GLR September-October 2023

ESSAY Robert Patrick at the Caffe Cino R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN

L EGENDARY PLAYWRIGHT Robert Patrick died earlier this year, on April 23rd, at the age of 85. The author of some sixty surviving plays — in 1983 he estimated that he ’ d already written be tween 250 and 300 — he was described by Samuel French (the publisher of acting editions and licenser of productions of contemporary plays) as the most produced playwright in New York. But the irreverent Patrick preferred to describe himself variously as “ true trash, ” a “ dark angel of light, ” and a humble “ handmaid of the arts ” whowas dedicated to “ saving American theater. ” His intention, he wrote, was to “ set fire to the minds of a generation. ” Robert Patrick O ’ Connor — a mistake made on the poster for his first play resulted in his dropping his family name in profes sional matters — was born in Kilgore, Texas, on September 27, 1937. Eager to escape what he termed the “ pod people of fifties America ” among whom he grew up, he joined the Air Force to see the world, only to be discharged during basic training when a poemhe ’ d written to a fellow soldier was uncovered during a crackdown on gays in the armed services. In September 1961, traveling cross-country by bus, he stopped to visit a friend who ’ d As Patrick himself recalled later in life, the Caffe Cino was the “ Ground Zero of the 1960s ... a coffee-house, a theatre, a brothel, a temple, a flophouse, a dope-ring, a launching-pad, an insane asylum, a safe-house, and a sleeper cell for an unnamed revolution. ” His novel was Temple Slave (1994), a fictionalized but nonetheless revealing history of the Caffe Cino, the birth place of American gay theater. (See also Darren Patrick Blaney ’ s article in the January-February 2014 issue of this magazine.) The secret of the Caffe Cino ’ s success seems to have been Joe Cino ’ s rejection of the scripted and the expected. Cino refused to read the plays submitted to him for production so as to avoid creating his own expectations that might interfere with the play wright ’ s concept, or prevent him from enjoying the surprises that the production had to offer. ( “ It ’ s magic time, ” he ’ d an nounce at the start of every performance.) And because the Caffe was so small and had no real stage to speak of, actors would move among the audience members, who were tightly packed around the coffeehouse tables, thereby blurring the Raymond-Jean Frontain ’ s most recent book is Conversations with Ter rence McNally . recently moved to Manhattan. On a street dur ing his first day in the city, he followed a beautiful young man into a dilapidated coffee house cum theater. He was so immediately engaged by the Caffe Cino ’ s atmosphere of raw magic and open homosexuality that he remained there until it was forced to close fol lowing founder Joe Cino ’ s death in 1967.

boundary between the audience and the performers and creating what was often an electric connection. Also, as Stephen Bot toms, historian of the off-off-Broadway theater movement, points out, because the better part of the Caffe Cino ’ s staff and regular patrons were gay, the Cino became a haven for individ uals excluded from mainstream society, fostering “ the celebra tory abandon with which Cino writers embraced the bizarre, the ridiculous and the taboo. ” Throughout his life, Patrick remained grateful to have been part of the revolution in artistic and sexual values that Joe Cino fostered in his Caffe, for it was here, Patrick explains, that he found “ sustenance for my pagan spirit. ” Patrick willingly func tioned as “ a temple slave, ” doing anything needed to support the Cino and its productions: waiting tables, hanging and oper ating the lights, manning the front door and deciding who could enter and who could not, and even acting in plays when needed. Shrewd observer that he was, however, Patrick was dismayed to realize that present in the movement ’ s creation were the seeds of its destruction. The same drugs that had opened the portals of perception and allowed for the creation of new kinds of theater became an albatross that dragged people down — most promi The sexual freedom that one experienced at the Caffe Cino led to the sexual propositioning and even exploitation both of playwrights seeking to put on a play and of actors eager to be cast. And the success of such groundbreaking productions as Lanford Wilson ’ s The Madness of Lady Bright , Doric Wilson ’ s And He Made a Her ,TomEyen ’ s WhyHanna ’ sSkirtWon ’ t Stay Down , and Patrick ’ sown The Haunted Host attracted the atten tion of avant-garde artists like Andy Warhol, who replicated the pop cultural experiments of the Cino without the Rabelaisian spirit that gave them their humanity. There is a boisterous, even chaotic element to many of Patrick ’ s early plays, giving the impression that they were ac tually written as they were being performed. This impression is not entirely false. When the performance scheduled at the Caffe Cino fell through one evening, Patrick famously improvised by purchasing half a dozen copies of a comic book at the local newsstand and leading the actors in a hilarious reenactment of an episode of Wonder Woman . In the process, he inaugurated a vogue for campy adaptations of the codes of popular culture on the West Village stage. As Patrick recalls in his preface to the four skits written largely in the 1960s but collected under the nently, Joe Cino himself. Devastated by the death of his lover, the sexually magnetic John Torrey, Cino attempted suicide after dropping acid in March 1967, lingering for days as half of New York ’ s avant-garde the ater world kept vigil outside his hospital room, before succumbing to his self-in flected wounds.

As Patrick later recalled, theCa ff e Cino was the “ Ground Zero of the 1960s: a co ff ee house, a theatre, a brothel, a temple... ”

September – October 2023

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