|
August 12 – I’d been hearing about Trannyshack for years from Keith Hennessy and others, as a vortex of cutting-edge San Francisco club performance. It started in 1996 as a Tuesday-night punk-rock drag event at The Stud, a tiny popular club in the leather-bar district South of Market, and it’s been going nonstop til then…until now. The week I was in SF on vacation was Trannyshack’s last regular show (there will continue to be periodical special events, the annual Miss Trannyshack Pageant, and what the late great Anna Russell used to call “the Australia farewells”), and so of course I had to go. It was a little bit of an ordeal. The show starts at midnight, Kirk Read recommended we get there no later than 9:30, Keith didn’t believe him so we showed up at 10:15 and there was already a line outside.
Keith and I in the
audience at Trannyshack (note the blond guy in striped shirt
behind us)
We got a drink and muscled our way reasonably close to the stage (although unfortunately right behind a phalanx of tall people and big-hair girls), where we stayed put, shoulder-to-shoulder, for the next 4 ½ hours. (Forget about another drink or going to the loo.) Luckily, the DJ played a nonstop fun mix of stuff from the ‘80s that had everybody grooving in place. (Killer cut, of all things: Abba’s “Does Your Mother Know.”) The show was a trip – a bit bewildering as an outsider, despite Keith’s valiant efforts to pour into my ears a running commentary on the cast of characters. Mistress of ceremonies and Trannyshack diva Heklina was the recipient of much love throughout the evening, but she herself was impervious to sentimentality and did her best to keep the evening moving, never changing out of the outfit in which she performed the opening skit (to Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield”).
Some high points for me: the third performer, Juanita Moore (above) in impeccable Erykah Badu drag, lip-synching to “Tyrone” and passing to the audience progressively larger spliffs until everyone in the audience who wanted one had a good strong toke; Falsetta Knockers doing an intensely dark bit called “Club Kid Nightmare,” openly dramatizing the downward spiral into party-drug hell, closely followed by Princess Kennedy’s similarly harrowing love-it-hate-it ode to cocaine; gospel diva Nikki Star taking the club to church; the physically fearless Suppositori Spelling
(below) stage-diving.
A running theme of Trannyshack was apparently Heklina’s fondness for rimming, which she would demonstrate onstage periodically throughout the history of Trannyshack, and before the night was over we witnessed The Last Man to Be Rimmed at Trannyshack, an adorably cute, certifiably heterosexual guy named
James (who'd been grooving alongside us all night long), who manfully submitted to public buttlicking while his girlfriend Arianna and a few dozen cameras observed from the audience.
Heklina, James and Peaches Christ
The closing number, performed as a pantomime to David Bowie’s “In Memory of a Free Festival,” was a Jim Jones number, in which everyone who had performed in the show came onstage and drank the Kool-Aid, until the stage was nothing but a pile of dead drag queens. Crazy!
August 15 – Kirk Read’s This Is The Thing (at Shotwell Studio in the Mission) explored the crossroads of storytelling, theater, and performance art. Kirk is a writer, memoirist
(How I Learned to
Snap), sex worker, health advocate, and bon vivant who grew up in a hard-core Christian family in Virginia, and he uses all that in the show, along with onstage music by Jeff Mooney and video by Liz Singer. It was evocative, provocative, shambolic, surrealistic, and poignant by turns. I could see traces of early
Tim
Miller, lots of Keith
Hennessy, and little echoes of Andy Warhol superstar Taylor Mead in Kirk’s funny, exhibitionistic, audience-friendly demeanor. But for all his seeming innocence and simplicity, the show took the audience for a bit of a ride through unreliable narrative and postmodern jump-cutting. The sweetest piece was his recounting of a session as an escort with a 450-pound client. Perhaps the most mind-boggling was a section in which he told an elaborate story about his military father while pissing into four wine glasses, which filled up with different colored liquids. That takes talent!
August 19 – Back in New York, I had a late-night drink at a café on Amsterdam Avenue with Kai Ehrhardt, and who should come strolling down the street but
Peter Sellars, who stopped to chat. He said he’s directing theater again (after being
consumed with opera for most of the last decade). In addition to
Kafka Fragments, which he’s remounting with Dawn Upshaw at Zankel Hall, he is in the early stages of working on
Othello with John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman. And he’s agreed to
direct a new play for the Comedie Francaise by Amin Malouf, who wrote the texts for two Kaija Saariaho operas that Peter directed,
L’Amour de Loin and The Passion of Simone.
see previous entry here
|
