Howl! Happening: Howl! Happening: An VegaVega ProjectProject AnArturo Arturo
Ethyl Eichelberger Timeline July 17, 1945
—Born James Roy Eichelberger in Pekin, Illinois.
1956
—Plays the Wicked Witch in his elementary school play Hansel and Gretel.
1959-62
—Acts in numerous plays at Pekin High School. Summer of 1961 and 1962 —Acts with the Corn Stock Theatre, a summer stock tent theater in Peoria, Illinois.
1963
—Enrolls in Knox College. Plays the title role in Hamlet freshman year.
1965
—Drops out of Knox College and enrolls in The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.
1967
—Attends a rehearsal of Charles Ludlam’s Big Hotel with American Academy classmate Gary Tucker (aka Eleven).
1967
—Joins the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. Acts in over 30 productions there during the next seven years.
1974
—Moves to New York City. Works at The Candle Shop on Christopher Street.
1975
November— Appears in his first Ridiculous Theatrical Company production, Tabu Tableaux.
1976
—Acts in Ludlam’s Caprice. —Changes his name to Ethyl Eichelberger. Somewhere between 1976 and 1978—Gets a full back tattoo, designed by Ken Tisa, and executed by Ruth Marten of himself as an angel in drag.
1977
—Plays Fricka in Ludlam’s Der Ring Gott Farblonjet. November— Presents his versions of Phèdre
and Oedipus at La MaMa.
1978
—Drove a NYC cab to support himself. —Premieres his Nefert-iti at Dance Theatre Workshop.
1980
June—Presents his Medea at Club 57. Fellow castmates include John Heys, Agosto Machado and Sarah Jenkins-Jacob.
1981
—Earns a cosmetology license from The Ultissima Beauty Institute. June—Premieres Minnie the Maid at s.n.a.f.u.
1982
—Begins working at the Pyramid Club where he will eventually be known as the bar’s Queen Mother.
1983
—Acts in John Jesurun’s Chang in a Void Moon at the Pyramid Club. June—Performs various grande dames at 544 Natoma Performance Gallery in San Francisco.
—Wins an Obie Award for his Lucrezia Borgia.
1984
—Constructs the wig for Einstein in Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach. August—Premieres his Hamlette with Black-Eyed Susan, Agosto Machado and Tabboo! in a friend’s loft on 2nd Avenue. November— Premieres his Souled Out (or Dr. Mary Faustus) at 8BC with Tabboo!, Agosto Machado and Ritta Redd.
1985
March—Premieres Mrs. Wiggs in the Cabbage Patch at Club Chandelier. July 17—On his fortieth birthday premieres Leer at 8BC. From this point forward, he writes male roles for himself in his new works. September—Acts in Ludlam’s Salammbo. September— Performs a tab version of Leer at Wigstock.
October 13— Gives the last performance onstage at 8BC before it closed.
1986
February— Premieres Casanova at The Performing Garage. July—Premieres Rip Van Winkle at P.S. 122.
premieres it at The Performing Garage. —Performs a variety of his works at the LIFT Festival in London, including Leer, Jocasta (Boy Crazy) and Lucrezia Borgia. —Performs Leer as part of the Serious Fun! festival at Lincoln Center.
July—A retrospective of his plays in repertory staged at The Performing Garage.
November—Present in hospital room when Peter Hujar dies.
September—Plays Mrs. Nurdiger in Ludlam’s last play The Artificial Jungle.
January—Performs various grande dames in Australia for three weeks as part of the Sydney Festival.
1987
March—Stages a group version of Klytemnestra at P.S. 122. June—Plays the Courtesan and Abbess in The Comedy of Errors with The Flying Karamazov Brothers at Lincoln Center, directed by Robert Woodruff. Production broadcast on PBS’s “Live from Lincoln Center.” July—Writes St. Joan for Black-Eyed Susan and
1988
—Cast in the HBO series Encyclopedia, a children’s educational show. —Evicted from his storefront at 9 Spring Street. Moves to Staten Island to live with John Brockmeyer in his house there. —Is diagnosed HIV+ but tells very few, select people and not until sometime later. July—Premieres The Lincolns at
Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun! festival. August—Premieres Fiasco at P.S. 122. September— Performs some of his grande dames in Holland for the Mickery Theatre’s The History of Theatre (Part 2). November— Premieres Ariadne Obnoxious at the Joyce Theatre.
1989
February—Begins taking AZT six times a day. February 9—Plays Froth in Measure for Measure at Lincoln Center. June—Premieres Herd of Buffalo at P.S. 122. August—Plays the title character in Buzzsaw Berkeley with book by Doug Wright and music by Michael John LaChiusa at the WPA Theatre. November—Plays the Ballad Singer in Threepenny Opera on Broadway with Sting and Maureen McGovern. Directed by John Dexter.
1990
—Shoots a small part in Oliver Stone’s film The Doors. April—Premieres Dilbert Dingle-Dong at La Mama. —Cast in The Caucasian Chalk Circle at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. February—Plays Pandarus in Yale Repertory’s Troilus and Cressida. July—Premieres his last play, Das Vedanya Mama, at P.S. 122. Play includes a new female role for himself. August 12— Commits suicide.
Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the 60s and 70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater— a cultural stew that defies easy definition. For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event—a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and on the Lower East Side. The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”
When Jackie Met Ethyl
Curated by Dan Cameron Published on the occasion of the exhibition May 5 – June 1, 2016 at Howl! Happening An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 11
JACKIE, ETHYL…ETHYL, JACKIE Dan Cameron
Someday I’d like to host an intimate tea party where the only guests would be Jackie Curtis and Ethyl Eichelberger. Partly because I’m in awe of them, and partly because they’re both long dead, I’m sure I’d be far too nervous to whip up anything foodwise, so it’d have to be a catered affair, and in fact I already have the perfect spot picked out for it, at a café table just inside the arboretum. My hands trembling as I refill their delicate porcelain cups, I’d be way too shy to ask them anything directly, but instead would just cock my head and wait for the pearls of wisdom and madness to come tumbling from their painted lips. This fantasy description more or less encapsulates the motivation behind this exhibition. As a young gay man from the sticks who moved to New York in the fall of 1979, I was for some years uncertain of my own creative direction. Although I knew I wanted to organize exhibitions and write about art, this somehow didn’t seem ambitious or creative enough, not to mention that I was experiencing other urgings. In particular, I wanted to write and perform my own plays and music, and I wanted to continue to
make paintings and collages as I had in college. And for a time, I did do all of those things, until it reached that moment near the end of my first decade as a New Yorker, when it was suddenly clear that whereas one area of activity had come to seem fundamentally connected to my own identity, the others were fields of endeavor that I was laboring in without feeling that I was truly making a contribution. Rather than turn my attention completely and fully elsewhere, I invested some of the untapped youthful idealism into becoming a fan of those whom I could not emulate. All my life I’ve studied what artists do in search of a quality that cuts through time and transforms the moment when we experience their work into a type of eternal present, a revelatory instant that can often be returned to years later without that encounter having diminished in intensity. It is a rarified state, but one that is hardly unknown to those who work in the arts, where such moments occur with a certain degree of regularity. Because of the nature of my own personal quest, the dogged trudging through museums and galleries is almost equally offset by the large number of evenings that I can be found watching a play or listening to a concert, as the near-electric surge that comes from a Velázquez or a Pollock is not essentially different from the feelings induced by a great performance, whether it is Anthony Shea playing Falstaff or Justin Vivian Bond channeling Jackie Curtis. This primal contact with genius, for want of a better word, is especially potent when it hits in close proximity to one’s own untapped desires. As avant-garde playwrights operating at the outer regions of gender self-determination within lower Manhattan’s Off-Off-Broadway sector, Jackie Curtis and Ethyl Eichelberger were unique in a number of ways, but they also shared a few interesting traits. Each invented a fulltime artistic female identity that was always acknowledged as a construct—in Jackie’s case because there were entire days, weeks and months when he simply preferred to live as a boy, and in Ethyl’s case because ‘Ethyl’ was a woman-identified stage persona onto which he could build his dramatic parts, both female and male, while he remained Ethyl, a man, offstage. Each was an ardent feminist
and an articulate champion for total freedom of gender identity. Both wrote wildly ambitious and idiosyncratic plays that did double duty as showcases for their own excessive performances, and both were deeply aware of and acknowledged an artistic debt to a handful of forebears, including Charles Ludlam, Jack Smith, and John Vaccaro. Perhaps most strikingly, both Curtis and Eichelberger were notable figures in the art world of their time, primarily because of the impressive list of visual artists who collaborated with one or both of them— Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Peter Hujar, and Billy Sullivan, to name a few—but also because of their social prominence as high-profile outlaws of sexual identity. Of the many striking differences between the two artists, class, looms largest. Jackie grew up John Holder on the Lower East Side when it was a slum, and he was poor and essentially orphaned for most of his upbringing. The only stability in his life was provided by his grandmother, Slugger Ann, and Curtis’ driving, lifelong ambition to make something extraordinary of his life was always in stark conflict with the glaring absence of the kind of educational, cultural and/ or familial foundation that could help make that dream a possibility. His ferocious clinging to Warhol’s celebrity, his crackpot schemes to become famous, and his persistent homelessness were all signs of an unmoored aspect to his character that seems to have paved the way toward his crippling addictions and eventual heroin overdose in 1985, mere weeks after his play Champagne had made his La MaMa comeback official. In contrast, James Roy Eichelberger grew up in a close and loving middle-class Mennonite family in rural Illinois, and he was provided ample opportunity (and private piano lessons) to nurture the dramatic flair that was evident from an early age. While his theatrical creations were fantastically flamboyant, Eichelberger himself was a consummate professional, laboring for years in regional theater and in Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company, even becoming a licensed beautician and expert wigmaker to earn a living—the wigs for the original Einstein on the Beach were his— before his first efforts as a performer took fruit. After changing his name to Ethyl at age 30, it took several years before his charged
interpretations of Medea, Clytemnestra and Lucrezia Borgia caught on, and he was at the height of his artistic influence when he committed suicide at his Staten Island home in 1990. The underlying premise to this exhibition is rooted in the idea that while both Eichelberger and Curtis continue to be celebrated today for their courageous approach to identity, their role as muses to the artists of their time, and the raw energy of their performances, my belief is that the key to their artistic longevity lies in their extraordinary use of language. To unpack this argument properly, it is necessary at first to offer a thumbnail sketch of the theatrical context from which their work emerged. From the pioneering plays of Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank through most of the middle 20th century, gay writers began to more assertively claim playwriting as a potent territory for artistic self-expression. By the early 1960s, Edward Albee had become a national celebrity through the success of his verbally explosive Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961-62), while the homoerotic subtexts in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) triggered a minor scandal, and both were quickly made into Hollywood films. The independent film community may have still been in its infancy, but Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1963) and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) showed the potential for channeling radical identities through the power of experimental celluloid. An especially cut-up, fragmented and reassembled approach to language best describes the radical verbal mix-and-match that both Curtis and Eichelberger aimed for, the roots for which can be found anywhere from William Burroughs’ mosaic-like fiction to the appropriation-heavy poetry of John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Koch (who moonlighted as a playwright). The major turning point in the downtown zeitgeist that paved the way for both Curtis and Eichelberger was Vaccaro’s founding of the Play-House of the Ridiculous in the mid-60s, particularly its early production of plays by Ronald Tavel and Charles Ludlam. Virtually all of their shows, like those of its spinoff, Ludlam’s own Ridiculous Theatrical Company, championed a freewheeling pastiche of campy movie clichés,
absurdist humor and an emphatic deployment of cross-dressing characters. This rapid sendup of preposterous plotlines that were no sooner introduced than instantly discarded appears to be a pioneering gesture that predates by a few years the emergence of post-dramatic theater, in which the performer is presented foremost as a personality, who simultaneously happens to be playing a dramatic role onstage. Most of the lines spoken (or shouted) by Ethyl’s and Jackie’s characters perform a subtle juggling act of furthering the storyline (to the degree one exists) while constantly undermining the narrative cohesion with endless asides, self-contradictions, multiple personalities, stream-of-consciousness interruptions, and a bottomless supply of archaisms, bad puns, arcane references, non sequiturs, invented words, double entendres, and even proto-linguistic stuttering and barking. As performers, both improvised heavily and rewrote their material obsessively, but their shared goal of fracturing the language through an intensely gay-identified notion of the absurd seems to be something they would be only too delighted to talk about, if only they could be persuaded to attend my tea party. When I learned during the early part of my research for this exhibition that Jackie Curtis and Ethyl Eichelberger had, according to the collective memory of friends who knew them both, never actually been in the same room at the same time, it felt like the affirmative sign I’d been waiting for. Both Jackie and Ethyl are, it goes without saying, more than deserving of a much larger, one person exhibition, but for the time being it seems appropriate to try and kindle interest in both of their contributions at the same moment. Both were products of a historically unique period in the U.S. theater and the downtown New York City avant-garde—the 60s, 70s and 80s—, we lost both of them tragically young, and both seem to be slowly entering a broader cultural lexicon of shared knowledge about visionary American artists who experimented with forms of gender and linguistic self-expression that most of their contemporaries appear to have found baffling, but future generations may well regard as heroic.
Ethyl Eichelberger Swallowing Fire. Photo Dona McAdams.
TO LIVE ANOTHER DAY ETHYL EICHELBERGER IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Joe E. Jeffreys
Ethyl Eichelberger wrote a song he often performed as an encore to his shows. Its chorus goes, “We are women who survive and we will live to fight another day.” Ethyl Eichelberger died some 25 years ago, in the last century, yet the impact of this East Village performer and playwright swells onward, like the lines from his rousing theme song, to live another day in this new 21st century. During his lifetime, Ethyl (née James) Eichelberger, the product of a Midwestern childhood and extensive classical theatre training, wrote and starred in some 30 solo and group performance works. Many of these works were based in the biographies of great women of history, literature, or myth, from Lola Montez to Mrs. Wiggs to Clytemnestra. As a gay man he deeply identified with these misunderstood and underestimated figures and wanted audiences to see his queer presence in these roles. From the late 70s through the advent of AIDS and its first wave of devastation in the 80s, to the peak of the National Endowment for the Arts crisis in 1990, Ethyl plied his do-it-yourself spectaculars of schmaltz and bombast all over the East Village, from the Pyramid Club to 8BC and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut
to performance spaces La MaMa, Dixon Place and P.S. 122. He also enjoyed significant success in the commercial and not-for-profit repertory theatre worlds, as a character actor on stages from Yale Repertory Theatre to Lincoln Center and Broadway. Performance is an ephemeral art. Once the curtain rings down, what is left? In Ethyl’s case the answer is much. Some of this remarkable legacy is quantifiable while other parts are perhaps just a feeling, but you know Ethyl’s inspiration is there. Since his death in 1990, several of Ethyl’s plays have been published and staged from coast to coast. Their literary merit, humor, outrage and audience appeal remain strong. He has also inspired characters in novels from writers including Matthew Stadler and Tom Spanbauer. As long as these works are read or performed, Ethyl is alive. While he was alive, the friends he made and the performers and writers Ethyl adopted and mentored keep him vitally alive today in their work, thoughts and conversations. Ethyl rarely sought photo or video documentation of his performances. Yet it was captured. Anytime those glorious still images by photographers including Peter Hujar, Donna Ann McAdams and Ande Whyland among others are seen in galleries or books, Ethyl is alive. Nelson Sullivan, Character Generators and others shot video of some of Ethyl’s raucous shows. While a moving image record is no substitute for any live performance, it is possibly the closest option available for those who were not there to witness Ethyl live in the last century. The explosive growth of the Internet and YouTube in this century have shrapneled this mesmerizing moving image Ethyl content worldwide, keeping a dose of his fierceness alive at the click of a mouse. This digital century’s generation of Googlers keeps Ethyl alive. Ethyl also lives in the works of painters and sculptors including Mark Beard, Oliver Herring and Donald Moffett, who created portraits and more abstract works inspired by him that are shown internationally. Museum and gallery shows like this one keep Ethyl alive.
Ethyl also thrives in the 21st century through the Ethyl Eichelberger Award. Established by Performance Space 122, the commissioning grant is given to an artist who embodies Ethyl’s generosity of spirit as a person and consummate skill as a multidisciplinary performer. Since 2005, the honor has been bestowed on an extraordinary line of artists: Taylor Mac, Julie Atlas Muz, Justin Vivian Bond, Jennifer Miller, Vaginal Davis, John Kelly, Peggy Shaw, Mike Iveson and Dane Terry. All these recipients spark Ethyl’s flame onto every stage they obliter Ethyl’s high-octane approach to life and performance also burns in the 21st century in more oblique ways. There is undeniably some pure elemental part of Ethyl beating through the aesthetics and attitudes of the current Williamsburg and Bushwig drag nexus. Lady Quesa’Dilla, Merrie Cherry and Untitled Queen likely never saw Ethyl live but keep sparks of his work alive in their role as drag shamans and fools of the new post-9/11, marriage-and-gender-equality-for-all, PrEP ciscentury. Ethyl wrote another accordion-accompanied song he sang at the end of his Klytemnestra. Its lyrics go “She’s alive, she’s alive. Do not doubt she’s alive. When you hear her name in song then she’s alive. So listen to her signing and when you hear her signing don’t forget she hears you too.” Ethyl, can you hear us howling at you in the 21st century? We still hear and see you and know you live another day.
Original Klytemnestra Press Release, 1987. Private Collection.
WHEN ETHYL MET JACKIE Penny Arcade
Being a stickler for lineage, I would have to make a correction and say, “When Ethyl Met Jackie”, because Jackie Curtis was the precursor for all drag that colored outside the lines of what was then colloquially called (in the gay world) ‘realness’. While Ethyl was two years older than Jackie, by 1967, Jackie, an indigenous Lower East Sider and hell bent on reinvention, had reorganized the entire concept of drag on the streets of downtown NY. Meanwhile Ethyl, the Midwesterner, had already graduated from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in NY, and would later spend seven years as the lead character actor of the prestigious regional theatre company, Trinity Rep. Jackie Curtis’s influence on downtown performance in the 1960’s was eclipsed somewhat in the 1970’s by the more formally organized and educated Charles Ludlam, but everyone, Ludlam included, understood that Curtis’s charisma existed both on and off the stage. Charles was an actor, and a great one, but Curtis was a force of nature. I have no doubt Ethyl would have experienced Curtis’ triumphant cabaret performances in the 1970’s, because the pragmatic Ethyl drew heavily from the rich downtown avant-garde that produced not
only Curtis and Ludlam but unique and iconic performers like Taylor Mead, Tally Brown, and Harry Koutoukas, among many others. Curtis was a feverish whirlwind driven by a wild blind ambition, buoyed by drugs and alcohol, and by 1970 Lee Black Childers iconic poster of Curtis, “What Becomes a Legend Most,” all glitter, false eyelashes, red lipstick and frizzy halo of hair, graced the Stones dressing room. Curtis was the only pin up who counted. Curtis’ reinvention of British music hall ditties, sitting on pianos with shredded black tights, galvanized the music business executives and PR people. As Curtis succumbed to a life long fascination with cabaret, eschewing the bourgeoning punk scene in the mid 70’s for midtown and uptown rooms like The Rainbow Grill, Ethyl, then the lead actor at Trinity Rep in Providence, threw it away to join Ludlam, beginning his subversive climb to downtown greatness. When I was asked to write about the relationship between the ideas of Curtis and Ethyl, my mind immediately dialed into the one great commonality they shared: Feminism. Both Ethyl and Curtis were diehard feminists who took the fight for women’s equality seriously. Both of them understood the plight of women, as well as the marginalization they both felt at the hand society’s prejudice dealt them, and they focused it thru the lens of the oppression of women. Both of these feminist artists gave me a hand at a critical time in my development. While Jackie Curtis was a close friend as well as a formative and seminal influence on me as an actor and performer, Ethyl would also have a great effect on what would become my career. In 1981, as I was rehearsing Tinsel Town Tirade, the last play by the Cockettes and Angels of Light founder Hibiscus, I took to entertaining Curtis (as many of his friends and family called him) on our rehearsal breaks by impersonating our old friend Andrea Whips. Andrea had killed herself in 1972, a decade earlier, just before her star vehicle, the Warhol film Heat, opened. Andrea was fun to imitate and I was a precision mimic, and found I could comment on the gentrification I saw in the 1981 East Village without drawing the ire I drew when I spoke of this in my own voice. Both Curtis and Hibiscus thought it
was engaging and funny, and one day Hibiscus surprised me by suggesting I rewrite my role in his play to what I was improvising on our rehearsal breaks. I was stunned. I consulted Curtis, who said, “Do it! But ask him for a writer’s credit.” I was frightened about asking for the credit, but Jackie pushed me into asking and Hibiscus happily agreed, and this event launched me in the direction of making my own work. In 1985 I premiered my first full-length show at St Mark’s Poetry Project, and in the packed audience of downtown artists, fellow performers and audience members, many of whom remembered my work as a teenager with the Playhouse of The Ridiculous sat, Ethyl Eichelberger. I noticed him in the audience because there was a singular gravity to the way he watched me, the way he seemed to hold on to my words. After the performance, Rita Redd, my onstage stage manager introduced me to Ethyl. “Was that all that character work improvised?” he asked me, “Yes”, I replied. “Is there a script? “he asked. Somewhat embarrassed I answered “No.” You are incredible,” he said quietly, and left. A few days I ran into him on 2nd Avenue outside of Gem Spa. He looked down on me from his height and said “Call Mark Russell at Performance Space 122. I told him you are a genius and that he should book you at PS 122 before someone else does.”—and so began my 25 year relationship with Performance Space 122, and with it my career. Jackie Curtis OD’ed in 1985, a month before I debuted my first full-length work at PS 122. A few months earlier, at 8BC, Curtis had crawled up on the stage and lay beside me on the floor before the curtain came up, urging the photographer he was with to take pictures of us in Hollywood Style, 1930’s romantic poses. Later he threw pennies in the air as I performed, shouting, “Penny is the most precious coin in my collection” over and over. Ethyl was in my audience opening that opening night at Performance Space 122. Like the rest of Curtis’s inner circle and most of the queer downtown performance scene, I was still reeling from Curtis’s death. As I began to perform more regularly, Ethyl started to resent Rita Redd working with me. Eventually Rita left Ethyl’s company and
Ethyl blamed me. “Penny Arcade!,” Ethyl shouted at the end of one of his PS 122 performances, “You should teach your employees to be better behaved.” There wasn’t much I could do about his feelings towards me. In August of 1990 I was performing Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! at PS 122’s downstairs theatre while Ethyl performed “Das Vedanya Mama’’ upstairs . He closed his run and I agreed to extend. I went to Ethyl’s closing night. Downtown royalty style, dressed to the teeth, I sat in the second row and was the world’s greatest audience, laughing at subtleties other audience members missed. At one point Ethyl quipped, “There appears to be a child in the audience.” After the show Ethyl’s gofer Matty asked, “Penny do you want to come back stage?” “No” I replied , “Just tell Ethyl he was great! That the show was great! That he is a master.” I stopped to talk to someone in the hall. A little while later Matty came over to me. “I told Ethyl what you said. He said “So what? Who cares?” but then 5 minutes later he came over to me and asked, “Did Penny really say that?’ He was very wistful.” The Sunday after Ethyl closed, as I was onstage a series of strange things happened in the theatre. I dressed for the wrong character and had to redress, a mouse ran up the leg of an audience member and they fell off the platform. “Oh,“ I cried in character, as the New Orleans call girl Charlene, “There is a spirit in the house! I feel someone’s soul running amuck in here,” and improvised for several minutes about spirits being in the room. When I came off stage an hour later I was asked to sit down and then told that Ethyl had taken his life earlier that day. Every night before I perform I stand in the dressing room or in the wings and call on Jackie, Ethyl, Charles, and all the great actors and artists who were and remain part of my community. They never let me down.
Ethyl Eichenberger as Klytemnestra Courtesy of The La Mama Archive / Ellen Stewart Private Collection
Ethyl plays the wicked witch in a 5th Grade Production, 1956. Private Collection Original poster for Leer, 1985. Ned Sontag. Private Collection Theater Craft, 1989. Private Collection
THE JOY OF ETHYL EICHELBERGER Miss Joan Marie Moossy
I first met Ethyl Eichelberger dancing on the bar at the Pyramid Club on Ave A. I had stopped by to leave something for my boyfriend, David Crocker, the Pyramid’s lighting designer. When Brian Butterick aka Hattie Hathaway saw me, he asked if I could stay and dance since someone else was a no-show. I was wearing cutoff jeans and a tank top. I told him that I didn’t have any costumes with me, but he said that Ethyl could help me. He took me and introduced me to Ethyl, who would also be dancing on the bar. I had seen Ethyl perform and I was thrilled to meet him. He said we should go into the tech office because the basement was full of children. I thought he was kidding, but there was a band from DC on the bill whose members were all children. When we got into the tech office, Ethyl hoisted his bag onto the desk and started rifling through it. We found a fabulous black dress that fit me, and then he looked at me with a face filled with glee, a look that would become familiar to me as I got to know Ethyl and experienced the joy he had in theater, performing, and entertaining. He had something in his hands inside the bag, and he asked me, “I don’t know if you’d wear something like this…?”
He pulled a large feathered headpiece out of the bag like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat. Now my look of glee matched his, and of course I wore the headpiece. Dancing with Ethyl was fun. He was flamboyant and hilarious. We played back and forth, leading and following, and dancing in unison in fits of faux choreography. Gerard Little, aka Mr. Fashion, and I made a red gown with voluminous amounts of fabric in my apartment for Black-Eyed Susan in Ariadne Obnoxious, which Ethyl produced at the Joyce Theater. The next play Ethyl produced was Fiasco at P.S. 122 in the downstairs theater. Gerard was in the play, so I heard all about his experiences with Ethyl and the production. Then, three days before the first performance, Ethyl lost his stage manager, and Gerard lobbied for me as the last minute replacement. I happily took over as stage manager the next day. It was a whirlwind three days as I learned the play, the props, and how to deal with Ethyl’s fire-eating equipment. I came up with an organizational system to accommodate all the entrances, exits, timing, and the needs and idiosyncrasies of Ethyl and the other actors. I had no training in theater, so Ethyl patiently explained up and down stage, stage right and left, no whistling in the theater and all the other theater superstitions, and how to cure any violation thereof. During this experience, I began to get to know Ethyl and to see the depth of his commitment to building his talent, his craft, and his body of work. I saw his reverence to those who came before him nd influenced his development. I saw him foster the development of other artists, including me. I saw his personal and professional generosity, and I saw the glee I first saw over that feathered headpiece in the tech office in the basement of the Pyramid Club. I also learned about Ethyl’s professionalism and experience with live performing. One night an actor accidentally skipped ahead in the script and before we knew it was performing a song prematurely. Ethyl was playing the piano backstage to accompany the song. He was on his knees playing when I rushed up to him. Without missing a note on the piano, he looked up at me and calmly said, “Explain to me what’s happened.” I showed him with the script how we had
skipped to the wrong song, and which other song and what in the plot had been omitted. At the end of the song, he jumped up and back onto the stage and adlibbed his way back to the previously skipped song and straightened out the sequence of events so the plot made sense. He wasn’t even slightly shaken up by it all. I was impressed. From that point I worked with Ethyl until he died. After Fiasco, he began writing parts for me in his plays, and he became my mentor. All the early impressions I had of Ethyl were supported by many other experiences over the years that illustrated those qualities in his character. I will always be grateful for the joyful experiences I had with Ethyl, both personal and professional. I hope that through this exhibit, many others can experience the joy that Ethyl felt and projected so beautifully to his audiences.
Big Round Flat, 2001. Oliver Herring. From A Flower for Ethyl series. Knit silver Mylar, parachute nylon, Styrofoam peanuts; approximately 67 x 64 inches.
Agosto Machado
JACKIE DEAREST Craig Highberger
Meeting Jackie Curtis during my first week at NYU Film School in 1973 and becoming his friend was one of the most propitious things that has ever happened in my life. Knowing Jackie right after high school truly freed me, inspired my intellect, and opened my mind to possibilities I had never dreamed of. As Lily Tomlin and others clarified in my documentary, Jackie Curtis lived his life as performance art, rejecting conventional gender classification and shifting freely between female and male as he liked. One day Jackie would be in James Dean mode, scruffy and unshaven, in blue denim and a t-shirt, with a pack of Kools in one rolled-up sleeve. The next day he would be Jackie girl, with his Barbra Streisand wig, red lipstick, rouge and Pan-Cake makeup over heavy beard stubble, wearing torn stockings and a black dress stolen from the closet of a deceased neighbor friend named Rosie. Each of these amazingly different personalities was Jackie Curtis—an accomplished singer and poet, an actor and actress, and a revolutionary playwright, whose work assaulted all conventions of taste and
form, toured internationally to packed houses, and simultaneously garnered derision and accolades from critics. Yet his influence was pervasive, and in a sense it still is. In 1971, Curtis had stagehands place the wrecked shell of a VW on the La MaMa stage as part of the set of Vain Victory. Later that year, an automobile was part of a stage set on Broadway for the first time in “Grease”. Bette Midler came to see Vain Victory, where on stage Candy Darling vamped in a mermaid outfit and Paul Ambrose did drag in a wheelchair, and a year later Midler toured the country wearing a mermaid outfit in a wheelchair. More than a few rock icons saw Jackie Curtis as both a boy and a girl, and there followed a number of years when quite a few singers began to wear women’s clothing and makeup, blurring the lines between sexuality and gender just as Curtis had. Jackie and I spent some of the summer together in 1983. Part of the time Curtis was a boy, part of the time a girl. I took lots of photographs and videotaped Jackie in various drag outfits, performing a number of his best poems, segments of which are in my documentary. I will never forget sitting at the breakfast table less than two years later and turning the page of The New York Times to see Curtis’ obituary. I loved Jackie, and he loved me. I felt guilty that he had died, wishing I could have prevented it, if things had been different. Today, I have no doubt that if Curtis had not died so tragically and so young, he would have continued to write, to perform, to be a major force on social media, in films and on stage. I am so glad that I have helped to commemorate the life and work of such a great artist and personality, whose cultural influence and joie de vivre touched me, and so many others. Craig B. Highberger, March 2016
Collage by Craig Highberger.
Collage by Craig Highberger. OPPOSITE: Original poster for Femme Fatale, 1970.* Original Poster for Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit, 1983.*
Signed Photo, 1970.* Original Program from Champagne, 1985.* * All Courtesy the La Mama Archive/Ellen Stewart.
Ethyl Eichelberger Tattoo Ruth Marten. Design Ken Tisa. Photo Peter Hujar.
PICTURES OF ETHYL IN MY HEAD Hattie Hathaway/Brian Butterick
Ethyl Eichelberger, my sister, my mentor, my friend… In 1986, I had the brilliant idea to do hardcore skinhead music matinees for all ages on Saturdays, at 3 p.m. at the Pyramid. Ethyl knew the club would be open early, so she came by to get ready for an early show somewhere. I went down to the basement dressing room, when the club was packed, to talk to the bands and there was Ethyl, surrounded by 25 somewhat homophobic skinhead boys with tattoos and bleachers who were enthralled by her and her makeup application. It is only by reaching out that we live forever. There will always be a picture in my head of Ethyl go-go dancing on the Pyramid bar with plugged-in Christmas lights woven into her wig, wearing impossibly tall six-inch heels. Shining on eternally… Ethyl, wheeling a shopping cart through the streets, piled insanely high with costumes, wigs, makeup boxes, from where she lived in Staten Island. The show goes on forever, distance be damned… Ethyl appeared in Broadway’s The Threepenny Opera in 1989 with Sting. I appeared in Threepenny with Alan Cumming in 2006. We are indeed birds of a feather… Ethyl killed herself in 1990, when her body began to break down due to advanced HIV disease. The only two recourses for her then would have been a painful, lingering death, or slow poisoning via AZT. Ethyl’s ultimate gift to me was the knowledge that, in some cases, suicide is noble. I miss you, my brave sister… Hattie Hathaway/Brian Butterick
Portrait of Ethyl Eichelberger (II), 1981. Photo Peter Hujar.
Ethyl Eichelberger as Nefertiti (I), 1979. Photo Peter Hujar.
Original Hamlette Poster, 1984. Art and Design by Stephen Tasjian. Courtesy the collection of Tabboo! Ethyl Eichelburger. Photo Kirila Faeh.
MEETING JACKIE Robert Heide
I first met Jackie Curtis through theater director Ron Link, during rehearsals of Jackie’s outrageous nostalgic/camp Hollywood comedy-play Glamour Glory, and Gold at Bastiano’s Cellar Studio in the Village. In the cast were platinum Melba LaRose Jr. playing a Jean Harlow-type screen siren, Robert De Niro in his very first acting role playing all the male parts, and Candy Darling, still a brunette before being transformed by Link—with the help of Max Factor theatrical make-up, false eyelashes, blue eye shadow, and for her hair, 20 volume peroxide mixed with white henna ammonia— into the super-blonde Goddess she is thought of today. Jackie also became a Warhol Superstar, along with her glamorous sisters Candy and Holly Woodlawn. At the time of my first introduction, Jackie was a pretty boy wearing wire-rimmed eyeglasses with natural rosy cheeks and brown hair. Initially shy and introverted, he was given a quick makeover by Svengali Link and changed, with the help of red henna, into a flaming redhead with glossy scarlet lips à la Barbara Stanwyck, Jackie’s favorite film star. Gobs of facial glitter would later add to the mix. During the run of Glamour, Glory,
and Gold, Sally Kirkland, who lived upstairs from me on Christopher Street, brought along her friend Shelley Winters to Bastiano’s to see Jackie’s show. Shelley was about to open in her own play, One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger, at the Actors’ Playhouse on Sheridan Square, and became enamored with the young, sexy, muscular De Niro, deciding to cast him in her show, where he ran around stage in his bathing trunks. Before long, with Shelley’s help, De Niro was off to Hollywood to become a movie star. I liked running around with Jackie in those days to gay bars like Boots and Saddles on Christopher Street, where Jackie liked to dress up in a red Rebel Without a Cause jacket, white t-shirt and tight blue jeans, and with his hair swept up into a D.A. as James Dean. At Jackie’s funeral, I was one of the friends who tossed glitter onto his face as he laid there in his coffin dead to the world, while others slipped joints into his shirt pocket. Looking at Jackie for the last time, I knew he would never be forgotten. I thought of the time he and I went to a book party for a Tallulah Bankhead coffee table photo book. Jackie was completely in heaven, posing for a picture with one of his idols—Joan Crawford—who was at the same party, making what turned out to be her very last public appearance. Who could ask for anything more?
Jackie Wedding Performance. Photo Kirila Faeh.
The Herald, 1971. Courtesy of The La Mama Archive / Ellen Stewart Private Collection
This exhibition would not have been possible without the generosity of time and energy offered by many people who knew and worked with either Jackie or Ethyl, or both. On this list the names Joe E. Jeffries and Craig Highberger deserve top billing. As the foremost experts on the lives and work of Ethyl Eichelberger and Jackie Curtis, respectively, both have encouraged me to pursue this project, and provided their words to this publication and lent valuable materials to the exhibition itself. Among friends of both Jackie & Ethyl, Penny Arcade and Agosto Machado were unstinting in sharing their energy and information. Regarding Eichelberger, Miss Joan Marie Moossy has lent both her words and images, Pedro Rosado offered his anecdotes, and Brian Butterick shared his intimate recollections. Regarding Curtis, playwright Robert Heide has provided an insightful memoir, and his nephew Joseph Preston has consistent in his support. Important thanks are also due to Brent Phillips and Marvin Taylor at the NYU Fales Special Collections; Stephen Koch and Hedi Sorger at Peter Hujar Archive; Ozzie Rodriguez of the Ellen Stewart Collection at La Mama Archives; Pace McGill Gallery; Peter Kennedy at Billy Sullivan Studios; the estate of Jack Mitchell; and the artists Kirila Faeh, Oliver Herring, Dona Ann McAdam, Lori E Seid, Billy Sullivan and Ande Whyland. Above all, the vision and dedication of Jane Friedman in transforming the vision of Howl! Project Space into a reality has been endlessly inspiring, and the opportunity to collaborate with the peerless Ted Riederer is, as always, an unalloyed joy. Front and Back Cover: Jackie Curtis studio portrait, 1970. Appears courtesy of the Jack Mitchell Estate. Ethyl Eichenberger as Klytemnestra, 1987. Photo Dona McAdams. Inside Front Cover: Ethyl Eisenberger. Photo Kirila Faeh. Jackie Curtis Performing in Heaven Grand Amber Orbit, 1969. Photo Bob Parlan. Courtesy of The La Mama Archive / Ellen Stewart Private Collection
HOWL! COMMUNITY
Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker BOARD OF ADVISORS
Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio Anthony Cardillo Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Social Networks Manager: Michelle Halabura Videographers: Darian Brenner and Jasmine Hirst Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Gallery designed by Ted Kofman
When Jackie Met Ethyl Curated by Dan Cameron Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project April 7–May 1, 2016 w © 2016 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 11 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. New York, New York 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294 Essays © 2016 © 2016 © 2016 © 2016 © 2016 © 2016 © 2016
Dan Cameron Joe E. Jeffreys Penny Arcade Miss Joan Marie Moossy Craig Highberger Hattie Hathaway/Brian Butterick Robert Heide
Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY
The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman
Autographed photo for Ellen Stewart Courtesy of The La Mama Archive / Ellen Stewart Private Collection
Jackie Curtis’ Timeline February 19, 1947
—Born John Holder, Jr. in New York City.
1948
—His parents, John Holder, Sr. and Jenevive Uglialoro, divorce.
1959
—Once Upon a Mattress opens at the Phoenix Theater with Carol Burnett playing the part of Princess Winnifred. Twelve-year-old John becomes a huge fan and waits at the stage door every evening just to see her.
1962
—Attends the NYC High School of Art & Design.
1963
—Susana Ventura (Penny Arcade) and John become inseparable friends. Behind closed doors at her parent’s apartment, she dresses him in drag for the first time.
1965
—Changes his name to Jackie Curtis., meets director Ron Link and finishes writing his first play, Glamour, Glory and Gold, soon after graduating high school,. At age 17, appears on stage for the first time at La Mama Experimental Theater Club in Tom Eyen’s Miss Neferititi Regrets.
actually attends any of the filming.
1969
—Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit premieres at John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous, and is a huge hit.
1970
1967
March—Paul Morrissey begins filming Jackie, Holly and Candy in the film that would ultimately be titled Women In Revolt.
1968
May—Jackie’s play Femme Fatale: The Three Faces Of Gloriam with Penny, Mary Woronov and Patti Smith, premieres at La Mama.
—Glamour, Glory and Gold: the Life and Legend of Nola Noonan, Goddess and Star premieres at Bastiano’s Theater on Waverly Place. —Lucky Wonderful, a musical with book by Jackie Curtis and music and lyrics by Paul Serrato, premieres at the Playwright’s Workshop. —Paul Morrissey directs Flesh, Candy and Jackie’s film debut, for Andy Warhol, who never
July— Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev shoots scenes with Jackie Curtis for his WR: Mysteries of the Organism. September—Alice Neel paints Jackie and Rita Redd.
1971
May—Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned premieres at La Mama in the East Village. Jackie wrote and directed the production.
1972
May—Jackie’s play Americka Cleopatra premieres at the WPA under the direction of Harvey Tavell, with Harvey Fierstein, Alexis del Lago and Agosto Machado.
1973
June—Jackie marries Lance Loud. September— Episode 2 of the documentary series An American Family airs on PBS. Filmed in 1971, it includes Lance Loud taking his mother Pat to see Jackie starring in Vain Victory at La Mama. March 21— Candy Darling dies of leukemia at the age of 25.
1974
May–June—Jackie and Holly appear together in Cabaret in the Sky - an Evening with Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis at the New York Cultural Center. The show is a smash hit.
1975
August—Jackie divorces Lance Loud.
1976
September—A revival of Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit opens at La Mama, directed by John Vaccaro.
1977
September— Jackie goes to LA and stays with friends while trying to land parts in films or television shows.
1978
January—Jackie returns to New York City, moving back in with his grandmother Slugger Ann.
1979
August—Jackie’s lengthy poem B-Girls
is included in the Unmuzzled Ox: The Poets’ Encyclopedia.
1979
Oct-Nov—Jackie performs in drag Friday and Saturday night shows at Slugger Ann’s.
1980
Spring—Jackie plays Mrs. X in Nick Markovich’s play, Tyrone X.
1983
April—I Died Yesterday a play by Nick Markovich premieres at La Mama starring Jackie Curtis as Frances Farmer.
1985
January— Champagne, Jackie’s final play, opens at La Mama with Jackie plays lead character Piper Heidsieck.
1985
May 15—Dies of an accidental heroin overdose at the age of 38.
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