The Poetry Project

I Love All the Ways in Which We’re Human: An Interview with Morgan Bassichis

Ayaz Muratoglu

I left Morgan Bassichis’s performance of Can I Be Frank? at La MaMa Theater on June 18 moved by their vision of art and organizing as practices that can work in concert. I wanted the chance to talk to them more about how aesthetics and politics comprise daily life. Over the summer, we spoke about their show, organizing for Palestinian liberation in a time of genocide, and the overlapping legacies of Douglas Crimp, Gregg Bordowitz, Frank Maya, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and others who considered performance, abolition, and the roles we play in our movements and on stage.
—Ayaz Muratoglu

Ayaz Muratoglu: I wanted to start by asking you if you remember the first time you ever performed on stage.

Morgan Bassichis: Well, I did a production of The Ugly Duckling in kindergarten, in which I played the Ugly Duckling. That’s the first time. Well, once my mother was in a class for new parents where the nurse asked for one of the babies to be washed as an example. And I was that baby, so I think that’s what my mother always says was my first performance.

AM: I’m curious how you got into the combination of performance art, comedy, theater, and specifically the version of the three things that you practice these days. How did you arrive at the place that you’re at now?

MB: Yeah, I would say trial and error, certainly not intentionally or strategically. I grew up doing theater and then really stepped away from it for about ten years while I lived in San Francisco as an organizer. When I moved to New York to be an actor, by literal trial and error, I kind of found this hospitable space that somehow I’ve been able to inhabit. And I wanted to be an actor and a playwright, so I started to do these sorts of scripted monologues with jokes in between. Then people told me to just tell the jokes in between the monologue, to let that be the monologue. I sort of watered that, and that grew. And then at some point I gave myself the test task of including a song in every show I did. And so that was how I kind of watered that part into what I do now.

AM: I love that. You just finished a run of a new show, Can I Be Frank?, at La MaMa. Can you share a bit about who Frank Maya was, and how he figured into the show?

MB: Frank Maya was a performer who died in 1995 of AIDS. He started out as a musician, and then moved into a performance art world, and then his final chapter was as a comedian. I’ve found that whenever there’s a gay person, it’s always like the first something, and everyone gets a little confused about the first person on a Friday to do this in June below 14th Street in a costume. There are different stories about what Maya was the first at, but I think he was the first gay comedian to have a set on network television, which was a big deal. There are a lot of eerie resonances between Frank and my work, which was part of what I was trying to explore with the show. How do I tell the story of my relationship to this person without displacing him from the story? How can I be honest enough to say that, when we tell the story about him, I’m also talking about me? The show aimed to stage this tension to figure out how to communicate the story of a performer without just saying, “Oh, you had to be there,” or “Just trust me it was funny.” Nobody wants to hear about a meal they weren’t at. Nobody wants to hear about a party they weren’t at. We need to make the meal now. We have to make the party. It has to be in this room. You have to leave feeling fed.

I think I saw somewhere that Frank performed at the Poetry Project at some point. [Note: Maya performed at the Poetry Project twice—a paired reading with R. Weis in 1986 and the Marathon in 1988.] Frank performed all over New York City, and did a show in 1987 at La MaMa—I proposed to the theater that I revisit the show and see what happens. And that’s how we arrived at the show.

AM: And what was it like the very first time you watched a Frank Maya video?

MB: It was just so intense, like new relationship energy, where you’re all, “Oh my god, we’re actually perfect, and we’re gonna get married. And I never wanted to get married, because I don’t believe in marriage, but now I do—that kind of thing. And we’re going to buy countertops—we’re going to have so much fun thinking about knobs.” So I just went real fast. Literally, the first day, I wanted to make a documentary about Frank, I wanted to know him, I wanted to make a show about him. And it was hard to have to slow it down. That’s a hard lesson we all have to learn over and over again.

AM: So how did you slow it down?

MB: People tell you to chill out. People say one step at a time. Who are you? I’ve never heard of you. Who do you think you are? I almost think about projects in terms of folktales, where you pick up little breadcrumbs, and each of them reveal the next step. But you don’t get to know the answer right away. You want to, and you’re miserable because you don’t, but you don’t get to quite yet.

AM: On that note, I was so taken by how many times in the show you start it and stop it and start it over. You have this iterative, kind of recursive start to the show. How did you land on that? How did you decide which version of it would be the one that propels the rest of the show?

MB: In some ways I wanted to kind of stage the main conflict right away, which is: is this about him or about me? And in some ways it might be a premise that people might have imagined coming to is, oh, I’m going to recreate his show, something people might expect. And right away I wanted to interrupt that, have my ego and my own needs undermine the sort of simplistic or naive premise that it could just be him on stage.

AM: I think a lot about how Frank Maya was fixated on making the world safe for him, rather than some sort of collective liberation project. How were you thinking about Frank’s politics in the show, and how did they square with your own?

MB: I love all the ways in which we’re human. Gregg Bordowitz always quotes Charles Ludlam’s idea from the Theatre of the Ridiculous manifesto: “If you’re not a mockery of your ideals, your ideals aren’t high enough.” In some ways, it’s so easy to kind of romanticize our queer ancestors and movement ancestors, and it’s equally as important when we encounter that they were also just people. They weren’t all running from the meeting to the barricade to the theater. No: Frank was trying to be famous. I like knowing that because it reminds me that I’m also human, and that we’re not trying to be saints, and that we don’t need to find saints that came before us to find people or ancestors to claim as our own. In fact, it’s an unfair responsibility to put on them that they never signed up for.

Frank’s friends and exes, with a sense of humor, called his memorial service his “canonization,” joking about the ways in which you die and become a saint. They assigned different people at his memorial to perform parts of his monologue, so this queer practice of honoring people in both their lovely and totally human sides was already in motion, long before I found Frank and his work.

AM: Can you speak to the process of preparing for the show? What was it like to speak to Frank’s relatives and exes and friends and lovers?

MB: The AIDS crisis, as we know, is not over, and in fact, it’s just beginning. But we can really learn from the networks of care that emerged around people in the 1980s, networks that also extended into keeping their memories alive, taking care of their archives and artistic legacies. It was a really moving, powerful, and meaningful experience to get to talk to people about their memories of Frank. We all have Frank Mayas in our life. There are so many people who were both amazing artists—and who weren’t even amazing artists—who were so important, and so many people are just dying to tell the stories of our loved ones, who want to tell us how special this person was. They don’t need to be perfect or even excellent to merit our interest. I hope to be as generous as Frank’s friends and loved ones were with me. I aspire to that level of generosity.

AM: I’ve been thinking about how you talked about Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation without naming it directly or explicitly in the show. And alongside that, how you honor the work of ACT UP in your organizing for Palestinian liberation. You were part of a November roundtable on Douglas Crimp, and you said something that really struck me, about “remixing and referencing and cross-pollinating, … about the interlockingness of all of our struggles for liberation.” I want to ask here again, how do you see these movements connecting to one another? What can we learn from those that came before us, what does this lineage of fighting for liberation look like, and how do we stay rooted in it?

MB: Our movements have always been cross-pollinated. On a very material level, there were many members of ACT UP who were also organizing around Israeli occupation and colonialism. What’s that mystical Jewish way of reading texts, where you read on the most obvious literal level, and then go through levels of abstraction? All those levels are present when we think about the interwovenness of struggles. That’s why we love Shatzi [Weisberger]—she embodied those intersections for us, as a nurse during the AIDS crisis and a proud anti-Zionist dyke. She refused to let any of those parts of her be erased.

[JVP’s October 2023 action in Grand Central Station] consciously referenced ACT UP’s Day of Desperation in Grand Central—we tried to remix that intervention. We drew on the power and creativity of ACT UP while honoring the material linkages between these struggles [the Gulf War and AIDS / healthcare not genocide]. There were many members of ACT UP, at all stages of ACT UP, who were very politicized around Palestine and fighting Zionism. When we honor these linkages, I feel like we are fundamentally talking about Ruthie Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” We’re talking about organizing against systemic death, where certain people’s lives are deemed disposable, and others are not.

AM: In the show, you suggest how inspiring it was that as ACT UP was lying down in the streets to protest the state’s murderous indifference to AIDS, Frank was ranting about a guy that was too tired to have sex with him, or joking that if it hadn’t been for a scout leader, he wouldn’t have had sex till he was 16. I’m thinking about Douglas Crimp’s 1989 essay “On Mourning and Militancy” that you reference throughout the show, where Crimp writes about how most gay people in New York knew upwards of a hundred people who died of AIDS at the time of that writing. What has Frank Maya shown you about insisting on living your life in the face of so much death and grief?

MB: That is such an important, juicy, ongoing question. I think about how where there is oppression, there is also resistance. We are driven towards life in unspeakable and unimaginable circumstances. That motor has propelled survival and liberation movements throughout history, and it has always included tons of jokes, sex, pleasure, silliness, beauty, desire, playfulness. Without romanticizing those conditions, let’s see that as part of what it means to create a life-affirming resistance to the death-dealing culture of racism and capitalism that tries to co-opt our joy and our pleasure and our desire into its own manufactured scarcities and militarized vision of the world.

People have always been making their dumb little jokes, no matter the circumstances. And then, on a real personal level, with this show, I did have to confront the question of, if this was a good use of my time right now. Is this a good use of me asking an audience to come? But that’s the wrong question. The thing is, this is also what we do. We also make rooms where people come together and laugh. I am quoting Gregg Bordowitz every second, which should tell you how formative he’s been to my thinking, but he would always say, “We need people at the barricades and also at their easel, at their studio. We need it all.”

AM: To go back to Douglas Crimp, this reminds me of how he tells the story in “Militancy and Mourning” of when his father died, he thought that he could just kind of bypass his grief. But then he develops this abscess, and these poisonous tears break out over his face—the grief becomes physical. I’m thinking about how the show builds a container through which the audience can mourn Frank Maya’s death, and through that mourn the death of so many people that we lost to AIDS. How did you bring Crimp in to contextualize the show?

MB: Douglas is always with me. You know, he was an amazing person and an amazing friend, and I had the real privilege of getting to be with him over the last year of his life. Douglas taught me how to live an engaged life. He was thinking and reading and theorizing and changing and evolving and asking questions and reading until the very end. For the November roundtable that Gregg Bordowitz pulled together, we had a discussion of Douglas’s work for people who had different kinds of relationships with him. And then I sat down and set his essay to music. It was sort of this overflowing of emotion, and not knowing where to put it, and it came out in this song. I knew the beginning of the show was going to start with Frank, and somehow it was going to end up with this song, and I didn’t know what was going to be in between.

AM: Can you speak a bit to the relationship between tension and release throughout the show—how comedic techniques allow you to build a container through which an audience can laugh, learn, cry?

MB: This was where my director, Sam Pinkleton, was so amazing because he would say, “It’s all well and good for this to be to honor this artist, and for the politics to be on point, but you better make it funny. You better make it an entertaining evening for people who don’t give a shit about whatever the message you’re trying to bring.” And I totally agree. That’s a great prompt.

I believe in things being entertaining—and I don’t think you can just gesture towards “this would be funny if I was to flesh it out,” or point towards something entertaining but deprive the audience of experiencing that pleasure. We need to actually make the show funny. Why are we so committed to misery? I knew the Crimp song was going to end the show, so Sam’s question was how do we earn that? How do we carry that thread the whole way? I love that about comedy: that you can fake-laugh, but you know when you’re faking laughing. The proof is in the pudding. You can have all the beautiful thoughts and ideas in the world, but is it funny? For me and my work, that’s the stitch I have to stay closest too—is it genuinely funny? I have to also make myself laugh. It was really amazing to be ruthless with the material: Sam would be like, “That’s a six. Cut it.” I’ve never had something so intimately in all of my material before, in every word. That rigor was a real blessing.

This collaboration reminded me of what we already know, which is that we never do anything alone. There’s no such thing as a solo. There might be one human body on stage, but it’s only possible through mostly unseen collaboration. So that was also part of the juice of the show: to claim this as a duet between me and Frank. It also feels like a duet between me and Sam. It’s like we constitute each other.

AM: That’s so beautiful. On that note, I always leave your performances as much in a new world as possible, like it’s around the corner, like what we’re fighting for is actually getting us somewhere, whether it be about Palestinian liberation, about queer liberation, about the possibility that I could hook up with a Park Slope dad. You make these things feel possible without being trivial. And I’m curious if you could speak more to the process of developing that—which mentors and artists have showed you the way to building out this ethos of conjuring different realities into the room?

MB: Such a good question. I feel like for so many queer people, humor is this baked-in strategy of making a space more hospitable and softer and inhabitable, which is part of that conjuring. I think that’s part of the mischievous thing. At the same time, I was radicalized in the prison abolition movement, which is so much about asking us to imagine a world beyond the one we can see now and beyond things that we take as inevitable and permanent. I remember a Critical Resistance sweatshirt from way back in the day about how prisons didn’t always exist. They will not always exist. To really imagine that the material structures can be taken down, dismantled, repurposed—that muscle is completely shaped and made possible by Black feminism, by the abolitionist demand that we see our imaginations as urgent realms of strategy. And history is littered with stories of seeing beyond what everyone says is permanent.

We’ve all been to events where they’re talking about the world to come and we’re like, Can I go home instead? This is boring. But I think we’re always in this experimentation with giving each other glimmers and tastes of that world to come. I feel like we just pass around glimmers and tastes, and it’s okay that it’s temporary. Even if I can’t live here in this space that we’ve created, we get to inhabit it for a couple hours. I love how many ghosts are with us at all times, ones we know and don’t know, and I really appreciate the way you’ve made and continue to make spaces for those ghosts to inhabit.

AM: Oh, thank you. I love that. Are there any other mentors and artists that come to mind who you feel have—this feels a bit reductive—set the stage for you to be able to make the work that you do?

MB: Certainly the work of My Barbarian—Malik Gaines, Alexandro Segade, and Jade Gordon. They gave me my first opportunity to perform in New York, and both in that gig and in their methodology as artists, they are engaged in this kind of interdisciplinary, pedagogical entertainment.

AM: When I think of your art, I think of how many people are behind it, friends of yours, playing cello, building cushions, designing pamphlets, painting backdrops. What does this look like for you? How do these networks figure into your work?

MB: I feel so grateful to know a lot of really brilliant people who are good at a lot of stuff. It’s a real pleasure to not feel like we need to be good at everything, and just to ask other people who are good at stuff to say, “Will you do this?” And that feels like another muscle or practice of recognizing we don’t all need to do everything. We can be strength-based. Our friend Eli Harrison made that backdrop and recreated Frank’s life preserver that he had in his show in 1987. It felt so amazing to me to have Eli’s hands make that because both of us love Eli and respect Eli so much, but also because Eli has made so many of the big and beautiful and powerful giant banners [that JVP has used] over these past horrendous, many months of Israeli genocide. It felt really powerful to have their meticulousness and skills and dedication cross-stitched and woven in. For someone who doesn’t know the backstory or the backdrop or Eli, I still feel like you can feel it. I feel like you can feel the love and devotion to justice and queer ancestry that Eli has.

AM: One last question: you are so good at building towards the end of a show in this big, layered, musical way. I think this is true of every show that I’ve seen of yours. I’m wondering what the process looks like to get to that point. Is it the same every time? What does it mean for you?

MB: I feel like the crescendo for this show comes from a moment that was Sam’s idea, where it’s unclear whether it’s me or Frank talking. We see this kind of light fade, where suddenly our materials bleed into each other. And then the show ends, and I’m doing a rant in the style of Frank, but it’s me. I’m inhabiting his form. That felt like the journey of this show.

For every show, the end reminds us that the show is its own folktale. It’s the end of that story, and there will be more stories. So the question remains: how do you not tie everything up with a bow? How do we not say, “Now we’ve learned our lesson?” How do we feel satisfied? And the answer is we get to rest in this moment for now, but we know there will be another crisis for us to attend to soon.

#278 – Fall 2024

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