Penny Arcade

I began to do my own work at the age of 34 after a long apprenticeship to two of the greatest theatrical visionaries of the 20th century, John Vaccaro and Jack Smith. I named myself Penny Arcade coming down from LSD at 17 in order to amuse Jaimie Andrews, a 27-year-old gay man whose drawing table I slept on inside of his studio apartment on East 9th street between Avenue A and 1st Avenue.

Jaimie introduced me to John Vaccaro, the brilliant theatre director whose Playhouse of The Ridiculous was the rock and roll, political, glitter/glam theatre group that influenced everyone from Andy Warhol to “Hair,” from Iggy Pop to David Bowie.

Performance, not theatre, was his game and he named it first. He was the first theatre artist to use a live rock band on stage. His contributions to performance are simply too many to name.

Drag queens, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals peopled the Playhouse. We were 17 to 50 years of age. It was the wondrous era of intergenerational collaboration. Our focus was not on identity politics, but on the major social and political issues of the day.

Many of the greatest performers in post-World War New York were profound influences on me, including Taylor Mead, HM Koutoukas, Jackie Curtis, The Living Theatre and The Tokyo Kid Brothers. My original work in the 80s was improvisational and influenced by photography, literature and storytelling rather than by theater.

My work grew out of my storytelling, an organic reality coming from a southern Italian immigrant background in which storytelling was the preferred form of entertainment.

Finding sanctuary in the gay world at the very young and impressionable age of 14 furthered my skill as a raconteur. Every monologue or performance piece I have ever created is based on a story, a series of stories or a point of view that I first shared verbally with one, two or five people. The sharing of information or experiences, whether it comes from others or myself, has always been central to my theatre, as is my deep belief in the transformational power of both theatre and performance. My work has always had a journalistic element or Lehrstücke—didactic, but not in the negative sense that the word has taken on. I prefer the definition: "intended to convey instruction and information as well as pleasure and entertainment."

The great Jack Smith always asked the question: Can art be useful?

My artistic relationship has always been with the audience for this reason. I have had very little of the type of “normal” success many people get in this business. Yet, without a manager, booking agent or even the support of the press, performance academics or art administrators, I have been able to do my work all over the world and to enjoy a powerful relationship with the general public therein.

At 17, my goal was to live an artistic life. The reason an art movement occurs anywhere in history is because it is made up of one-third artists and two-thirds people who are living an artistic life. These are the people who will never write a play, song or poem, they will never paint or perform, but they build their lives around the experience and the support of art.

Today the arts have been professionalized and this event is compounded by the rampant careerism in our culture. The arc of development that any artist has (or anyone attempting to master anything, for that matter) is being erased by a commercial and academic world eager to sell you art as a job that you can learn to do in four years.

The gay world of the 60s was a place where conversation, the ability to communicate in an engaging, witty and individualistic way was highly appreciated and encouraged. In short, the immigrant Italian family in which I grew up and the middle class values promoted by my schools and greater community caused me to feel ostracized. Because of my singular point of view, my intense need to express myself and my outspoken belligerence about society were highly valued and encouraged by the gay world and the people who inhabited it, this became my sanctuary.

At the age of 20, mostly from the prompting of Patti Smith, I left New York for Amsterdam with The Playhouse of the Ridiculous. I later lived in Paris and in Spain, where I continued to act in experimental theatre. At 24, I returned to the United States, this time to the woods of Maine where I continued to do ensemble experimental theater, usually with some rock and roll involved.

In 1981, I returned back to the East Village and found myself doing solo performance art. I was one of a handful of people who came to define solo performance in the 80s. In the early 90s, I started to write full-length pieces with lots of actors and dancers. These, I realized, were highly influenced by my time with John Vaccaro.

Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! is the title of my sex and censorship show in which two female strippers and I galvanize New York City in a hugely politically incorrect reaction to the PC feminist academic world. The show soon became populated by male dancers as well in 1992, and ran for a (then unheard of) full year Off-Broadway. After the first year, we went on to become a mainstream commercial hit show in 22 cities internationally. In doing so, we left the now much-lauded revival of burlesque in our wake. This show will be remounted on September 11th, 2007 at The Speigeltent at South Street Seaport.

I have also written and directed ten full-length performance works and many solo performance pieces. My work is verbal, comedic and dramatic. Through these means, I express the ridiculousness of both the sorrow and the pleasure in real life.

I have always created my group work with like-minded people. Some of the current stars of the downtown performance world have worked in several of my shows. The group Tigger!, made up of Miss Kelly Webb, Lady Ace, Viva Ruiz and Julie Atlas Mus, among others, carry forward some of my theatrical devises, much as I carried forward those of John Vaccaro.

My collaborator since 1992 is video producer Steve Zehentner. We have worked in a truly creative partnership for nearly 15 years. A former architect, Steve uses his skills as a designer to create stage sets and a certain audience ambience as well as to design sound and video. He also acts as my dramaturge.

I am and have always been funny. As Patti Smith said in 1971, “I always loved you because you could find the laughter loophole in any tragedy.”
The description of my work that I have most often heard and the one that pleases me the most is, “I laughed and I cried and then I laughed and then I cried again.” And, “It is just like theatre except not boring.”