More than Frank
New Yorkers! (And my bridge and tunnel brethren!) It’s one of the best times of the year to be in the city. Everyone with somewhere else to go has gone. Be feral! Go to a cool restaurant without making a reservation! Yell at western European tourists for standing on the steps to the subway! And go see Morgan Bassichis’ show, Can I Be Frank?, at the Soho Playhouse until September 13th.
Can I Be Frank? is comedy, is performance art, is a solo show/conjuring of the dead, is song and, well, if not dance, then a touch of Lucille Ball style physical humor. It is, as Bassichis promises, the first time in history that a gay person has written a play about AIDS. The show moves fast: a joke, a serious line, a deadpan appeal for A24 to sponsor the show, another joke, a serious moment, a bit of physical comedy with an increasingly cumbersome microphone cord, winding around and around them. You can read more about Bassichis in a Lux profile by our own Yasmin El-Rifae, where Bassichis discusses how Jewish tradition, which includes humor, is “undermined in the Zionist marshalling of religion into colonial violence.” Laughter, they explain, is a form of disarmament. Can I Be Frank? echoes a classic Bassichis line: “I don’t hate myself because I’m Jewish, I hate myself because I’m gay!” Yes, humor helps us survive, but not all of us did.
The show is inspired by Frank Maya, one of the first out gay comedians, on the verge of mainstream success (MTV and Comedy Central specials!) before succumbing to AIDS-related complications in 1995. If you know your AIDS history, that date hurts: 1995 is the year protease inhibitors were released, the first drug cocktail to successfully treat AIDS. Maya is simply a man who could have been here, should still be here, but is not. One of the most powerful moments of the show was when Bassichis does a bit about how the guy you take home is always on his best behavior the first night only, and slowly, from historically specific details, the audience realizes that it’s a Maya bit, that Bassichis has subtly altered their tone and cadence to bring his work into theirs. It was just as fresh as it must have been in 1987.
They implored us to remember places and names: Cookie Mueller, yes of course my ears pricked up here because I love her, and also Ethyl Eichelberger, John Sex, Haoui Montag. More names I didn’t write down because I was crying but I’ll go to the show again! Google these people! Have fun! AIDS history is full of names of the famous, but it is harder to make art about those who were known in their community – whether it congregated around Caroline’s or the Pyramid Club – but not the whole wide world. Which is why, I think, the show opens with Bassichis doing a Maya bit about Liberace, who died of AIDS and lied about it, who could have saved a lot of people if he had just come out with it all.
In 70 minutes, I laughed, I cried, I was grateful, I waved at my gay neighbors sitting in the aisle across from me and said to my wife, the queer community is real! And when I ran into one of them as we were walking our dogs – we know each other’s dog’s names but their human names escape me, and I’m sure vice versa – we exchanged numbers to finally have drinks. Wouldn’t you know it – both my neighbor and I are working on projects about little-known queer New York history. He’d never seen any of Bassichis’ work before, and I told him I was a Bassichis completist and this was their tightest show yet. (I imagine it takes a lot of work to make the show seem so off the cuff, so shout out to director Sam Pinkleton, who won a Tony for Oh, Mary!, and La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, where the show was developed and produced. I meant to see it last year, but I had a thing.) We commiserated about the pressure of honoring the dead not as martyrs or as material, which Bassichis dramatizes so well. We remember them because we are them and will become them, we are that community in the here and now. There’s no such thing as a solo performance. ––Natalie Adler