McKenzie and The Brick Theater, Inc. It's a series of plays written Exquisite Corpse style. That is to say, each playwright only saw just what came before and proceeded as they saw fit, and then the next playwright in line only saw what they wrote. And so on. It's essentially a Surrealist party game.

I will be in Saturday's group ("B") which will be directed by the always fetching Miss Hope Cartelli.

Information an tickets can be found here.

"Lesser" Tennessee Williams is Still Better Than Most Things

Many, many years ago, in the first paragraph of the first review I ever received for a play I had written, I garnered the most ridiculously over the top complements any human ever received in the history of theater criticism. Here it is in its entirety:

It is tempting to compare playwright [Caviglia] to many great American dramatic writers. In [title], her stunning one-act play, her psychology is as deep as Sam Shepard's. Her characters' neuroses are as frightening as Edward Albee's. Her poetry may not be as rich as Tennessee Williams's (whose is?), but her plots and characters are less forumlaic than Neil Labute's. She is confidently staking out her territory in our country's strong history of poetic realism.

Seriously, I could never even use it as a pull-quote. I have no idea who the reviewer was, and a big "Thank you!" to you, wherever you may be all these years later, but (and it pains me to say this), you're dead wrong. Or, maybe you're right. Because upon recovering the file (it's old) and rereading it, what the play is, is pastiche. I mean, I was what? Twenty-five? It was the second play I ever completed, and the first one I ever had produced. I was an intern at Circle Rep and on the running crew for a play by Joyce Carol Oates, and I brought in pages every day which were then subsequently read, and critiqued by actor John Seitz. I was immersed in this world that had been built by Lanford Wilson. I was taking heaps of playwrighting classes and I wanted to be another genius American writer, maybe the first one in a silver mini-dress. So, yeah, I was a young writer just finding my own way. And I read all the American greats: Williams, O'Neill, Albee, Shepard (I freaking loathe Arthur Miller). I was obsessed with Paula Vogel who was the playwright that made me come to Circle Rep to begin with. I wanted to be an artist.

But I'm no fool. I was a child. To speak of my writing in the same sentence as Williams's, was ludicrous.

Last Friday night, I saw Green Eyes, the premier of a late period Tennessee Williams one act that is being presented as a part of PS122's Coil Festival. A site specific production, 14 audience members cram into a small room at the Hudson Hotel to watch what happens on Mr. and Mrs. Claude Dunphy's honeymoon. It's strange and intimate and beautifully acted. To be honest, I've read or seen very little later Williams, and have mostly heard it described disparagingly. But I thought Green Eyes was wonderful. Maybe tastes have changed. His dialogue is unmatchable, and the layers and complications and lies and unhappy truths that are brought forth in its 40 minute running time are deep and even possibly true.

Claude is a young army man home on leave. His new wife is a bombshell, teasing and smart, played by Erin Markey in a really remarkable and interesting performance. She looks as if she's stepped directly out of a time machine directly from 1970. She's often nearly naked, her face is right in front of us in the tiny room, she's completely exposed. There always seem to be about six simultaneous and often contradictory things going on behind her eyes, but it all looks effortless. I remember getting invites to the show she had up in SoloNova, and now I really regret not going.

I have no idea what is real and what is not in Green Eyes and it hardly matters. It's pure Southern psychodrama and Williams is a stone cold genius the likes of which come around only once a half century or so. It was such a smart move to stage this in such a tiny space. It's crowded and slightly uncomfortable and it's all right there in front of you. Director Travis Chamberlain made lots of very smart choices and his actors are more than game. My lord, I've seen so much theater that calls itself "transgressive", sexually or otherwise, and I nearly always wind up staring at it stony-eyed, as those words so often wind up meaning "creepy" and "misogynistic" or, like, just "not transgressive." But this is, it's about sex and violence and war. And mostly about where sex and violence overlap, and the desire - of a woman - for this violence. It's disturbing as hell, but it's complicated and believable.

I think I thought of that one act I wrote a long time ago, and that ridiculous review, because I think I was trying to do something a little similar, and lord knows I mostly failed. When I used to read plays we would call works like this "hotel plays", you know you've read and seen far too much when you acknowledge genres that don't really exist. But they're one of the hardest things to do. Because it's just two actors, mostly naked. Talking. Fighting. Screwing. And getting tossed around in some scenes of really tense and believable violence. They can't hide a thing. It's wonderful.

Green Eyes was extended through the 30th. Purchase tickets here (if there are any left), and find information about the show here.

Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell

This has been an action packed week indeed: library talk in West Egg, beginning again at my old day job, Dainty Cadaver chapter to be written, apartment hunting commencing, big decisions being made all over the place, and lots of theater being seen and reviewed.

Oh, theater. There's been so much to see, with Under the Radar over at The Public, and Coil in full swing over at PS122 (and points North - more on that later). Inamorato and I began our week of theatrical viewing with the anger-making depression factory (pun intended) Gob Squad's Kitchen, then the next night we were lucky enough to catch Stories Left To Tell: Created from classic and unpublished work of Spalding Gray. Sadly, I was never able to ever see Gray perform when he was alive - aside from the films of his solo performances and his often inexplicable movie roles (Beaches - need I say more?).

It's funny, even though I've read his novel (and I use the word "novel" advisedly, as it is clearly as autobiographical as anything else he's done), I never really thought of him as a writer - but as a storyteller and performer. We live so much in the world of the theatrical one man band, the idea of a performer's voice as a writer and that writer's performance have become nearly unseperably linked. I mean, can any of us picture someone else performing one of Mike Daisey's shows? No, me either. So I wondered how it would be seeing a bunch of other people read Gray's words.

All I can say is that screw everything else - Gray is a writer. Not only does it hold up, hearing and watching his work being performed by others was nothing short of a major revelation.A disperate group of four performers read pieces of Grey's monologues, letters and journals and it was incredibly moving and hilarious. His work is a gift. Kathleen Chalfant (who I last saw on stage many years ago in Angels in America), Hazelle Goodman (who, I was thrilled to discover, played Georgia Rae Mahoney on Homicide: Life On the Streets), Bob Holman (poet and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club), and playwright Ain Gordon performed for the audience and for each other. The guest performer on the night I was there was David Straithairn. It was completely joyful.

I know it's silly, but like with Calvin Trillin and his Alice, I feel as if I knew Spalding Gray. He wrote about an acting exercise in which he was supposed to tell his acting partner a secret he had never shared with anyone. And he had nothing, he had no secrets. Following his work over the years, you knew about his long time girlfriend Renée, about his mother's suicide, about his childhood in Rhode Island, about his affairs, about his hypochondria, about his health problems, about his work, about his sexual hang-ups, about his children when they were born, about everything. So, when he committed suicide in 2004 is was such a shock, it seemed such a waste. But hearing further details about the terrible car accident in Ireland, about some possibly botched surgery, about what sound like debilitating health problems, about going mad - it's all devastatingly sad, but understandable.

So, Spalding Gray was a writer, maybe one of the best. He is missed. Read what my inamorato and fellow Rhode Island native has to say.

Too Late! (antigone) contest #2

I've been seeing an awful lot of theater recently, some wonderful, some less so. After an action packed week, I hope to catch up on writing about what I've seen (in both Under the Radar and at PS122's COIL - Festivals! Festivals! How I love them!).

I've just turned in my (woefully rambling) review of Too Late! (antigone) contest #2, and though I believe it's sadly (for you, happily for them) sold out, I just want to urge everyone, if they get the chance, to see anything MOTUS comes up with, as though I've just seen the one show, I'm pretty deeply smitten. After seeing their performance, I felt as if I had been fed pure oxygen and I remembered how thrilling theater could be.

Look. I think I've made it pretty clear how much I hate giving bad reviews, particularly to theater which is so difficult to do, even when it's terrible. I'm much happier writing about stuff I like. I usually find I have much more to say about it, too. So read my happy review of this play. At one point the charming woman pictured at right wrote the phrase "Better dogs than masters" down her arms, but the show is smart enough to know that not all dogs are trained or downtrodden. Dogs can bark and dogs have teeth. Their show has the offhandedness that only hours and hours and hours of rehearsal can achieve. It's kind of a perfect thing.

Movie/Warhol

Last week I reviewed Gob Squad's Kitchen for the New York Theater Review, and I didn't much like it (and my darling inamorato positively loathed it). I don't feel like writing much about it here, but it supposedly was a "reflection" and a "deconstruction" of Andy Warhol's films of the mid-1960s. Personally I found it to be a tiresome and airless demonstration of early 21st cenury bubbleheadedness. But, that's not what I really want to write about.

The show put me in a direly bad mood, so I decided to look at some of Warhol's actual films and see what they looked like after not having seen them in a long time. Wonderfully, quite a few are on line. One thing that I think bears repeating as often as possible is something my high school English teacher used to tell us, that what we think of as the 60s didn't start until 1967, and in most places the 60s didn't happen until the 70s. Mad Men is doing an unbelievably wonderful job at showing those of us who are too young to remember, what that era (particularly in NYC) looked like. The most recent season was set in the beginning of 1965, the same time period in which Warhol (and his Factory-ites) made films such as Kitchen, My Hustler, Vinyl, Drunk, Poor Little Rich Girl, Horse, Empire and the first of the Screen Tests.

As my inamorato said, Mr. Warhol has a great deal to answer for in terms of hideously deathless cool and the emptiness of art. So, having not seen much of this work in years and years I was actually really surprised at how human and watchable the few that I watched are. It perhaps speaks to the arch and contrived nature of reality TV (I have a very strong conviction that Warhol would have adored reality) that these films seemed so, almost, touching. The mid-sixties were also an extraordinarily exciting design moment. The films looked purposefully amateurish in reaction to the slick Hollywood product of the time, and what they look like to me is the birth of the post-modern age. He experimented with split screens and multiple projections. Most of them were a mess, but I find them to be arresting, for documentary reasons if nothing else. Looking back, the big geniuses of the 1960s for me were Andy Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard. They very nearly created out of whole cloth the world we currently inhabit.



The screen tests are extraordinary. For a while there in the mid sixties, Warhol asked everyone who wondered through The Factory to do one. He would simply turn the camera on someone's face and he would ask them not to blink. They're essentially portraits and they're all interesting to watch. I'm sure monkeys are endlessly fascinating to each other, and we humans can look at each other's faces pretty much forever.



In a case of perfect timing, MoMA currently has an exhibit of Warhol's films of this period on display. I'm certainly going and will report back when I do. The exhibition runs through March 21. Find information here.