The Rise of the Meta-Gay Show
In the opening moments of Morgan Bassichis’s bright, mournful “Can I Be Frank?,” they stand center stage at the tiny Soho Playhouse, clutching a mike and shrieking a denunciation of a closeted celebrity: “Liberace, Liberace, can you hear me, Liberace? You died. You lied. You died of AIDS and you lied. . . . You could have helped so many people—sorry, Gloria, can we get the lights?” Bassichis twitches as if emerging from hypnosis, then apologizes: it’s not really them yelling, they explain, it’s a bit by Frank Maya, an artist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1995. And Maya’s uncut rage may be too hot a way to open this one-person show—so can they start over? And add some context?
The context: Bassichis, a nonbinary performance artist, became obsessed with Maya after meeting his brother at an artists’ residency and thrilling to the parallels between their work. Maya, like Bassichis, did an act that was a bit standup, a bit performance art, broken up by dreamy, oddball songs. Maya, too, was a confessionalist and a pop-culture obsessive—he was known for his “rants,” manifestos that involved “tearing to shreds” other gay artists, a tradition that Bassichis describes, puckishly, as “one of our ancestral healing practices.” And Maya, like Bassichis, craved fame, the mainstream sort that he was tiptoeing toward when he died at forty-five, just as drugs for AIDS were becoming available. As a result, he became a cultural footnote, having exited the scene two years before Ellen DeGeneres’s “Yep, I’m Gay” Time cover hit newsstands, two decades before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage—and long before the hideous backlash of recent years, as school boards and state legislators worked to snuff out the queer history that Bassichis’s show celebrates.
The performance is intended as a sort of séance, an attempt to summon the spirit of Maya—and, through him, the queer demimonde lost to the plague. But Bassichis’s arch joke is that what we’re watching is only a rough draft, a “preview” in which one thirsty artist struggles to celebrate another, only to get derailed by their own solipsism. There’s no pretense that Bassichis is truly embodying Maya: the real Maya, whose work is on YouTube, was, as Bassichis acknowledges, more butch and more chill, with a regular-dude affect. (His energy reminded me a bit of Tony Danza’s, and was surprisingly similar to that of another gay pioneer, this one fictional: Jodie Dallas, Billy Crystal’s character on the late-seventies TV show “Soap.”)
Bassichis has their own bracing charisma: an elegant schnoz, sparkling eyes, and a slinky body that wriggles like a Squirmles toy as they glide over the stage, tugged to and fro by audience banter. That craving for attention is the aspect of Maya’s work that Bassichis focusses most closely on, as they tangle themself in the mike cord like Liza Minnelli on quaaludes, then cue up audience members to read sycophantic questions off notecards. There aren’t a lot of details here about Maya’s life: it’s a very different project from, say, Matt Wolf’s brilliant documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” which gently but insistently cuts to the core of Paul Reubens’s mystique. Instead, it’s more of a vaudeville act with YouTube links, or a campy riff on “Pale Fire,” a clinging vine of commentary wrapped around Maya’s act, concealing as much as it exposes.
At times, this approach can wear thin, the air quotes so enormous that they dwarf what’s inside them. But, when the method clicks, it captures something profound: the deep craving to understand, cross-generationally, queer art that refused to play it small. At one juncture, Bassichis recounts a routine that Maya did about coming out as gay to his father, a devout Catholic who reassured him that their family would pay any price for a cure. Maya wisecracked that everybody already knew the cure for homosexuality—fame. Then Bassichis explains the gulf between then and now: when they first heard the joke, they thought the point was that gay men were showboaters, striving class-president types, whose traumas got healed by the limelight. But Maya’s real joke was that getting famous meant you could no longer be gay—you needed to retreat to the closet, like Liberace and Reubens did.
At times, the show reminded me of David Drake’s “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me,” from 1992, in which Drake argues that the then popular Chelsea “clone” aesthetic wasn’t about vanity so much as self-defense: get bashed enough and you, too, might adopt a shield of muscle. Bassichis argues for something similar: that gay-male narcissism can be a form of political defiance, a refusal to be ignored. Watching him, I was flooded with memories of that lost era, back when debates erupted in response to OutWeek magazine, which took shots at all the famous figures who chose security over solidarity. Mostly, I flashed back to Buddy Cole, a character created by Scott Thompson on the Canadian sketch show “The Kids in the Hall,” which débuted in 1988. It was my first glimpse of the razzle-dazzle of gay fury: Cole, a haughty queen who held court from his barstool, similarly took aim at his peers, tearing into homophobic comics such as Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay, during a time when grabbing the mike back from bigots was a radical act. “Can I Be Frank?” performs the opposite of a takedown—it throws its arms around the painful past, as if it were an old friend you might never see again, someone who might have a few sharp ideas about how to survive the present.
Just uptown from the Soho Playhouse, you can find a more cheerful variant of queer fandom in “Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical,” an adaptation of last year’s surprise television hit about closeted gay hockey players, one sweetly Canadian, one gloomily Russian. You might assume, not unreasonably, that this parody would be dumb, disposable fun—for superfans only. You’d be wrong! To my shock and delight, “Heated Rivalry,” written with unsettling swiftness by Dylan MarcAurele, is a flat-out terrific musical, no caveats necessary. I saw it with somebody who hadn’t watched the show, and she loved it, too.
Like “Can I Be Frank?,” “Heated Rivalry” arrives in ironic air quotes: a trio of horny housewives, all named Susan, sing a rollicking homage to their preferred binge-watch, a series about “Hockey players, with big butts / Sucking dick, but they’re sad.” The prima donna of the group (the fabulous Ryann Redmond, in a haystack wig) explains that this is all a sacred ritual, an attempt, during the show’s hiatus, “to keep the spirit of Shane and Ilya”—the show’s central couple—“alive through this endless winter.” Yet what Susan narrates, as she guzzles “Ambien margaritas,” is not a rude satire; in fact, it’s actually a pretty solid distillation of the show’s narrative. For all the raunchy puns about “heavy loads” and meta-references to the fandom (the YouTube videos of Connor Storrie, the original Ilya, come into play), the show delivers much of the same emotional kick of the series, from its enemies-to-lovers frisson to the psychic burden of the celebrity closet. That makes sense, really: Aren’t Broadway musicals and romance novels the art forms best designed to tap buried feelings that can’t be repressed?
All the songs are good, from Ilya’s hilariously mournful introductory number, “Big Ass, Cold Heart,” to the peculiarly affecting ballad “This Fuck Is Different,” a romantic-breakthrough number delivered with such resolute, distressed sincerity by Jimin Moon, who plays the Canadian goofball Shane Hollander, that a man near me clutched his chest. Key sequences from the show—like a cruising scene in a hotel gym—are reproduced, efficiently, using basic props. The sex is staged vertically, up against mattresses, or using “Avenue Q”-esque puppets; the Susan trio juggle multiple roles, from Ilya’s cruel dad to Shane’s hovering mom—and, each night, one lucky audience member is invited onstage to play the hunky zaddy Scott Hunter.
Best of all are the adorable Moon and Jay Armstrong Johnson, as Ilya, who do much more than mug as the star-crossed lovers. It’s impossible to say how Frank Maya might greet a crossover phenomenon like this: As schlock? As progress? But, in the midst of a Broadway season overflowing with high camp, from “Titaníque” to “The Jellicle Ball,” there’s some room to spare for a humble, handmade valentine, découpaged with X’s and O’s. ♦