Performing

Richard Elovich
Framji Minwalla

Its all true, and some of it happened.

I start out with myself and try to improve it.

-Holly Hughes
DIXON PLACE: I walk through a nondescript door and up a slim stairway leading to one of
New Yorks tinier downtown performance spaces. The room, set up to resemble a theatermismatched couches and chairs extend across the longer end-is washed by a dirty glow of
yellowy lights that remain on throughout. The center of the playing space holds a chair; a light
board sits at the left edge of the room. With no fading lights, no raised curtain, Richard
Elovich walks into the space wearing a smart, but slightly loose, dark suit, a white shirt and
conservative tie, acknowledges the audience with a close-lipped smile, begins his performance.
MANHATTAN: I first meet Richard at a small Ukrainian cafe. He wants to talk about
Brecht. Hes putting together a performance piece framed around civil disobedience training,
and he wants to know how Brechts theories might help him shape it. We sip cold borscht and
I tell him what little I know. I see early in the conversation that Brecht is not going to help him
much. The questions Richard grapples with suggest an aesthetic different from Brechts, even
though their main agenda-to get an audience thinking critically about how it lives-initially
appears the same.
Our conversation shifts to Richards own work, and he starts telling stories. All facts, all
statements, all events in Richards life attach to stories-usually about other people, looping
around, connecting at moments, then brushing past each other. Richards mind arranges
experience in bundles of lived encounters; to get to know him is to get to know the patterns
behind the stories he tells. The characters in his plays operate in the same way.
P.S. 122: Aside from the suit (which he usually doesnt wear) and that he stands in a
space separate from where were sitting, nothing indicates Richard is performing. His tone,
conversational and deliberately untheatrical, eases into a debate between Gordie Benjamin
and Steven Teitelbaum over the efficaciousness of making art or making activism, recounted
by yet a third character, Felix Kater. Little distinguishes Richards imitation of Felix imitating
Gordie from Richard in his own persona. This blurring of theatrical boundaries-which
almost all performance artists use-suggests a dramaturgy intimately related to Richards
metaphysical concern: defining identities in a postmodern age.

47

Richard launches into his new fascination with Freuds Moses and Monotheism. A friend told
him about the book, which Richard, even before reading it, began to see as a potential performance. For Richard, even a treatise like Freuds contains a narrative, a history that can be
imaginatively recreated. I ask him why he likes the book, and he tells me by leap-frogging
through a series of analogies:
It doesnt matter that I dont believe in what is behind these thoroughly routinized
practices [Richard gestures to an imaginary skullcap and winds tefillin],I do them anyway. Like Kafkas obedience to his father who he hated, like his obedience and fear of a
bankrupt o r nonexistent god, it doesnt matter I d o them anyway, its not my
thought-Im trapped in it-someone else, the ideology, is doing my thinking for me,
the technology of my family is doing my thinking for me. Gordie says in Someone
Else..., when I jerk off there are generations of my dead relatives watching me.
There are certain threads that I keep worrying from piece to piece to piece. Im horrified and fascinated by Jeff Goldblum in Deep Covet: this Jewish lawyer who is really a
drug dealer who wants to get down and be accepted by a hip, black man and still
keep his white privilege. I feel that hit home. Like what about those times Im in the
Bronx riding the subways at seven oclock at night on my way up to Bronx A I D S services, suppose some young kids were beating me up: Hey, hey dont hurt me. Im the
guy who brought in five million dollars in drug services. Stay away. Dont you know
what Ive done? Talking my way out of that one....
Its what Mailer wrote about in The White Negro. Our red light districts are in
black neighborhoods. We buy drugs and sex there-we go there for what is outlawed
in our own community, but what we really desire, and then go back to the safety of our
families. I mean I know this first hand. [Richard is a recovering heroin addict.] You
look for a real feeling in a dangerous situation ....The prince and the pauper. I slept with
the wrong person and now I cant get back into the castle.

All of Richards preoccupations are here: Jewish, African-American, and queer identities;
activism; fictive representation; detective thriller films; imagined communities; drug addiction;
AIDS. Each anecdote is discrete, contains its own history and political implications, yet they all
connect tangentially. His refusal to privilege any part of his experience, his need to represent
all of it without fixing it in neat analyses or convenient theories, gives his work a messy vitality
absent from the more aestheticized art of performers such as Karen Finley or Tim Miller.
A Man Cannot Jump Over His Own Shadow, his first solo piece, presents the short life of
a small-time Mafia pawn, Samson Meisel, narrated in five monologues by three characters, all
played by Richard: Samson; his mother; and his sometime lover, Jacob. Richard arranges the
piece symmetrically: it opens and closes with stories told by Jacob; Samson narrates the bulk of
his own biography in the second and fourth sections; and his mother fills in the center. But
this order doesnt lead us deeper into the psyche of his subject. Rather, each monologue runs
off course, almost as if Jacob, Samsons mother, even Samson himself, cant hold o n to
Samsons identity. After all, Samson, as Jacob tells us in the opening section, is a great talker....He makes you think youre important to him ....He didnt have affairs, he had lives.
Talking with Richard is like reading unrevised drafts of his work. Anecdotes about people he
knows, texts he likes, recede-like fractal planes arranged o n a Cubist canvas-into an illusory
three-dimensionality only to be cut short by an intersecting tale bringing his listener back to
the surface. His collaborators and friends-a veritable whos-who of the downtown New York
art scene (Mark Bennett, Jeff Weiss, Holly Hughes, Gregg Bordowitz, Nicky Paraiso, Itamar
Kubovy, Ann Bogart, Natsuko Ohama, Zoe Leonard, Marc Robinson, Jeff Nunokawa, Robert

Richard Elovich, arrested at a needle exchange in New York City, 1990.Photo by Allan Clear.
Wilson, Richard Foreman)-turn into characters who populate his autobiography. He tells
their stories the way he narrates his fictions: sounding their voices, imitating their gestures,
cannibalizing their histories for possible inclusion in his own text. Much of his work emerges
as a response to artists he admires. For example, the first speech in Someone Else... engages
Wallace Shawns The Fever in a dialogue. By crafting his work as a polemic, Richard locates
himself within a community and moves away from speaking only to and for himself.
Like a stand-up comedian, Richard arranges his disparate material into a long routine.
But his stories dont have punch lines. Instead they fall off, turn sour, transgress the conventional limits of storytelling to suggest no easy resolutions, often no resolutions at all. In
Someone Else..., Gordie Benjamins imitation of Joe Jitsu telling about Jews and assimilation
starts out funny: Welcome Jews! Hello Jews!...You bring books, you bring business, you bring
good management!. ..Take off your hat. No? Okay. Whatever. But it ends horribly: Jews. You
know you cant give them anything. You cant even tell them a good joke. You know what? Who
invited you in the first place? Get the h c k ouddda here! Nowwww! Paaadummm tsssssch!
Richard transfers two autobiographical facts into the lives of each of his characters:
theyre all queer Jews balancing their relation to both a Jewish and a queer community. His
characters are outsiders, others who deliberately create themselves as other, but whose
need to belong, to cultivate a stable identity rooted in community drops them to the depths of
panic. This overwhelming desire to be a part of something, to connect with other humans,
propels their acts, even while a contradictory impulse-to escape, disappear, live an unimaginable life-tears them apart. As Gordie tells us, theyre simultaneously Herman Munstersconstantly seeking to assimilate-and Gomez Adamses-who set a standard of a world
consisting only of [themselves]. The negotiation between these two edges of otherness serves
as a paradigm for contemporary living.

M I 3WALLA

I try to remove myself from my autobiography when I write my pieces. To do this, I

write my autobiography as biography: I borrow and stage fragments of other biographies as a way of getting at mine....The stories in my work may be borrowed or madeup, ordinary or idiosyncratic, transparent or opaque-yet I hope that the method of
storytelling will betray the truth of experience....

Recently, Richard told a class of undergraduates at Yale about one of his students at the
Chicago Art Institute who performed the William Burroughs section from Someone Else from
Queens Is Queer. It was refreshing, he said, to watch a younger man describe the experience of
getting fucked for the first time, an experience he can only recreate, he laughed, with nostalgic
wistfulness. He wants other actors to try out his texts, make them new again.
The Burroughs segment is an experiment with the implements of theater, the only part
of the play thats deliberately staged: one light defines the space in which Richard assumes a
cartoon-like, exaggerated guise, smoking a cigarette and puckering his lips into a fishy- mouth
to imitate Burroughs as the mysterious, shadowy outlaw that Felix describes. Burroughs is the
only real person represented in the story, but the staging makes him appear falser than the
other characters. He becomes a mythic caricature, almost the overseeing ghost of the piece,
representative of a criminal, Genet-esque homosexuality that Richard finds difficult to assimilate with queer life in the 80s.
Director Itamar Kubovy and he are quick to point out that the decision to stage the
Burroughs section in this way had no theoretical base. It happened in rehearsal, and it worked.
They spent most of the remaining rehearsal period trying to find out why its distinctly jarring
form fit with the overall untheatricality of the performance. Perhaps, as Itamar suggested,
Burroughs is a myth that transcends a character. He has a kind of real value, as myth, in the
world.
When Reagan was president and were seeing this actor on TV all the time, you know
hes lying to you ....That was fascinating to me. This sense that the mechanisms of theater have
been co-opted by a corrupt, political machine emerges in Richards work as a deeply rooted
antitheatrical prejudice. By stripping away sets, lights, costumes, staged events, Richard avoids
the solipsism of so much avant-garde performance that cries out, Look at me, arent I dangerous! Currently, hes rewriting Someone Else... as a film script in which different actors will
play the characters he single-handedly impersonates on stage. His switch to film is another way
to avoid the narcissism he often finds apparent in performance art. Film becomes a shared
work, rather than personal ritual. This collaboration is what differentiates him from most
performance artists: he always works with a director. With Someone Else..., even the writing
process involved Itamar, who would read Richards rough drafts and suggest changes in lines,
or in the order of the stories.
Richards characters are survivors, escape artists who try to slip out of their biographies, but
get caught in the consequences of their lives. The title A Man Cannot Jump Over His Own
Shadow comes from a Yiddish expression, literally a man cannot jump over his own belt; but
this is exactly what his characters try to do. Joseph, in the second solo piece, IfMen Could Talk,
The Stories They Could Tell, keeps climbing onto his fire escape and peering into his own apartment: I wanted to see what my life looked like from the outside. I wanted my life to be
unimaginable. Gordie, in Someone Else..., tells Felix about Benthams Panopticon: Whats
threatening about homosexuals is that they go outside the nuclear family to find their sexuality....They escape the Panopticon ....Once Im outside, nobodys watching me-my life is

Elovich in A Man Cannot Jump Over His Own Shadow.

Photo by Torn Brazil.
unimaginable. Jacob, in A Man..., ends his story about Samson with: He keeps talking about
Harry Houdini.
But theres no escape. Gordie dies of AIDS, leaving Felix with the fact of his coffin and a
nostalgia for the time they disappeared together. Samson, crippled and in a wheelchair, will
never become another Houdini like his boyhood friend. Joseph affirms his identity when
storming a health commissioners office with other A I D S activists: Cant you understand
changing the numbers wont render us invisible? We exist! We wont go away! Unable to slip
into other roles, Richards characters finally become actors of their own lives. Theyre outsiders
who slowly turn towards community, towards communal action, towards making their histories matter.
Only when Richards characters encounter brick walls, when they recognize their identity as containing both selves and others, do they finally assimilate the various roles they play
into a hybrid being labelled I. Only then does the I have a story to tell; and telling such stories becomes the most important act any character can perform.
Richards work, like the art of other queer men and women in the 80s and 90s, has been
profoundly changed by the A I D S crisis. He-like Felix, Jacob, Joseph, Dr. Seuss-is a survivor

who has watched a generation of friends and lovers die. All the facets of his life revolve around
the certainty of A I D S and the ineluctability of death. His work for Gay Mens Health Crisis, coordinating drug rehabilitation services, consumes the greater part of his time. He performs
and writes only if and when he can. Its not surprising, then, that A I D S shadows all the stories
he tells.
For Richard, A I D S defies aesthetic representation. It is, rather, a governing condition of
contemporary queer life, and as such invades all contemporary queer discourse. That it cannot
be represented figuratively constitutes the underlying paradox of his work: how can he tell the
truth about the disease through a form that at all times proclaims an essential falsity? How can
he maneuver around Brechts insight that the theater theaterizes everything? He makes a theater that at times confronts, at times embraces, this contradiction, shaping his presence as a
performer who shifts A I D S from an allegorized absence to a literal visibility.
In Someone Else..., Felix relates Gordies disintegration with exactly this literal care. He
meticulously describes Gordies progression from fighting the disease, to his hospitalization, to
the moment when Felix gives up and leaves. Theres no attempt to sentimentalize this story, or
to make it representative of all people dying of A I D S . As such, it provides a necessary antidote
to the proliferation of plays and films about A I D S victims ( A n Early Frost) or A I D S tragedies
(Longtime Companion, The Baltimore Waltz) that insist on troping the disease, making it aesthetically manageable, interpretable, and so, dismissable.
Richard doesnt condemn Gordie for dying in the way the infamous let go scene in
Longtime Companion condemns the dying TV writer, nor does he indict Felix for leaving the
hospital. These things happen because Gordie and Felix are human. And Felix leaves not
because he doesnt care, or because he cant bear to see Gordie decomposing, but because he
cant sit there and not communicate. Richard uses observable facts to narrate the sequence,
facts which converge toward, but never arrive at, Gordies death. This final moment happens
during the pause Felix makes between two narrative blocks-when he leaves the hospital and
when he remembers, as he rides the subway to Gordies funeral, getting high together...climbing on top of him and fucking for hours. Death remains unrepresented because language cannot transcribe its resonant meanings, or perhaps because A I D S death may not mean in any
conventional way.
Richard ends his piece, bows, walks off the makeshift stage and through the audience. The
lights in the theater remain on. Felixs final words echo as a tangled affirmation of memory,
death, pleasure, and queer sex: I was in tears and it was the one thing I could think about:
how good it was to be inside him. It was the one thing I could think about. How good it was to
be inside him. The lines conflate past, present, and future: they tie up the larger narrativeFelixs life with Gordie-but leave all those other told stories untied.
Richard deliberately leaves his text unresolved, refuses to provide answers. He opens the
theater to the possibilities of intelligent debate, separating his art from what he calls a generation of stop making sense epitomized in the work of avant-garde performers such as David
Byrne and Laurie Anderson. By crafting his theater out of a vernacular form like storytelling, a
form he can then use to talk with-not at-people, he provides a smarter response to the rampant neoconservatism threatening to destroy culturally engaged art altogether. His plays might
end when he walks off stage, but his theater certainly doesnt. He comes right back on
moments later, ready to participate in a discussion with his audience, ready to begin shaping
the critical analysis of contemporary culture we so badly need.