Greg Mehrten, Ron Vawter, and Marianne Weems

By 1991, downtown theater artists Greg Mehrten, Ron Vawter, and Marianne Weems had each reached a professional crossroads. Mehrten had recently left his position as co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines in order to care for Vawter, his partner of over a decade, who by then was battling the early stages of AIDS. Vawter had taken a step back from his work with The Wooster Group as his disease progressed, and Weems, a dramaturg and assistant director with the company, was looking to expand her artistic practice. Together, they joined forces to create the performance piece Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, a probing psychological portrait of two very different men who died of AIDS: closeted, anti-communist legal crusader Roy Cohn, and brashly Camp avant-garde performance artist Jack Smith. Roy Cohn/Jack Smith premiered at The Performing Garage, The Wooster Group’s home in Soho, in 1992. While touring through Europe, the trio decided that they would continue to work together, enlisting Rosemary Quinn as an administrator. Their new company would also need a name: inspired by a detour through Italy, they decided to call themselves the Pomodori Foundation.

The Kitchen would play a singularly important role in the brief life of the Pomodori Foundation. In October 1993, the trio began a three-month residency at The Kitchen. On the first floor of The Kitchen’s 19th Street space, they staged a benefit production of Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1993) filmed by Jill Godmilow. On the more intimate second floor, they developed a new work, Queer & Alone (1993), which was adapted from the 1987 Jim Strahs novel of the same name. Like Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, Queer & Alone is something of a character study and mostly takes the form of a monologue. While lying infirm in a hospital bed, Queer & Alone’s central, eccentric anti-hero, Desmond Farrquahr, narrates stories from a sea cruise he took from Europe to Hong Kong. Farrquahr often uses startlingly racist language to describe the people and places he encountered on his travels. But like Cohn, and even Smith, Farrquahr is not meant to be a sympathetic figure. His xenophobic ramblings are partly the product of narcissistic delusion—unable to fully acknowledge the reality of his hospitalization, Farrquahr turns outward, and projects onto others the qualities he most abhors in himself. In many ways, the text of Queer & Alone feels out-of-date. But it also speaks peculiarly to our present moment, given the numerous narcissistic figures that dominate our daily news cycles.

In the final weeks of their Kitchen residency, Mehrten, Vawter, and Weems began to develop a third work, tentatively titled Dark Victory, with Susan Sontag as director. Inspired by the Bette Davis film, Dark Victory aimed to explore the dynamic between the “dying one” and the “surviving one.” Both Mehrten and Vawter would have starred. However, Vawter’s death from an AIDS-related heart attack in April 1994 left the production ultimately unrealized. Vawter’s death became the crucible that finally propelled Weems out of The Wooster Group: relying on Sontag for support, Weems immediately began working on Master Builder, the first production she would stage with her company The Builders Association. Many early Builders productions were later workshopped at The Kitchen—with Sontag, as ever, in the audience.

Roy Cohn/Jack Smith is considered a landmark piece of American avant-garde theater history. But it is often described by critics and scholars as being the singular work of Vawter—rather than as a collaborative endeavor, created by two veteran downtown actors grappling with the reality of AIDS and a young dramaturg looking to make her next big move. By presenting the often-told story of Roy Cohn/Jack Smith alongside the lesser-known stories of Queer & Alone and Dark Victory, it is my hope that this Video Viewing Room will shed new light on how these artists came to work together and why their company, though short-lived, proved to be such an important fulcrum for all involved.

—Elizabeth Wiet, 2019–2020 Curatorial Fellow

Elizabeth Wiet [EW]: Let’s jump right in. Greg, Marianne, can you tell me how you first came to work together?

Marianne Weems [MW]: I was the dramaturg and assistant director at The Wooster Group—way back in the nineteen-hundreds! I worked closely with Ron Vawter, who was a founding member of the company, as well as an amazing performer and human being. I got to know Greg, his partner, who was delightful and charming, and still is. That was the very beginning.

Greg Mehrten [GM]: I moved to New York in 1975 and met Ron soon thereafter. A couple of years after that, we got together. I was in another theater company, Mabou Mines. But I left that group in 1991, partly to focus on taking care of Ron, who by then was in the early stages of AIDS. He decided to step back from The Wooster Group after his disease progressed. He had this idea of doing a tribute show for the late artist and filmmaker, Jack Smith. He asked me to help him work on that. We eventually commissioned Gary Indiana to write a companion piece about Roy Cohn, a person who, like Smith, had somewhat recently died of AIDS. That became Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. Ron acted and I directed.

This was not a Wooster Group production or a Mabou Mines production—it was really just us trying to get it together. We enlisted Marianne to be the dramaturg, producer, and all-around helper. Designers Clay Shirky and Jennifer Tipton helped us created the final piece, which premiered at The Performing Garage—

MW: —and had a run at The Kitchen in a later incarnation.

EW: I’d like to return to Roy Cohn/Jack Smith in a bit, but for now, I want to ask about the next work that you all did together, Queer & Alone. That play was adapted from a novel written by Jim Strahs, who I know had also written for productions like Point Judith and North Atlantic by The Wooster Group. For viewers who might be unfamiliar with Queer & Alone, I will introduce it by providing this summary from the press release: “From his hospital bed, eccentric anti-hero, Desmond Farrquahr, describes and relives his long sea cruise from Europe to Hong Kong. Employing torrents of deceptive, sometimes surrealistic language, the play forms an often humorous portrait of a disturbed personality and a bitterly comic and subversive view of western civilization.”

What initially drew you to wanting to adapt Queer & Alone?

MW: That’s such a good program note! Who wrote that?

GM: You probably did! Roy Cohn/Jack Smith was a terrific success, and we wanted to continue to work together. Because I had directed Ron in Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, we thought, well, maybe Ron should direct me in something. We both had experience with Jim Strahs, and I was in a Mabou Mines production of Wrong Guys that he wrote. I can’t remember exactly how Jim’s book Queer & Alone came to be our choice, but both Ron and I loved his language, and it seemed the perfect vehicle for me.

MW: You know, we all read the book. I thought it was so hilarious. I read it many times. But I think it was probably Ron who zeroed in on that being a good vehicle for you, Greg.

EW: Because the novel takes the form of a memoir-travelogue, there are a lot of different characters that come and go—people whom Desmond encounters on the cruise. But your production focuses almost exclusively on Desmond, with Ann Rower and Elion “Lushe” Sacker occasionally playing minor characters. Can you talk further about how, and why, you adapted Queer & Alone in the way that you did?

MW: I think that, like with Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, we wanted Queer & Alone to be mostly monologue. It wouldn’t necessarily be a companion piece to Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, but it would have the same sort of structure and weight. Ann seemed like a natural fit to play the multitude of peripheral roles. I don’t remember how Lushe got involved. Do you remember, Greg?

GM: I think, on a conceptual level, Ron was interested in having non-professionals play some of the parts. Lushe and Ann were also his friends, and I think at that point, he just wanted to have friends around for support, given his illness. He was also very close to Lola Pashalinski, who appears on video.

The book is told from Desmond’s point of view, but he’s a very unreliable, self-contradictory narrator. So, even when other characters talk, you have to ask, “did they really say that? Is his description of these characters really the way it was?” I think that is why Ann and Lushe often read directly from the script. Not only does it remind us that they’re not professional actors, but it also reminds us that what they’re saying is just what Desmond himself wrote down.

EW: Lushe was also in the audience for Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. Ron mentioned in one interview that Lushe had been a card-carrying communist in the ’50s when Roy Cohn was the chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy. While playing Cohn, Ron said he would look out into the audience and focus on Lushe in order to remind himself of the reality of the McCarthy hearings and the “red scare.” But in Queer & Alone, it sounds like Lushe’s role, and Ann’s role, was to remind us of the artifice—almost in a Brechtian way.

I want to talk a little bit more about the character of Desmond. The title is a bit of a red herring: Desmond is not queer in any straightforward way. Almost all of the sexual encounters he describes are with women, not men. At the same time, critics writing for Theater Magazine and The Village Voice compared him to an aging Tennessee Williams. How do the two of you understand Desmond as a character? What is his relationship to queerness?

MW: I really loved watching the video again, because Greg, your performance is so bitterly comic—you truly are the epitome of an unreliable narrator. Evasion is your number one tactic. I think it would also be interesting to touch on how the text has aged. Jim Strahs was a profoundly misanthropic person. The text is so xenophobic and misogynistic—

GM: Racist!

MW: —and racist! But it’s strangely ambivalent around homosexuality. Watching the video, I kept thinking about the term homosexual panic, and its currency within Freudian and Lacanian theory.

GM: In all of his work, Jim Strahs deliberately assails the reader with objectionable language, situations, and attitudes. But to get back to your question about queerness, Ron and I had both been “out” for decades by the time we did Queer & Alone. That provided a subtext for the way I thought people would understand the play, especially coming right after Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. I did try to play the role as I thought it was written. Maybe Desmond is totally homosexual and everything he’s said is a lie. Or maybe he’s just so fucked up emotionally, sexually, and psychologically that, as Marianne said, the text is just a vehicle for him to play out all of his neuroses.

I remember that in adapting the novel, we tried to use the parts that would be best for performance: the funniest lines, the most outrageous situations. I really delighted in that as an actor. I didn’t shy away from the negative aspects of Desmond’s character. I wasn’t trying to be likeable. But I was trying to be true to what Jim wrote. As Marianne said, he was a very bitter, misanthropic person. He wasn’t homophobic, in my opinion. He just thought that people were basically up to no good and would lie about their behavior.

EW: You alluded to the way the success of Roy Cohn/Jack Smith inflected audiences’ understandings of Queer & Alone. I’d love to talk more about other resonances between the two plays. For my part, I actually see many similarities between the figures of Roy Cohn and Jack Smith. I know a lot of people see them as opposites: Cohn was deeply closeted, and Smith was unabashedly queer; Cohn pursued money and power, whereas Smith created profoundly anti-capitalist art. But at the same time, in all of his ostentation, Smith was also extremely guarded as a performer, and could even be hostile towards his audiences and collaborators. He came to view the filmmaker Jonas Mekas, one of his earliest supporters, as a great betrayer. So there’s an element of paranoia that existed in Smith’s work: while he wasn’t closeted in the way Cohn was, you can see the trauma of having grown up gay in a very homophobic society impacting the way he understood both the art world and the world more broadly.

Desmond’s a lot like Cohn and Smith, too. He spends most of Queer & Alone reclining in his hospital bed, just like Ron reclines on his chaise when he’s playing Smith. Similarly, like Cohn, Desmond often lies to himself. And to console himself, he retreats into this fantasy world of travel—that reminds me of Smith’s habit of retreating into the lush, problematically orientalist fantasy world of MGM B-movies.

Did staging these two plays in repertory draw out any additional connections for you? I would also welcome you to talk more broadly about the experience—even the chaos—of doing these two works at The Kitchen while Ron was sick and Jill Godmilow was filming the whole thing.

MW: Well, Elizabeth, I think you summarized that really well. All three of those figures possessed a profound narcissism. They were completely embedded in their own worlds and fantasies. They were one-hundred-and-fifty-percent convinced that their way was the way of the world. Jack, in his investment in the orientalist mystique, was every bit as extreme, though potentially not as damaging, as Roy Cohn was in his incredible homophobia. Desmond’s investment in his incredibly problematic, provocative language—that embodies a similar kind of dedication.

GM: We were extremely busy. Not only was I performing in Queer & Alone, which took a lot of concentration and energy, but I was also directing Ron in Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. That was difficult because Ron’s medical and mental condition had really started to deteriorate by that point. He often couldn’t perform at the same level that he did when we opened the show at The Performing Garage. Adding to all of that, I lived with Ron. I was his caregiver. So I was also dealing with doctors, lawyers, and his financial affairs. There were just a lot of things to do every day. And then, of course, we were also thinking about the next project with Susan Sontag.

I remember it as being incredibly fraught. Ken Kobland also filmed us backstage. And in that footage, you can see Ron suffering. Yet he’s also doing his Buddhist chants and receiving people afterwards. You can see me coming in to give notes, and I look so sad and exhausted. Everyone is trying to make it possible for him to give this performance.

EW: In the video documentation of Queer & Alone, you can also hear Ron laughing. So there’s still a dialectic between joy and suffering. It’s not all one or the other.

MW: In retrospect, Greg, I was like, “how the hell were you doing all of that?” I literally remember putting ointment on the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on Ron’s back in the bathroom at The Kitchen. It was incredibly chaotic.

EW: When we spoke previously, Marianne, you mentioned that you came on as co-director for Queer & Alone partly because Ron became too ill to do it all himself. I was instantly reminded of the Iranian American theater director, Reza Abdoh, who died of AIDS at the age of 32 in 1995. I’ve interviewed a number of his company members, and one thing they’ve always stressed is how much the unpredictability of AIDS, and the non-linear progression of the disease, really impacted the work. For Abdoh’s final play, Quotations from a Ruined City, the actors recorded all the dialogue ahead of time and then lip-synced it in production, because Abdoh was often too sick to go to rehearsals. I think that’s one of the untold stories about theater made by artists living with AIDS—so many of those artistic decisions were informed by the reality of the illness.

MW: I’m glad you mentioned Reza. When we were touring Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, we were hop-scotching with Reza’s company all over Europe.

EW: Yes! All those tour posters will have Roy Cohn/Jack Smith and Abdoh’s Law of Remains listed adjacent to each other. You were also on the same season at the Walker Art Center. I know even the company members who were in great health found that tour so grueling. I can only imagine how it would have been for Abdoh, and of course, Ron.

MW: We love touring, but it’s incredibly hard. I remember talking to Diane White, Reza’s producer, at the Kaaitheater in Brussels. Our show had just closed, and theirs was about to open. It was exactly this conversation. She was saying, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this. How is Ron?”

EW: Yes! All those tour posters will have Roy Cohn/Jack Smith and Abdoh’s Law of Remains listed adjacent to each other. You were also on the same season at the Walker Art Center. I know even the company members who were in great health found that tour so grueling. I can only imagine how it would have been for Abdoh, and of course, Ron.

MW: We love touring, but it’s incredibly hard. I remember talking to Diane White, Reza’s producer, at the Kaaitheater in Brussels. Our show had just closed, and theirs was about to open. It was exactly this conversation. She was saying, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this. How is Ron?”

EW: Greg, you briefly alluded to that final production, Dark Victory. I imagine that the title is probably a reference to the Bette Davis film. Can you talk a little bit more about what you had envisioned for that play and how you were developing it with Susan Sontag?

GM: I directed Ron in Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, and then he directed me in Queer & Alone, so we thought for the next thing, “why don’t we both be in it and someone else can direct it?” We came to the idea of making a piece about the dying one and the surviving one—the caregiver. Susan knew everything about world literature, and so she had a lot of literary references: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Brothers Karamazov. But me and Ron, of course, we knew theater and film. Bette Davis was Ron’s favorite film actress, and Dark Victory is one of Bette’s greatest performances. There’s that final scene where she’s dying and Geraldine Fitzgerald is at first unaware, and then becomes aware, but refuses to acknowledge it. It’s this complicated psychological thing. And that really resonated with us.

MW: The image that Ron kept holding onto was Bette climbing up the stairs at the end. That was going to be the opening image of the show, I think.

GM: Oh, I forgot that!

EW: My understanding is that Susan was a frequent guest at The Performing Garage. How did you come to collaborate with her?

MW: We were doing Brace Up, The Wooster Group’s version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and Ron played Vershinin brilliantly. Susan was in the front row, night after night. I remember Ron going across the stage and talking to her at intermission, or maybe after the show. She adored him. I think she was thrilled by the idea of collaborating. There was no courting her—everyone was fully engaged from the very beginning.

GM: I also remember that Ron didn’t want to ask Liz LeCompte, the director of The Wooster Group, or Lee Breuer, the director of Mabou Mines, or any of the other famous directors that we knew. He wanted it once again to be removed from what had been our normal circle.

EW: In the final months of Ron’s life, the three of you were in residency with Susan in Italy at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on Lake Como. You intended to complete the script for Dark Victory there. Can you talk more about that time at Bellagio?

MW: Being at Bellagio was a totally surreal, Magic Mountain experience. We were in this incredibly beautiful place between the Swiss and Italian Alps. We were at dinner with the world’s top intellectuals, dressed up for these five-course meals, but we were heavily weighed down by the experience of Ron’s illness. He was up there in his room, dying. We did not get any work done.

GM: Ron’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Eventually, we sent him to a little regional hospital up in the mountains. Every day, Marianne or Susan or I would drive there, and we would go see him. He was in intensive care. But very few people there spoke English, and none of us spoke Italian, even though Susan claimed she did. Finally, Ron said, “I want to go home to New York,” where he had a support system of doctors. The officers at Bellagio arranged for a commercial plane to transport us back to the United States. They curtained off an area of the plane for Ron. After we reached cruising altitude, the doctors came to tell me that he was crashing, and he died about thirty seconds later.

MW: I remember very well Ron’s gurney rolling out on the tarmac. Susan and I went back to the villa. I called Kate Valk, a friend from The Wooster Group, to ask how it went—she was meeting you on the other side, in New York. And she said, “Ronnie died on the plane.” It was just cataclysmic. Both Susan and I were quite torn apart. But Susan pulled herself together a little faster. I think she was used to it.

GM: That’s very interesting how you say she was more equipped to handle it. I recently read that big Sontag biography, and it struck me that, while we were working with her, she had already survived several bouts of cancer. She always seemed so strong and together. But it must have made her reflect on her own mortality.

MW: Yes, I remember her talking about that after you left.

EW: Marianne, I know that after Ron died, you stayed on at Bellagio with Susan and started working on the piece that would ultimately become Master Builder, the first work you staged with The Builders Association. I’d be curious to hear more about how your work with Ron and Greg and that time at Bellagio influenced the work you ended up doing with The Builders. Of course, I would also invite you to talk about the importance of The Kitchen to that early work as well.

MW: We stayed there for two more weeks, partly because the Bellagio people were like, “are you going to finish this residency?” And we were like, “I guess so!” Susan worked on In America, her novel about the Polish actress Helena Modjeska. I started working on Master Builder with her encouragement. I was right at the age when you decide how you want to make your mark on the world. Ron’s spirit, and the work I did with Ron and Greg, propelled me out of the heady environment of The Wooster Group. I wasn’t really sure what to do next, except I knew that I wanted very much to start my own company.

The Kitchen ended up playing a very important role in the life of The Builders Association. We did several workshops there, including an early workshop of Alladeen with Keith Khan. Susan was in the audience, and she went over to Joe Melillo, who was the director of the Brooklyn Academy of the Music at the time, and said, “you have to do this project!” We also did Jet Lag there. I remember The Kitchen always being a place where it was just about the artists. There was absolutely no administrative bullshit. No one ever wanted us to worry about contracts, or rights, or even rentals. It was an extremely artist-driven, artist-supported environment. That remains unique.

Bios

Greg Mehrten is an award-winning actor, writer, and director who has been making theater downtown since 1975. A former member and co-artistic director of Mabou Mines, he is currently an associate member of The Wooster Group. He was Ron Vawter's partner for 14 years, and directed Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, which premiered at The Performing Garage in 1992. With Ben Williams, he produced a new audio adaptation of Queer & Alone in 2019.

Marianne Weems is a theater and opera director and founder of the award-winning New York-based theater company The Builders Association, an influential ensemble that has created a significant body of work at the forefront of integrating media with live performance. With the company, she has created and directed seventeen original large-scale productions and worked with unexpected collaborators including the architects Diller + Scofidio, The National Center for Super Computing Applications, and the South Asian arts collective motiroti. Her work has toured domestically and internationally to over eighty venues, including the RomaEuropa Festival, the Festival Iberoamericano de Bogotá, the Seoul Festival, the Melbourne Theater Festival, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. Her last four performances have had their New York premieres at The Brooklyn Academy of Music. Weems has also worked in various creative roles with The Wooster Group (where she was the dramaturg from 1988–94), David Byrne, Taryn Simon, Susan Sontag, The V-Girls, and many others.