Shaking a Spear at Delta and Bank of America

I've been out of the loop with theater in NYC for a lot of complex reasons which I may write about one day... but I feel compelled to write about Delta Airlines and Bank of America withdrawing sponsorship from the Public Theater for their production of JULIUS CAESAR.

For my friends in Europe, you might not know that the Public Theater is where HAIR, A CHORUS LINE, and HAMILTON premiered. (No, Broadway is NOT where plays premiere; it’s where plays go to cash in on their success.) If you've ever enjoyed the songs "Tits & Ass" or "Age of Aquarius" you owe something to the Public. In fact, if you've enjoy any American theater in past 50 years, you owe something to the Public. It's one of the theaters that birthed the American nonprofit theater system for better or for worse. It’s where Meryl Streep got her start. It’s where New Yorkers have seen Shakespeare with stars like Streep (and Al Pacino and James Earl Jones and John Lithgow, etc. etc.) for FREE every summer for nearly 60 years.

Like any great theater, the Public would naturally mine JULIUS CAESAR for what the play has to say about the world today. Thank GOD the Public has a freaking perspective on the play instead of just tossing together another dusty old toga party. That’s what art is supposed to do, for chrissakes – give us perspective, context, a lens through which we can see the world from an angle we hadn’t considered. If it’s safe and reassuring, then it ain’t art.

I’m posting this because the theater community is teensy and we’re always preaching to the converted. But I’m in Europe where no one knows what the Public Theater is. I haven’t heard people here talking about boycotting Delta. (Bank of America doesn’t exist, so they can’t boycott it here...)

It's a slippery slope. Theater doesn't have enough funding as it is and corporate sponsorships is one of the hardest money to come by. The Public is probably doing okay with HAMILTON raking it in on Broadway but the summer Shakespeare productions are free to the public. Entirely kostenlos except for like 50 seats that are impossible to come by. And we all know that a company of 10+ union actors and stagehands, not to mention sets, lights, and costumes ain't cheap. So the entire summer season needs to be subsidized somehow.

Delta and Bank of America pulling out absolutely bites. If they're being swayed by Fox & Breitbart, then people who give a shit about art should give them a piece of their mind.

-- Here is an article about the debacle in The NewYork Times, which repeats incendiary quotes by Fox News and Breitbart, but gives the reader very little idea about the actual Public Theater production. 

-- In contrast, here is what a smart friend of a friend says, who has actually seen the play. He makes the very good point, “If there ever were an ANTI-assassination play, this is it.”

Gone but Not Forgotten - HOT KEYS

I tossed 20 years of theater files but that doesn't mean they're gone gone gone. This is a series of articles with photographs and musings of some of the more special items.

Here's the flyer for HOT KEYS by Jeff Weiss, a serial soap opera that won an Obie Citation. (Click to see it enlarged.)

Jeff Weiss ala Humphrey Bogart.

"...until Jeff has had enough..."

I met Jeff through Tony Nunziata, also known as Tony Fish, who was part of the gay musical trio Hot Peaches. Sometimes I think how funny it was that all the people who looked out for me when I was a snotty teen were all gay men. But then, if you grew up in a downtown NYC theater in the 1980s and 1990s, everyone you knew happened to be a gay man. I didn't know Tony very well but he asked me to be part of a reading. It was at that big building on 10th Street and Broadway across from Grace Church. The apartment was fabulous, one of my first instances of seeing a place decorated with incredible taste. I stared in awe at some gorgeous Greek theater etchings on the wall and then Tony came over and informed me that they were early works by Picasso. Well, the play was something about a Vietnam vet written and starring Jeff Weiss. I was in the last scene with Jeff, playing a Vietnamese woman encouraging him to eat pig's balls. Apparently, I knocked the scene out of the park, since he invited me to be part of his new project HOT KEYS.

I still think what a genius idea this piece was. It was another iteration of Jeff's serial theater pieces with a different "episode" every week. We got the script for the scene(s) we were in on Monday or Tuesday, rehearsed on Wednesday and Thursday, and performed the episode on Friday and Saturday. Repeat the following week. The only constants were that each "episode" began with the Rodgers and Hart song Where or When, and somewhere in the middle of the episode one character would sing the gorgeous ballad Please Let Love Pass Me By, written by Jeff's partner, Carlos Martinez. The perverse and sprawling storyline was something about various murderers who go on the lam and end up in Disneyland.

Jeff wrote the part of Mary Lois for me. At least I think he did. I was 18 and I had a slight reputation after living in TNC's cages. In HOT KEYS, I played a wild teenage party girl from South Jersey who murders the milkman. Or maybe it was the postman. My mother was played by the amazing Kristen Johnston, whom some of you might know from 3rd Rock to the Sun. And my boyfriend Wesley was played by Neil Pepe who later became Artistic Director of the Atlantic Theatre. Here's the first page of my first scene with Wes.

From the sexy & perverse imagination of Jeff Weiss.

I turned down a part in a regional production of M BUTTERFLY that would've gotten me an Equity card to be in HOT KEYS. Sometimes I think maybe that was a bad career move, but I was 18 and it seemed like a helluva lot more fun and interesting to be in HOT KEYS. And in a way, I was right. I met some amazing people and I was part of an Obie Award winning production. But I did learn a hard lesson about the pitfalls of being poor.

There was a peculiar rich/poor or uptown/downtown divide in HOT KEYS. I think Jeff knowingly set it all up, being the mischievious imp that he is. Almost all of the actors came from four theaters: Naked Angels, Atlantic Theatre, La Mama and TNC. For those of you who are unfamiliar with NYC's theater landscape, Naked Angels and Atlantic are tonier theaters in Chelsea with more experienced actors. But Jeff gave the juicier roles to people from the scruffy East Village theaters La Mama and TNC. The actors from Naked Angels and Atlantic mostly played talkative cops. This made for a rather tense environment but I think Jeff liked it that way.

At that time, I was a teenage runaway and homeless. By the time I was in HOT KEYS, I was no longer living in TNC's basement, but I was drifting around various SROs in New York. For those of you who don't know, SRO stands for Single Room Occupancy and they were teeny tiny cheap hotel rooms for single people set up after World War 2 mostly for returning vets. If you were poor, SROs were a great option since they were about $100 a week. They were usually segregated by sex and in the 1980s and 1990s, the best ones for women were the Allerton and Martha Washington. But I also stayed at skeevier places like the Kensington and the Lincoln, which to my consternation turned out to be a whore hotel. The Lincoln was later knocked down and it's now the Baruch Performing Arts Center.

Well, being poor, things happen like you suddenly can't pay for your phone service. I turned up at Naked Angels one Wednesday for rehearsal as usual and to my shock, I discovered that I'd been replaced. It seems the stage manager had tried to call me and wigged out that I couldn't be reached even though I had been attending every week for like three months. The East Village folk understood how you could have your phone shut off and they were livid. For a moment, it seemed the rich/poor divide in HOT KEYS would implode. But I didn't want any part of it. I left the production and never saw Jeff again.

Shortly after HOT KEYS, Carlos became ill and Jeff took him home to Allentown, PA to take care of him. Sometimes I think about Carlos' beautiful ballad Please Let Love Pass Me By. I wish I remembered more of the lyrics. There was recently a 3-night retrospective of Jeff's work at The Kitchen. Don Shewey's blog has a lovely review of the event (scroll down). And Jim Moore of Vaudevisuals posted a video of one of the songs sung in HOT KEYS. It seems I can't embed it, but the link is here.

Goodbye Old Life

Decluttering has become something of a trend lately, with promises of a simpler more fulfilling life once you’re free of all your junk. But I’m not purging my things because I need more space. I have no space. I’m letting go of an entire lifetime of things because I have to.

Yesterday, I tossed 20 years of files on theater work that I’ve done since I was a teenager. Flyers from shows at LaMama and Theater for the New City and Synchronicity Space and Ensemble StudioTheater. Contact sheets from a 10-hour anti-war festival I organized back during the first Gulf War with phone numbers for Allen Ginsberg and Patti Smith. All the scripts and playbills and research for the 30-odd staged readings and short film screenings I produced for my company Direct Arts. Hard copies of grant applications, rejection letters and a few acceptances. Each file was a milestone in my life, a small symbol of accomplishment. The only file I kept was the one for my old friend James Purdy.

Today, I’ll be selling nearly 500 books. Most people know that I didn’t finish high school and I never went to college. My parents never once spent an evening working on homework with me; they can barely read English. These books were my education. Here are the books that taught me about literature, art, design, film, mythology, global politics and history. It's because of these books that I speak and think and write the way I do. The only real difference between me and immigrants working low-end kitchen jobs are these 500 books.

There are also about 5 boxes of clothes, mostly vintage and tattered. This is another way that I’ve been able to set myself apart from my immigrant roots. For better or worse, I was born with a mutant aberration that gave me a sense of style. But without any money, I’ve always had to scrounge around to realize any kind of look. So all these torn and wrinkled dresses and jackets from the 1940s and 1950s represent mild triumphs for me. A way for me to thumb my nose at consumer culture and homogeny and economic class all at once.

At times the ghoulish part of me thinks that this would be a great time for me to die or commit suicide. No one will need to clean up after me. Everything I have is gone. But sheesh, that’s depressing. (And no, I'm not that ready to end things.) 

I know that these papers and books and dresses are valuable to no one but me. And they're only valuable because they inform who I am. If all the evidence from my theater history is gone, you can't take it away from me, but how can I prove it to anyone else? But then again, why do I need to prove it anyway? I’ve always loved that random pieces of paper in an archive is called “ephemera.” Like a theater production, everything we have is ephemeral. The curtain closes and the next moment, something else is on stage. So what’s next now? The stage is swept and empty. I'm jonesing for opening night.