I haven’t laughed so hard and so continuously at a show in I don’t know how long. Morgan Bassichis’s Can I Be Frank? partly recreates a performance at La Mama in 1987 called “Frank Maya Talks,” but it’s also a passionate personal account of Morgan’s discovery of a queer comic ancestor and by extension an exploration of the previous generation of downtown artists who died of AIDS. Morgan channels Frank in two or three tirades (taken verbatim from archival performance tapes stewarded by one of Frank’s ex-boyfriends, Neil Greenberg), a couple of songs (“Polaroid Children” was one), and a couple of shticks – reading letters from dead celebrities and giving the audience questions to ask him. All of these are hilarious. Frank had a manic, unpredictable style of performing. You never knew what was going to come out of his mouth. There are tons of quirky, queer, fast-talking, unfiltered standup comics around now – they show up on my Instagram feed every day – but there weren’t so many in the 1980s.
For a comic performer, stumbling across Frank Maya is a godsend. You can get points for excavating a somewhat overlooked gay cultural figure from the past AND you get access to a goldmine of jokes that keeps your audience happy and laughing. I loved Frank Maya’s work and saw him onstage a bunch of times, mostly in the early days when his act was more music than standup. At the time I lived with Stephen Holden, who was also a big Frank Maya fan and covered him frequently in the New York Times. (Stephen also wrote the obituary when Frank died in 1995.) Frank often performed with one ear painted gold, and he occasionally showed up in episodes of Chang in a Void Moon, written and directed by his roommate, John Jesurun.
I reviewed him once for the Village Voice:
And I treasure a cassette tape of his songs from 1983 or so, some of which you can hear on Bandcamp.
On Vimeo you can watch Frank give an astonishingly relaxed and funny interview on the Dick Cavett show.
Can I Be Frank? samples from the Frank Maya archives to create a kind of time capsule, but with a lot of added value. Morgan makes it a point to provide context for Maya’s humor and expressiveness through a series of digressions (a useful structural element allowing for identification of people, places, and things that come up in passing references) that smuggle in history lessons for his mostly young, enthusiastic following.
At the same time, Morgan channels the deep rage underlying the material. Maya’s madcap, free-associative, often silly and campy performances coexisted with a dark time in New York City gay life as AIDS devastated our ranks to the profound indifference of the Reagan administration and New York City health officials. Ostensibly a work-in-progress sharply directed by Sam Pinkleton (who also staged Cole Escola’s smash hit Oh Mary!), Can I Be Frank? is clearly going places after the sold-out two-week run at The Club at La Mama.
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