The Meta-Gay Antics of “Can I Be Frank?” and the “Heated Rivalry” Musical
Key takeaways
- And Maya’s uncut rage may be too hot a way to open this one-person show—so can they start over?
- The context: Bassichis, a nonbinary performance artist, became obsessed with Maya after meeting his brother at an artists’ residency and thrilling to the parallels between their work.
- The performance is intended as a sort of séance, an attempt to summon the spirit of Maya—and, through him, the queer demimonde lost to the plague.
In “Can I Be Frank?,” Morgan Bassichis delivers a cross-generational celebration of the performance artist Frank Maya.Illustration by Adams Carvalho Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story In the opening moments of Morgan Bassichis’s bright, mournful “Can I Be Frank?,” they stand center stage at the tiny Soho Playhouse, clutching a mike and shrieking a denunciation of a closeted celebrity: “Liberace, Liberace, can you hear me, Liberace? You died. You lied. You died of AIDS and you lied. . . . You could have helped so many people—sorry, Gloria, can we get the lights?” Bassichis twitches as if emerging from hypnosis, then apologizes: it’s not really them yelling, they explain, it’s a bit by Frank Maya, an artist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1995. And Maya’s uncut rage may be too hot a way to open this one-person show—so can they start over? And add some context?
The context: Bassichis, a nonbinary performance artist, became obsessed with Maya after meeting his brother at an artists’ residency and thrilling to the parallels between their work. Maya, like Bassichis, did an act that was a bit standup, a bit performance art, broken up by dreamy, oddball songs. Maya, too, was a confessionalist and a pop-culture obsessive—he was known for his “rants,” manifestos that involved “tearing to shreds” other gay artists, a tradition that Bassichis describes, puckishly, as “one of our ancestral healing practices.” And Maya, like Bassichis, craved fame, the mainstream sort that he was tiptoeing toward when he died at forty-five, just as drugs for AIDS were becoming available. As a result, he became a cultural footnote, having exited the scene two years before Ellen DeGeneres’s “Yep, I’m Gay” Time cover hit newsstands, two decades before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage—and long before the hideous backlash of recent years, as school boards and state legislators worked to snuff out the queer history that Bassichis’s show celebrates.
The performance is intended as a sort of séance, an attempt to summon the spirit of Maya—and, through him, the queer demimonde lost to the plague. But Bassichis’s arch joke is that what we’re watching is only a rough draft, a “preview” in which one thirsty artist struggles to celebrate another, only to get derailed by their own solipsism. There’s no pretense that Bassichis is truly embodying Maya: the real Maya, whose work is on YouTube, was, as Bassichis acknowledges, more butch and more chill, with a regular-dude affect. (His energy reminded me a bit of Tony Danza’s, and was surprisingly similar to that of another gay pioneer, this one fictional: Jodie Dallas, Billy Crystal’s character on the late-seventies TV show “Soap.”)