There’s maybe a reason the work light that watches over a theater at night is referred to as the “Ghost Light”: so much of live performance is a kind of seance with the past. This is explicit in Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank? which this past summer was remounted at the SoHo Playhouse for its third summer, like our own Very Downtown Pride Carol (replete with Ghost of Homosexual Artist Past). Audiences once again flocked to witness Bassichis, under the immaculately tuned direction of our foremost theatrical freak-whisperer, Sam Pinkleton, ostensibly recreate one of the the solo works of the late queer performance artist and comedian (notably the first out gay comic to perform in MTV’s Comedy Hour) Frank Maya, who died of AIDS-related heart failure in 1995 mere months before the first antiretroviral drugs would radically rupture the epidemic’s prognosis.

That is, if Morgan will ever get out of Frank’s way. Or is it their own way? The show begins with a “rant”—Maya’s preferred term for his rhetorical explosions—that Maya wrote about Liberace’s closetedness after the latter’s death. But Morgan (for the duration of this piece I’ll use “Morgan” to distinguish the character of the show versus “Bassichis” the artist) almost immediately breaks to check in with an unseen stage manager about their anxiety about coming in “too hot.” Over the evening Morgan shares many of Maya’s rants and songs, but the exquisite central running gag that comprises the formal spine of the show is how Morgan’s stage persona can’t seem to help interrupting the proceedings to center themselves. For instance: telling the story of when they first found out about Maya’s existence, Morgan relays that “the first thought that came into my head was I…am going to win a Tony award.” This dramaturgy of upstaging that structures the evening can be read as both an homage to Maya’s own brand of self-centeredness and a sly commentary on queer narcissism’s sometimes parasitic relationship to the past—but eventually transforms into its own alchemic model of queer generationality.

Before his death, Maya was poised to become the first American mainstream gay comic. But whereas Maya turned to stand-up comedy as a means of breaking through into the mainstream, Bassichis has honed their body of work in the emergent “alt-comedy” scene that has flourished in New York the past decade-plus. As Bassichis has noted, the stand-up world Maya traversed was notably a bastion of “white supremacy, homophobia, and transphobia.” The alt-comedy world, by contrast, is distinguished demographically by shows and mixed bills largely made up of women, queer and trans people, and comedians of color. More importantly, alt-comedy relies on formal approaches to comedy that explode the comparatively straightforward Brick Wall confessional style of the mainstream.

Two of the most recognizable examples of this wave are frequent collaborators John Early and Kate Berlant, whose solo and joint bodies of work are both as formally sentient as they are incisively hilarious portraits of Millennial posturing. Witnessing Berlant perform for the first time, critic Jason Zinoman writes, “What she did was not a performance of comedy so much as a narration of the experience of someone performing comedy…every time she began to tell you about herself, she either changed the subject, contradicted herself, or, criticized her own act, as if the commentary track had invaded the show itself.” This meta-commentary both disrupts expectations around conventional approaches to stand-up, and serves as a kind of self-reflexive portrait of a generation that’s metabolized the proliferating ways to manipulate and editorialize their own self-image. In his 2023 HBO special fittingly titled Now More Than Ever, Early quips “I feel like the only thing we were taught as a generation was to vamp,” and Bassichis’s own take on this very Millennial vamp in many ways structures Can I Be Frank?

The Morgan of Can I Be Frank? is not a realistic self-portrait, but instead an exaggerated avatar that resonates with Maya’s own legacy (Eileen Myles has said of Maya, “Frank was trying to make the world safe…for Frank”) and acts as its own critique on a kind of queer Millennial narcissism. This Morgan feigns humbleness (Maya “is the star of the show. I’m in almost like a…choral role”) only to constantly insert themselves into the narrative. In one of the show’s most lyrical and wily images Morgan disappears to tell a joke of Maya’s behind the stage’s backdrop (which depicts an illustration of a striped life preserver ring that Maya himself performed in front of, here lovingly recreated by Eli Woods Harrison) before being backlit, their silhouette framed by the ring. Is it meant to evoke gestating in the legacy of Maya or is it just a literalization of them centering themselves in it? Just as Maya often talked about being one of America’s first gay comedians, so too does Morgan grasp for even more exaggerated claims of “first-hood”: “Sorry,” they auspiciously interject, “… I’m realizing I might be the first gay person to speak about AIDS…” (this then gets neurotically qualified with “publicly…in a theater! In a one-person show”).

Bassichis is an exquisite physical performer, and one of the recurring bits of this is the way they manipulate a seemingly never-ending mic cord—“about half our budget went to this cord.” This lazzi has a horizontal echo to Kate Berlant’s similar lasso-ing in her generational 2022 comedy special Cinnamon in the Wind, which she annotates by quipping “The wire, of course, representing media…the way it’s snaking around me, the way it’s cannibalizing the female form.” When WNYC’s Alison Stewart pressed Bassichis on the significance of the cord in their performance, they eventually suggested that it “kind of represented this umbilical cord across generations…We are passing down the mic.” In one of Maya’s songs that Morgan performs, Maya meditates on a kind of instant gratification parentage: “Why can’t I have Polaroid Children? Children that would develop in a matter of seconds / so I can know right away if I made a mistake.”

But what is so fascinating, and complicatedly moving, about Can I Be Frank? is in fact the way it ultimately refuses this kind of linear succession narrative. The climax of Frank comes in two movements. Throughout, Morgan has delivered several of Maya’s own “rants,” although each is slipped into more and more imperceptibly, reflected in the lighting (by the brilliant Oona Curley) as it transforms from quick snaps of Morgan in spotlight to subtler fades. The final of Maya’s rants Morgan delivers is about the trap of expecting men to be as fun as they are the first night you go home with them, and Morgan reflects on their admiration for how Maya, in front of an audience impacted by the AIDS epidemic, reserved his righteousness for “a guy too tired to have sex with him…I love that about Frank Maya.” This morphs into a fevered rant, almost an aria, of Morgan’s own about how Maya’s ceaseless appetite for “more” mirrors theirs, and their porous, shifting relation to him: “...Frank and I are seeing each other! Is it strictly professional? Is it Oedipal? I don’t know what’s projection and what’s transference, and where I end and he begins…Because we are stuck. You and me, me and Frank, Frank and you—we are stuck. And thank God for that!” Just as you think there’s no register left for Morgan to burst through, they call for a song as the lights shift once again to the opening chords of the final track of Maya’s we’ll be witness to, “Boxes of You.”

Lyrically, Maya’s song is a simple ballad of ostensibly post-break-up malaise. The speaker begrudgingly acknowledges the fresh possibilities the world surely still holds (“I know that there are other boys out there to meet…I know that someday I may just find someone new”), while bemoaning the fixating reruns in their mind: “Why can’t they show something new? / instead I’m sitting watching boxes of you.” Maya’s rendition, which we blessedly have a recording of, has a melancholic but jaded aloofness to it. Morgan’s re-performance is immediately more hungry, the yearning’s edge sharper. Spoken anew, Maya’s refrain of “I can’t get you, I can’t get you / out of my head” is now about Maya himself.

This is made text as Morgan croons, “Since you’ve been gone / all the ups are too, the ups are gone / they left with you,” as they rotate a humble stair unit they’ve been perching on to reveal inside it a television playing grainy footage of the actual Frank Maya. Morgan sings imploringly directly to this flickering image of Maya’s ghost, splayed in front of the monitor like a child stealing transfixed glimpses of something unspeakably recognizable for the first time. In the footage, Maya performs in front of that same life preserver backdrop, and the glow of the TV mirrors the glow of the backdrop that looms over Morgan. Maya’s narcissism has been repurposed and focused back onto him across time, but instead of a prismatic hall of mirrors a kind of wondrous queer synthesis has occurred before our very eyes.

Why can’t they show something new, indeed. Early in Tony Kushner’s opus Angels in America (which ended its Broadway run just months before Maya would pass), the prophet Prior Walter witheringly advises, “It’s something you learn after your second theme party: It’s all been done before.” And this puncturing of the cruel optimism of the myth of a Queer First is actually the good news—thank god for that. As Morgan M. Page says, “There is a greater power in the tug of lineage that connects us back through centuries.” Morgan Bassichis’s narcissistic performance of Frank Maya’s narcissism achieves the theatrical equivalent of what a thaumatrope does optically, the illusion of a double-sided image that superimposes and unites into one when spun rapidly. It’s not in fact that Morgan can finally “Be Frank,” or one of his “polaroid children,” picking up the baton of his mic and taking their place on a prematurely abandoned throne. The mic cord here is in fact not an umbilical cord, but more like the tether of the life preserver, and that across the turbulent ocean of history the queer past and present continually symbiotically throw to each other. Indeed, one of the show’s many magic tricks is how most of its audience has likely never even heard of Maya before—and by the end, achingly feel the loss of an artist they before didn’t even know existed. As Morgan righteously professes, they want to ensure “everybody knows the name Frank Maya. And where I am at spiritually today is if that means along the way people have to learn my name—let go and let God.”

No one’s coming to save us. But the profound relief in not being the first, and in being in fact profoundly derivative of our ancestors before us, is that we also don’t have to do it alone. Both Morgan the avatar and Bassichis the artist have clearly been transformed by Frank’s legacy, but just as much with every show in turn Bassichis continues to transform that same legacy. In interviews, Bassichis has shared how one of Maya’s ex-boyfriends Blake West has said of the show, “Well…this is part of what (Frank) was making.” Here, the queer past isn’t just summoned by the queer present to touch: they constitute each other; they make each other possible. And by that same token, like lighthouses across the roiling waves, or a ghost light in a darkened theater, can be both blueprints and beacons alike to continually save each other.