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When political activist, comedian, and performance artist Morgan Bassichis brought his exquisitely funny show Can I Be Frank? to New York last summer, they already had a grand comeback in mind. As they laboriously dragged a tattered prop ladder across the tiny stage at La MaMa, Bassichis assured us that greatness was in store for the show. After all, Frank was directed by the wily Sam Pinkleton, who was at the time pushing Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! to the top steps of Broadway. Bassichis, serious and funny, assured us that when their show came to Broadway, too, the final cost would be staggering. “We’ll put it up,” I heard them mutter, gesturing toward the rattling staircase behind them.
Illustration by Harrison Freeman
So the show’s triumphant return will indeed be at the stamp-sized SoHo Playhouse (through Sept. 13), but Bassichis will surely be graciously ignoring such minutiae. (Bassichis’s stage persona is both a high-style diva and an anxious, cane-like Muppet.) The “Frank” of the title is a reference to the pioneering if now-obscure comedian Frank Maia, who died young, in 1995, of complications from AIDS after achieving fame in both the downtown avant-garde and on Comedy Central. Bassichis embodies Maia by recreating—and repeatedly interrupting his own recreation of—one of Maia’s manic “rants,” a stand-up aria about sex and death, a high-octane mode that meshes perfectly with Bassichis’s own agitated, often romantic energy.
Incredibly, hitmaker Pinkleton also runs another show just a few blocks away, that of a lanky, dark, chaotic comic: Josh Sharp ’s ta-da! at the Greenwich House Theatre (through August 23). Sharp, like Bassichis, straddles the line between chaos and emotion: he co-wrote and co-starred in the queer absurdist love-film Dickie: The Musical, and at Greenwich House, Sharp’s monologue weaves his coming-out story into an attempt to memorize 2,000 PowerPoint slides. Pinkleton agreed after seeing a version he called “an idiotic feat of theatrical magic” — at that point, I’d watch anything that caught Pinkleton’s attention; surely there’s no better guarantee that silliness will be perfected
Sourse: newyorker.com
