Theater

Friday, Oct 10, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

Media Circus: humble pie

Alec Mapa went from Broadway glory to slinging pepperoni -- and back.

By Catherine Seipp

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The waiter-who’s-really-an-actor is by now such a clichi that it seems no inside-Hollywood scenario is complete these days without him. The prissy character who announces, “Hi, I’m Alec and …” is always good for a laugh in any sitcom or movie about the business, especially when the screenwriter is in a phoning-it-in sort of mood.

But what’s the real story behind the stereotype? Alec Mapa was a working character actor who at one point had the starring role in “M. Butterfly” on Broadway. He hit a streak of truly bad luck, spent six months in the purgatory of the California Pizza Kitchen in Encino, Calif., and only began crawling his way back up from the bottom when he was so down and out that he no longer cared. He sometimes introduced himself to customers with a cheery, “Hi, I’m Alec … and I’ll be touching your food.”

Unsurprisingly, he was often close to becoming the waiter-who’s-really-unemployed. “The thing is,” he told me, “I was a fun waiter. But I was really sloppy. I was always on the verge of being fired. I had the dreaded managerial conference: ‘Alec, you’re a little slow on the cash register …’”

He was, however, a quick study when it came to the Pizza Kitchen’s smarmy but effective “suggestive serving” method: “Ladies, we have some excellent tiramisu for dessert today …” Once he had a big triumph: the highest lunch shift receipts, which meant free food for a whole week. Not bad for someone who lied about his waitering background (he had none) to get the job.

He also turned the whole experience — plus his life up to that point and beyond — into the one-man stage show, “I Remember Mapa,” a tongue-in-cheek look at his Filipino-American journey as a gay, tap-dancing actor under 5-foot-5. “When I was in third grade,” he tells the audience, “I wore glasses, a retainer and corrective shoes — all at the same time. I used to kick my own ass at recess.”

As you may surmise, Alec Mapa has done stand-up comedy. But he’d been out of that loop for years when he got the idea for “I Remember Mapa” while reading Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way.” He came to the question: What would you do if you didn’t have to do it perfectly? And he realized that what he’d do is perform his own material.

So he booked himself, with a nonrefundable deposit, into a cabaret three months hence. Knowing that he’d have to come up with material, he did. Eventually theater director Chay Yew helped shape the show into the version I just saw for the second time at East/West Players in Hollywood.

Mapa had been, as they say, king of the hill and top of the heap. He understudied B.D. Wong’s transvestite Chinese courtesan character in “M. Butterfly” — finally taking over that role on Broadway, and later in the national touring company. Now 32, he was then still in his 20s and had been earning his living as an actor for a good five years.

The closest he’d come to paying his dues through drudge work had been a stint while very young at a place called Boy Bar. His duties there had included periodically checking the bathrooms to make sure no one was actually having sex or taking drugs. As he recounts in the show: “It was a job that was virtually impossible to do without sounding like somebody’s bratty kid sister … Excuse me, are you guys shooting up in there? You better not be, ’cause I’m TELLING!”

His triumph in “M. Butterfly” had actually begun as a major disappointment, because of course he had hoped to be the star rather than the understudy. Insult was added to injury when Playbill spelled his name “Alec Wapa.” The stage managers hung a sign over his dressing room: “Home of the …”

“See, it’s funny now, but back then I wept,” he says in the show. “I tried to be really spiritual about it, thinking, ‘Don’t worry, there’ll be another Tony Award-winning role for an Asian drag queen that’s meant just for you.’ But I couldn’t help but feel like I lost out on the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Eventually, however, he took over B.D. Wong’s role and got a standing ovation the first night. Unfortunately, at the end of the run, three things happened. His boyfriend, who was also a fellow cast member, broke up with him. His business manager, who had also been a friend, stole all his money. And then his mother died, suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 53.

Mapa’s nervous breakdown took the form of watching TV 18 hours a day until his utilities were shut off. He was still auditioning. But, as he told me, “In New York, once you’ve been an actor, you are an actor. In Los Angeles, it’s, ‘Well, what are you doing now?’”

He turns this into a schtick in his show: “In L.A., perception is everything. You are either doing really well, or you don’t exist. You can never say to someone, ‘I’m not working’ or ‘I’m unemployed.’ You have to say, ‘I’m in development.’ Or, ‘I’m on hiatus.’ I once got flustered and said, ‘I’m developing a hiatal hernia!’ And someone said, ‘Oh, really? Who’s casting?’”

But the Pizza Kitchen job was, in a way, his salvation. Being so low he no longer cared had one positive side effect: It erased the whiff of desperation that had been tainting his auditions.

“I went from not doing anything to working constantly,” he told me, sitting in the theater after one of his performances. “I’ve kind of built up a really good relationship with casting directors. I become the character when they don’t know what they want. They’re paying me to be ready. So even if I’m completely wrong for the character, I’m always fully prepared, because they might have something else they think of me for.”

This fall, Mapa will appear at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in Anna Deveare Smith’s new show about the press and the presidency. Like all Smith productions, this one is built around actual transcripts and features each actor in multiple roles. Mapa’s range from former speech writer Peggy Noonan to New York Times correspondent R.W. “Johnny” Apple.

His many TV appearances include “Seinfeld,” “Roseanne,” “Melrose Place,” “Law and Order” and a recurring role as Angela the lovable transvestite on “NYPD Blue.” He knew he had to come in costume for that audition to stand a chance. And as he drove to the audition, in full drag, he prayed, “Oh, God, please don’t let me get into an accident.”

He started getting so much work he had to — oh, happy day! — shed his actor-who-is-really-a-waiter skin. He quit the Pizza Kitchen and morphed back into being just an actor. And a wiser and humbler one, at that.

Catherine Seipp is a regular contributor to Salon. More Catherine Seipp.

Monday, Nov 18, 1996 10:05 AM UTC

The Awful Truth

Marriage: The Embalmment of Love

By Cintra Wilson

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my best friend and old roommate got married the other day. We used
to live like two grubby skater hags, in one big warehouse room with essentially no privacy, and spent our unkempt
evenings together drinking beer on the couch and socking each other in the arm and cackling wildly. This was a
state of bliss and excellence I always held dear, and figured if nothing else in my life worked out, Chirt and I could
be two old filthy cackling women and live in some big cluttered house and renounce everything but books and beer
and possibly a dog together.

However, this fantasy escape route has been completely obliterated by her getting
married. “Can you believe it?” she was saying to me, weeks before. “I’m buying a dress. I’m buying
shoes. What’s happening to me?”

Indeed, a shock larger and perhaps more life-altering than
puberty, even. The lashing of herself to the mainmast of another. The renouncing of sexless cackling. The
renouncing of renouncing everything.

A wedding is an unspeakable ordeal. I have been a bridesmaid before, and
I know. It is one small disaster after the next. “Everything, everything cost two hundred dollars more than
everybody said it would,” lamented the groom, days before the ceremony. “I just had to squash all my rage and
write checks. Just smile and write the checks. Checks, checks. Everybody took advantage of me because they
knew I was over a barrel, and I couldn’t just tell them to fuck off and punch their lights out, or I’d risk losing the
space, the catering …”

Poor guy, I thought. People getting married, like people having children, have no idea
what’s about to happen to them. They suffer and shell out money, so they can suffer and shell out more money,
and have no life and no freedom, etc. etc. forever and ever, Amen. Yet once they do it, they all seem to think it was
all a great idea.

I was thrust into the role of “Maid of Honor.” This meant that I had to do things like Get My
Hair Done With The Bride early in the morning, and wear a pink dress that I normally would have looked at with the
evil alacrity of a group of Orinda skinheads discovering an unconscious drag queen lying in their parking lot.

I
mocked and taunted Chirt all morning. “Bridey! Bridey!” I hollered, to which she smiled and groaned, helpless in the
undertow of impending events. I brought her a beer as she was sitting in the stylist’s chair with her curlers. “Here,
you’ll need this,” I said. She looked at me, puzzled and amused. “You brought me a beer?!” she asked. The
obviousness of needing a beer at 9 a.m. on her wedding day had become a mystery to her. I realized that an
enormous steel door was slamming shut on our lives, forever. “Well, YEAH!” I blurted out, somehow defensive.
She ended up understanding the beer and drinking it, for which I was grateful.

“I’m so nervous,” she
said, which I found surprising. “He won’t back out now,” I told the Bride-to-Be. “He’s written too many
checks.”

“Wedding is theatre,” my mother said. “For most girls, this is the only time they’re ever really onstage.”
It’s true: Bride as Ingenue. Bride as the Embodiment of Beauty. Groom as Respectable Future Personified.
Innocence and Beauty Weds Stolid and Secure Respectability in Mutual Bond of Legally Fortified Love. Ideally.
Theatre, I guess. Ritual, really. The difference between Ritual and Theatre being that Ritual will cost you a whole lot
more.

We all managed to get through the short, utilitarian ceremony with a minimum of pain.

About
midway through the wedding day, the groom leaned over to me and said “Hey, somebody has to trash the car.” I
rushed out with holly fronds and doilies from the buffet table. Lumpy (his real name), the Best Man, had a bar of
Zest from his shaving kit and we proceeded to write “Just Married” and “Suckers” all over the Groom’s Honda. We
festooned it with toilet paper, we tied soda cans off the back bumper. This societally condoned vandalism had a
wholesome worthlessness about it, like a non-alcoholic beer. It’s hard to get a true vandal’s hard-on for an act
steeped in Tradition getting away with something that is a time-honored tradition that you’re
supposed to get away with doesn’t pack the same creative emotional wallop as doing something that will
truly dismay the victims. But oh, hee hee hee. We trashed the car, us wedding party adults. Boola Boola, won’t the
rival college be shocked we stole their goat. Titter titter. Wheee.

The bride’s oldest brother is one of these guys who never says a word and lurks around in the background and
looks like he might be dangerously crazy, until you throw him up in front of a group of people and announce that
he’s going to make a speech. Then he becomes this fluid genius, like Dylan Thomas on a fresh drunk, rolling into
lyrical free-prose. “Marital partners need to be worthy opponents,” he said, wisely. “Your partner is somebody
you’re going to need to battle with for the cause of self-improvement for the rest of your lives. The bride and the
groom in this case are pretty evenly matched. If either of them were marrying anybody else, I’d be terrified for the
other person.”

Absolutely true, I thought. The worthiest opponent. Somebody with whom you can relentlessly
wage a War on Truth and Love, a socko mate with whom to knock each other’s blocks off, then pop them back on
again. Someone who won’t flee from the ring whining at the first taste of blood. A psychic animal of the same size
and weight. ‘Til death do you part.

Weddings make one want to get married. But one thing has to be self-evident, before one can do it the
It Is Obvious That We Should Be Married thing. There shouldn’t be a shadow of doubt about it, because marriage is
an ordeal of mythological proportions. A Circus of Need. I wish I was needed by somebody. It brought a tear of
self-pity to my eye later, driving home, thinking that the only person who ever said they needed me was dead. But
life is funny and cool, and I have faith in its weird magnetic logic, and eventualities.

When Chirt and I lived
together, I got an emergency phone call one day at the theatre from her mother. “Do you know where Chirt is? I’ve
got some news…” As it turned out, the younger of her 2 brothers had just fallen through some thin ice in Sweden
with his girlfriend, and both of them had died. I watched Chirt go through this terrible grief for around a year and a
half she was torn through with devastation. She and her brother were very close. They had language
between them like twins some long alphabet of non-sequiturs that could reduce them to red explosions of
tearful laughter. He was one of the main anchors into the world for her.

The other person most affected by
Chirt’s brother’s death was the late brother’s best friend. The best friend and Chirt became pals through coping with
the loss together they did a lot of crying and walking and talking and remembering. Then the other day
they got married. Unreasonable pain turned itself inside out, and through it came astonishing joy.

“He cried all
the way to Calistoga,” said Chirt of her groom, a few days after the honeymoon. “He said he’d never been that
happy before; he’d never cried because he was happy. He didn’t know he could be that happy.” The whiplash agony
and ecstacy of human life, exemplified. Up, down. Up, down. A little higher up, if you’re lucky, every time.

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Cintra Wilson is a culture critic and author whose books include "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease" and "Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny." Her new book, "Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling America's Fashion Destiny," will be published by WW Norton. More Cintra Wilson.

Monday, Jun 10, 1996 11:31 AM UTC

The SALON Interview: Tony Kushner

America's real taboo is talking about a different society, says the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

By Christopher Hawthorne

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in the early ’90s, “Angels in America” transformed Tony Kushner from a young writer working in obscurity into the most highly acclaimed playwright of his generation. (“Angels” — a “gay fantasia on national themes” in two parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika” — won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and a slew of Tony Awards.) Since then, Kushner has also built a reputation as one of the most outspoken literary figures in America — a man who will talk just as easily about Roseanne or Gingrich as O’Neill or Ibsen. In an age when the American theater has grown increasingly divorced from public life, Kushner, like a latter-day Arthur Miller, stubbornly insists on the playwright’s role as political provocateur.

His latest play, which he has called a “coda” to “Angels in America,” is “Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness” — a compact, quirky exploration of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ruin, both philosophical and environmental, left in its wake. Kushner has also been working on both a film of “Angels” and an ambitious new trio of historical plays about “the phenomenology of money.” We caught up with him recently in San Francisco, where he had come from his home in Manhattan for an appearance with fellow playwright Anna Deavere Smith.

You had dinner at the White House last year. What was that like?

I was invited for a dinner of the national Medal of Arts honorees, and I went with my best girlfriend Michael Mayer, who directed the national tour of “Angels.” I wore my pink triangle, and I got to explain to Al Gore and the people at his table what a pink triangle was –

Al Gore didn’t know the meaning of a pink triangle?

I’m sure he knew what it meant. He was probably just being polite. In any event, he didn’t ask — somebody else at the table, a rich man from Miami, asked what it meant. And Al didn’t volunteer the information. I can’t believe he doesn’t know, although maybe he doesn’t. I would imagine that he’s afraid to seem like someone who would know such a thing.

Later on we went to this big ballroom, and there was dancing, and this woman from Washington came up to me and said, “Did you get to talk to the President?” I said, “I did, and I’m sort of displeased with myself because I didn’t get to tell him what I wanted to say.” She said, “Come tell him now,” and she grabbed my hand and dragged me over there and said, “This is Tony Kushner, and he has something he wants to say to you.” And I told him that I thought he was blowing it, and that he was alienating the people who elected him, and he was going to lose to Dole if he didn’t behave more like a progressive Democrat, because that was what had gotten him elected.

And he smiled and said thank you about 40 times, and didn’t look at me once. And as I was walking away, apparently he said to somebody standing next to him, “Take his name down.” I thought that meant that I was going to get audited, but apparently what it meant was this State of the Union thing — because he called me a couple of weeks later and asked me to write my version of the State of the Union address. And after that Michael and I danced to “Unforgettable,” right next to (Republican Senator) Alan Simpson and his wife, and we had a very nice time doing it. It was wild, completely wild.

A lot of commentators are arguing that the differences between Dole and Clinton are essentially minimal.

That’s idiotic. It’s completely idiotic. A Republican president with a Republican Congress will destroy this country. These people are insane. Late-term abortions — Dole announced that he didn’t think Clinton should have vetoed the bill. So at this point, if Dole were president, late-term abortions would be illegal. There will be an attempt to have a constitutional amendment against abortion period if Dole is elected. There will certainly be a balanced-budget amendment. Gun control will be destroyed.

Dole was at one point sort of like what Clinton is — a kind of libertarian-ish, tepid Republican — but he isn’t anymore. He’s made lots of promises to the radical right, and he plans to say anything that will get him elected. And then like Bush, who did the exact same thing, he’ll try and carry those things out. I think it would be absolutely catastrophic. Anyone who says they’re not voting because they hate Clinton and it would offend their principles is an idiot. This is maybe the most significant election since the first time FDR got elected.

You’ve become something of a spokesman for and in the gay community. Is that a role that you mind shouldering?

Well I don’t know how much I’m a spokesman. There’s always this dilemma about wanting to be an activist, but also finding that the time that it takes can be pretty destructive to making art. I really admire people who can do both, but it’s very rare, and the sad fact is that when you try to mix the two the art suffers, and sometimes the activism suffers as well. I feel that if there’s something that I need to contribute to in terms of writing a letter or making a statement, or if I get called to go on “Nightline,” like I did in January, that I have a responsibility as a citizen to do that.

But I don’t aspire to a leadership position. I don’t want to run for office, and I don’t want to run an organization, and I really feel that whatever contribution I have to make I’ll make as a playwright. I’m trying to write fewer essays and introductions and blurbs and all of that this year, because I think it has been a huge distraction from the one thing I do relatively well, which is write plays.

I heard you say once that you think it’s easier to come out as a gay man in this country than as a socialist. Can you elaborate on that a little?

It’s a more acceptable thing now: we all know that we have to be nice to homosexuals. We’ve all been scolded and seen enough episodes of “Roseanne” to know — and we have “The Birdcage” to remind us if we had forgotten in the last 15 seconds — that the cool thing now is to be tolerant of homosexuals, who after all are asexual and funny and not any threat to anything. At least that’s how most Americans want to think about it.

But the notion that anybody has a continued interest in alternative economic formations — alternative to capitalism — is shocking and appalling to people. There’s a real anger I’ve seen in audiences for “Slavs!,” in places like Baltimore and Los Angeles, a very cold reception that I think is based on the absolute certainty, as people have been promised over and over by the media, that we don’t have to think about these issues at all anymore. The idea that someone is still writing plays about them is hopeless. I don’t think that anybody’s going to kill me because I say I’m a socialist, but I think people find it risible.

Let me ask you about the “Angels” film, for which you wrote the screenplay, and which I understand Robert Altman is scheduled to direct.

Well, Robert Altman is not going to be directing it. He thinks that it needs $40 million, and that we’re never going to raise that, and so it’s a mistake to try and make it. I think that we can do it for less than that, and there are a few companies that will come up with something that seems to me be to be adequate, so we’ll see. My guess is that if it’s going to happen, it’ll happen soon — it’ll start filming sometime in the fall. And I really don’t care, except I want the money.

There is certainly a long history of playwrights moving into film, and not always with the purest of artistic motives. Did you have any qualms about doing that?

Yeah, I don’t particularly want to do it — though I say that and I’m writing three screenplays at the moment. I think that it’s a mistake to do it. Screenwriting is primarily a narrative art — and I don’t think that’s true of playwriting, which is dialogic and dialectic, and is fundamentally always more about an argument than it is about narrative progression. I suspect, in fact, that novel writing and screenwriting have more in common than playwriting has with either of the other forms.

So, yes, I’m very worried about it, because I think that a lot of talented playwrights wound up producing much less than they should have, and progressing less surely than ought to have, because they’ve spent a certain amount of their creative life doodling around in Hollywood. I think it’s had a baleful impact. Some writers’ work has just been destroyed by it. And I don’t think you ever get good as a screenwriter either, so what winds up happening is you’re weakened on both fronts. I think playwrights generally don’t really care about film enough to become great screenwriters.

Having said all that, I’m deeply trying to make money in Hollywood, like every other idiot in the world. But mostly what I’m working on now is a new play.

I’ve heard you describe it as a set of new plays.

I’m writing three plays — one at a time, of course. They’re history plays, and they’re all about money — the phenomenon and the phenomenology of money. The first one will open in the Spring of 1997 at the National (Theater, in London) with George Wolfe directing it, and then go to the Public (Theater, in New York). I’m excited about it. It’s an incredibly great story, and if I don’t fuck it up, and stay out of its way, I think it’ll be a very good play.

The first play is about the British textile industry?

It’s about the relationship between the British textile industry and American slavery in the 19th century, and about the international character of capital, in the way that slavery, this bizarre holdover from earlier social formations, was primarily bankrolled by a foreign country in the interest of supporting an empire. I’m interested in the question of the internationalist solidarity of labor: I think a very good case can be made that the British working class is essentially what kept Britain out of our Civil War.

This is the first time you’ve tackled race in a significant way in your work.

Absolutely, and I wouldn’t do it if George (Wolfe) weren’t directing it, because I think it’s too easy to make a complete idiot of yourself. But the fact that he’s directing it makes me feel fairly secure, and it’ll have a very large African-American cast. That’s the great thing about writing plays, that it’s a collaboration, and that hopefully will keep me from doing anything too fucked up. I know that it’s going to be controversial, and that people are going to be angry about it. Just the idea of a white writer writing about a former slave, it’s offensive to some people. I feel like going back and reading William Styron to figure out what he did wrong, so that I don’t repeat his mistakes. But it’s absolutely the time to be writing about race, and it’s wrong almost to not do it.

You’ve just been at the Lousville festival of new plays. What’s your feeling about the state of American theater?

The defunding of the NEA is cataclysmic. The character of American theater becomes more reactionary the more imperiled it gets in terms of box office.

Everything that has happened during the last 30 years of American theater, which was a really exciting period, has had to do with the presence of the Ford Foundation, and the NEA, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lila Wallace, all those grants. If that starts to dry up — partly because the NEA is drying up, and partly because social funding across the board is being killed from a government standpoint, so foundation money is going to get scarcer for the arts — it’s going to be very destructive.

It’s also a hard time in the theater because cable television has created a vacuum, sucking everybody down to L.A. It’s getting harder and harder to cast well. Even in New York, it’s really hard to cast well, because now that 900,000 hours of broadcasting has to be filled each month, everybody and his mother is making movies. You have to be a really shitty actor not to have some job in L.A. It’s not the same problem in Berlin or Vienna or London or Paris, because in those places there is one capital city where all the work is done — film, television, and theater. So you can act at the National at night, and film during the day.

Given the presence of so many actors, why hasn’t L.A. become more of a center for theater?

I’ve never understood why. I don’t understand why Hollywood doesn’t foot the bill. It would cost them nothing. It doesn’t make sense to me that people in L.A. don’t want to go to the theater. Nothing can happen in L.A. except movies, it’s so completely seductive — it’s all anybody’s ever thinking about. It’s like living in Hapsburg Vienna and not being a member of the royal family: All you’re thinking about is, where was the emperor spotted last, and what was he wearing, and who dressed him, and who’s sitting next to him? And all anybody in L.A. is thinking about is, what is Tom Hanks doing right now and why aren’t I doing it with him?

It’s enough to make you wonder if film is becoming the dominant medium in America, to the exclusion of all others. I even have my doubts about whether the next truly great American novel will be noticed on a large scale.

It isn’t going to be. Really really good sales for a serious novel at this point is 60,000 copies –in a country of 240 million people! It’s almost like you might as well not bother to write it. The market for serious literature — and I think to a great extent for serious theater — is really dying. It’s pretty grim. I don’t know what’ll turn it around. The students I taught this year at NYU, the undergraduates, it’s scary — they’re not literate.

What’s frightening, of course, is this generation of people in their 60s and 70s, who are really literate, who have a really good education, are dying out. And what dies out with them is that really encyclopedic knowledge that allows you to crack reality open and say this is what’s really going on here, and say it authoritatively. And bring history to bear on a moment and say this is what this is like, this is what happened last time somebody tried this, and so on. No one can even remember that the kind of bullshit that Gingrich is slinging around is what Ronald Reagan and David Stockman were doing in 1980, because that’s already such ancient history. Trickle down economics can come back 15 years later and nobody even remembers that it was here 15 years ago.

What was your reaction to the news that Andrew Sullivan, the gay editor of The New Republic, is HIV-positive, and that he has known for three
years, and is now resigning?

Well I’m really sorry that he’s sero-positive. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I’m sorry that he’s dealing with that. But I still think politically I pretty much disagree with him from stem to stern. His decision to resign makes sense to me. I didn’t like the way he ran The New Republic, but the person they get to replace him will probably be worse. At least Andrew was like the E.M. Forster character, Maurice: His homosexuality gave him a streak of decency and compassion that leavened his Thatcherite horseshit, and Catholic horseshit. And I think the next person will not be openly gay.

The magazine is garbage. It’s been garbage for years. And people got upset because Andrew articulated what’s always been true of The New Republic, because it’s always been sort of, “We’re much smarter than partisan politics, we don’t take sides, we manage somehow to transcend that.” It’s nonsense. Politics is a matter of being partisan. So his post-ideological politics are just an open declaration of what’s always been hollow about The New Republic, which is that they straddle the fence and wind up being about nothing.

Do you think a gay man who’s in a position of prominence has any kind of responsibility to disclose the fact that he’s HIV positive?

I don’t feel that there’s absolutely a responsibility to disclose it. I would, if I were positive. But I don’t think it’s the same thing as disclosing that you’re gay. And I don’t even know that I agree with outing people about that. I think you’re talking about somebody’s health, and people have a right to privacy. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan published I think a really awful article on the New York Times op-ed page a few months ago, saying why is everybody being so negative about AIDS, we’ve got all these breakthroughs on the way, and we have to get out of this ACT-UP nonsense, and we have to start to admit that there’s good news, and everything’s going to be fine.

Well, he’s nuts. Everything’s not fine, and rates of infection aren’t going down, education’s failing right, left, and center, kids are getting infected, African-Americans are getting infected at higher rates, and the new drugs are great on one level but none of them work for more than 18 months. So I don’t know what he’s talking about. And it sounds a little bit like — now that we know that he’s positive — that it’s in a certain sense denial, that he’s being in a certain sense more optimistic than the situation warrants.

When you were working on the first part of “Angels,” did you have any inkling about what kind of splash the play was going to make, that it would absolutely turn your life upside down?

It feels very distant from me at this point. And God knows when I was writing it I thought that it was this preposterous, lengthy thing that would be the end of my very short and not very distinguished career. Now that I’m really working on the new play it’s become very clear to me how intimidated I am by the success of “Angels.” I thought it wouldn’t bother me, because I don’t walk around all day polishing the Tony awards, and wondering how I’ll get another one. But I think I’ve been kidding myself that it wouldn’t be a hard act to follow; it’s going to be a very very hard act. People even attacked “Slavs!” in places, saying it’s not “Angels in America.” And I can imagine what kind of hideous plays I would write if every time I wrote a play I attempted to write this gigantic statement. People would get tired of me really fast.

It doesn’t seem, though, at least from your description of the new plays, that those reservations have kept you from trying to write something quite ambitious all over again.

Well, that’s what I do. I’m not a miniaturist. I think that these three new plays are somewhat more tightly focused than “Angels” — they’re not as kaleidoscopic and they’re certainly not these big field paintings. They’re focusing on very specific things. But at the same time I like big, splashy, juicy plays, and that’s what they’re going to be.

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Christopher Hawthorne is arts editor of the East Bay Express in Berkeley, Calif. More Christopher Hawthorne.

Saturday, Apr 6, 1996 9:26 AM UTC

The Awful Truth

Laugh, Laugh, I Thought I'd Die

By Cintra Wilson

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Recently, a crop of yellow flyers for a “comedy” show appeared all over the East Village. The photo on the flyer featured a leering woman with huge
round Coke-bottle glasses, with a caption underneath which stated “FUCK ME VERBALLY — Alternative comedy” in a large, childish black scrawl. The flyers contained no
information as to where the show was.

My gal friend A. and I were able to
finally deduce that it was at “Surf Reality,” a haphazard Lower East Side performance space where live geckos eat roaches in the bathroom. We checked it out. The emcee was a big angry girl with a crew cut wearing a thin Day-glo halter and
vinyl mini. After greeting the 15 members of the audience kindly, she proceeded to hurl acid in all directions,
watching us boil and cringe as she unfolded “komedy” about how she had a
sadomasochistic Puerto Rican coke freak boyfriend who used to tie her up and
lock her in the closet while he’d go out and bonk other women.

The
audience was really straining to be there for her as she sat “naturally” on her chair, inadvertently flashing her entire crotch as she spouted lines like “Like everybody says, ‘Like, why are you such a bitch?’
And I say, like, I’m just like, smarter than everybody else, OK?”

Her act hurt
us all a lot. Still, it wasn’t nearly as torturous as the next guy, who was
perhaps the most completely despicable human being any of us had ever been
exposed to. Even G.G. Allen, of the famously disgusting and violent punk band
G.G. Allen and the Murder Junkies, had more personal charm than this loathsome
maggot. In “Hated,” the documentary about his life, Allen
waddles naked around small performance spaces in an alcoholic blackout, beating up on college women who had paid to see his show while riding the
revolving door of criminal recidivism and popping in and out of Rikers.

But even the scene during which Allen vomits on himself while being urinated on at a frat party was charming compared to this guy’s act, an endless barrage of humorless, misogynistic, atheistic, xenophobic and otherwise misanthropic complaints about the Chinese family he lived with that had at least half of the
audience wanting to call the cops on him. “Mr. Wong blew a fuse and it erased half of
a new comedy act I was working on in my laptop, so I broke into his computer and
erased his thesis. Huh huh huh.”

We all knew it was true. I feel completely
comfortable saying that the audience would have felt a golden glow of peace and
cleansing righteousness if we had seen this performer being beaten shitless by
hooded thugs with flaming pine clubs outside the theater after the show. He wasn’t funny.

A tall girl in a big pair of boots stomped in during the set, and immediately started talking to the emcee. She was very boisterous, very young and seemingly without any safe personal boundaries — the kind of person who has such loud energy she is impossible to ignore. She had a beautiful face, big blue eyes, a small, tight, clean nose and small French-curled lips — an upper-middle-class Nantucket nectar gone all gonzo-Lower-East-Side-bisexual-until-I-get-out-of-Tisch-School-for-the-Arts-kind of gal. A slumming debutante in combat boots, wearing intentionally ugly boy clothes, bein’ a real free-wheelin’ Free Spirit. Her big eyes and little mouth immediately demanded too much attention from everybody.

“All RIGHT!” she yucked it up loudly, clapping her hands, when someone made a comment that she found funny. She probably worshipped her high-school drama teacher. She was one of those annoying children who had shamelessly forced adults to listen while she incessantly sang. Her parents were undoubtedly sexless, bloodless Republicans who lived in a bomb shelter during the late ’60s, and she was doing all that cartwheeling free-love hippie stuff now to overcompensate, but she still looked a little too CLEAN, like a professional ballerina at a discotheque having a really hard time “getting down.” To our horror and dismay, she was carrying a guitar.

“Too many dykes have told her she’s beautiful,” I told A. “They probably all sit around in her dorm room, dying to get into her ugly corduroy pants, saying ‘Oh my God, Treya (or whatever “interesting” name she undoubtedly has) you’re so TALENTED! You REALLY should go on stage. No I’m serious, you’re so FUNNY!’ She’s had too much positive input — she thinks everything she says is interesting and cute.”

Although we were filled with prejudice and trepidation, we were unprepared for her act. Treya got out her guitar, whimsically painted with fluorescent swirls (Oh my GOD, Treya, you’re such an ARTIST!) and proceeded to sing these reeeallly long songs. One was about a waiter scratching his balls at this popular East Village Polish restaurant. It went on for what seemed like days. Her next song was called “Bullshit Head,” which was inspired by the fact that her brother had sent her a pubic hair in the mail. This was one of those dumb esoteric things that only inside family members could possibly appreciate, while stoned. Gosh, it really makes my brother laugh, so I bet it will work on stage!

I try to avoid doing walk-outs when I’m sitting in the front row of a performance space the size of a Volkswagon, but we had no choice — we fled “Surf Reality.”

The entire evening reminded me of “The Day the Clown Cried,” the never-released Jerry Lewis film in which he played a clown who, actin’ all kwazy, entertained small children on the way to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. “Hey, don’t cry, kids! Watch me cross my eyes and talk in a little retarded duck voice! Ignore the death in the box!” An article in Spy magazine about the film had quotes from execs in Hollywood who had actually seen screenings of this thing, which Jerry had sunk an enormous amount of his own money into — it was his project, his dream-vehicle. Years later, they were still shuddering from the experience; what on earth was Jerry THINKING?

Ever since I saw “Repo Man,” I have been followed by the “Plate O’ Shrimp” phenomena, which is a study in small blots of the daily miraculous. “You know how you’re thinking about a Plate O’ Shrimp, and then somebody says “Plate O’ Shrimp” and then you see a sign that says Plate O’ Shrimp?” sayeth the Repo man. Well, Treya has become my personal Plate O’ Shrimp. I run into her everywhere. Every time I go out and see any comedy, she’s always there, sitting Indian-style on the floor, answering back whenever the guy on stage asks a rhetorical question. I cannot escape her. To my horror, she has become inextricably bound up with Comedy Itself. A. and I know that she knows us now — we’re the girls who walked out on her act. She glances at us, we glance at her. We worry she’s going to sing again. She worries we’ll walk out again. And we will.

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