Sam Pinkleton’s jewels of theatrical ingenuity continue to enthrall and multiply. The Tony Award-winning director helped Cole Escola confect Oh, Mary! into its Broadway-conquering success, and now with Josh Sharp’s ta-da! and Morgan Bassichis’ Can I Be Frank? (SoHo Playhouse, to Sept. 13), both opening in the traditionally quiet summer months, Pinkleton is helping pilot two spare-in-appearance, rich-in-texture and execution pieces of queer theatrical comedy by two supremely talented performers.
The two shows are, by turns, hilarious and moving, reveling in all kinds of mess yet immaculate in their construction and delivery. Besides their shifting tones of hilarity and seriousness, writer and performer Bassichis also makes room for raw outrage and anger in Can I Be Frank?—before playing with the audience’s emotions around that too.
We feel Bassichis’ fury, we know their fury, it’s inscribed in contemporary queer history and experience—but then Bassichis punctures their own righteous ire, makes us laugh, takes us off into side-roads we didn’t see coming. Bassichis and Pinkleton know how to make a knowing ally of an audience, then make that audience look uncomfortably at itself, or roar at some blithe, tone-subverting gag.
Bassichis’ subject is the comedy and career of a too-forgotten gay comic Frank Maya, who died of AIDS aged 45 in 1995. Before his far-too-premature passing, Maya was one of the first out queer comics beginning to make inroads into the mainstream.
There is one monologue that Maya performed that has long fascinated Bassichis, who tells us they will perform that monologue word for word. The initial laughs in the show come from the deferring of that moment, as Bassichis gets sidetracked, has technical issues. When, you wonder, will they get to do what they set out to do? As with so many of life’s best journeys, it turns out the most fun is in the getting-there.
The monologue as performed turns out to be one of a few pieces of Maya’s comedy that Bassichis brings to life, incorporating original material from Maya’s 1987 work Frank Maya Talks. It shows a comic in no way hand-holding audiences in the 1980s. Uncompromising, witty, pin-point precise, Maya told the unvarnished truth of his life and experiences in his work—and, as Bassichis makes clear, paid the infuriatingly unjust price of not becoming as famous as he deserved as a result. If Maya didn’t directly confront the homophobia and political turmoil of his time, the tone and content of his performances were implicitly marinated in the cross-cultural currents whirling all about him.
Can I Be Frank?, originally developed and produced at La MaMa Experimental Club, is much more than a simple re-enactment. Bassichis approaches the performance of Maya’s sketch—as Sharp does in the slides-filled, pristinely timed, technically dazzling ta-da!—as a kind of thesis.
Bassichis’ intention is not simply to re-enact the sketch in question, but to examine Maya as the comic and gay man at the time he was alive and working; and to examine the era more broadly—its wit, comedy, prejudice, and modes of resistance—and how that era beams and echoes into Bassichis’ own present-day comedy and queer being. The show’s title is meaningfully deceptive: Bassichis’ show is not about impersonating Maya, it is about interrogating what formed the carapace and context of his performance.
Bassichis assumes rightly that you may not have heard of Maya, and so—with an initially stark backdrop designed by Oona Curley showing a life preserver—he sketches the life and times of this comic in a time when there were no queer TV shows or out superstars, in an era of rampant political bigotry exacerbated by HIV and AIDS, the level of personal pain and tumult of that time made so much more painful and tumultuous by the proudly propagated homophobia and blithe lack of care of politicians and media.
Bassichis draws a line between the political and cultural time of now—with the queer community feeling under siege from the second Trump administration—and Maya’s era, populated by a different set of bigotry baiters, but a similar sense of attack and foreboding.
Bassichis combines both their own very personal fascination with and respect for Maya and the nuts and bolts of a reporting project, talking to Maya’s surviving former lovers (including the choreographer Neil Greenberg), friends, and peers to try and make sense not just of Maya himself, but what he and his practice and experience of comedy meant.
When it erupts, the tone of Bassichis’ anger matches the tone of 1980s direct action groups like ACT UP—crystalline, raw fury at the boneheaded systems of discrimination and oppression causing so much pain. And then, in a deadpan blink, Bassichis will also make clear their own anger at not being famous enough, at being really special and brilliant, and not being recognized as such. Like ta-da!, Can I Be Frank? revels in the multiplicities of queer communication: What is left unsaid beneath the said, the seriousness hidden in the very funny, and the very funny hidden in the absolutely earnest.
Can I Be Frank? is on one level, an intelligently mischievous act of remembrance for a performer who should be better known and better lionized. But it is also a deeply felt and very personal piece of art by Bassichis. What, they ask, is this business of being queer and performing and succeeding and failing about, the sex and drama of it all, the politics and absurdities? What does success look like? Where does art meet fame? What can Bassichis learn from a fellow queer comic from so long ago? What about Bassichis—long pause, long stare at the audience—no, really, what about them?
The way Bassichis phrases and then chews on these questions is dizzying, fun, uncomfortable, inviting, impassioned, ironic, and earnest—the kind of comedy (or really, an unpeeling Russian doll of performance) where, in a split second, your laugh may be suddenly superseded by a moment of gut-punch reflection.
Bassichis hands out question cards for selected audience members that are both ridiculous and serious. Then Bassichis makes you laugh and slightly worry as they negotiate the perilously snaking spool of their long microphone lead.
The mystery of that life preserver design backdrop (a recreation by Eli Woods Harrison) is revealed in a beautiful moment where Bassichis finds a way to commune with the real-life Maya. What could be played and directed as something very obvious and big by Bassichis and Pinkleton is almost underplayed—you have to crane your necks to see the reveal in the confines of the SoHo Playhouse.
That physical effort mirrors this excellent show’s demand, its commanding insistence actually, that we look at Bassichis and Maya through the recognition they differently merit and similarly, like so many performers, crave. The show also asks that we observe the dead-serious and laughably absurd, the present and past, the blossoms and frailties of ego, pleasure, sex, friendship, ambition, and community, the terrible ravages of another time, the bravery, injustices, and scramble for personal recognition and political equality of then and now. In Can I Be Frank? the echoes between Maya and Bassichis are sometimes elusive, sometimes deafening, sometimes extremely funny, and always piercingly true.
