GLR September-October 2023

fiction overtones to what is, after all, es sentially a love story, he was allowed ” to remain clothed. The Sexual Revolution that occurred in the streets following Stonewall was in some ways a weak imi tation of what Patrick had imagined in the preceding years on the stage. Patrick seems to have understood fairly early on that his moment of glory would be short-lived. In 1983, he aban doned New York City for the West Coast, frustrated that the surviving off-off Broadway theaters like La Mama and Circle Rep had lost their improvisatory edge, having discovered that, in order to apply for the grant money that they needed to stay afloat, they had to an nounce their production season months in advance. In Los Angeles, Patrick became artistic director of the forty-seat Fifth Es

title Up by Wednesday in 2017, it often hap pened in those “ long ago days ” that he might have been walking in his Lower East Side neighborhood only to have La Mama director Ellen Stewart call out to him: “ A show canceled. Can you get something up by Wednesday? ” The play that he wrote would depend entirely on the actors and costumes that Stewart had available. (His title Up by Wednesday coyly satirizes the title Up to Thursday , by Sam Shepard, who started out at the Cino — where, Patrick hints, he enjoyed receiving blow jobs from his gay colleagues, only to move on to commercial theater and heterosexual acclaim.) What kept Patrick gainfully employed was his ability to write to the needs of any of the half dozen off-off-Broadway theaters where his plays were produced — most no

Robert Patrick. Becket Logan photo.

tably, after the shuttering of the Caffe Cino, the Old Reliable Theatre Tavern, for which Patrick wrote some thirty plays in two years, and which supplied him with a rowdy audience that he enjoyed interacting with. The theater ’ s very name was a re minder of the occasional, improvisational, and highly social na ture of the venues that Patrick preferred. Stephen Bottoms describes Patrick ’ s Joyce Dynel (1969) — first produced at the Old Reliable — as “ a carnivalesque travesty on the life of Christ ” in which, for example, the Annunciation occurs in a scene in which “ God rapes Mary, but stops midcoitus to ask his divine member, ‘ What ’ s a nice joint like you doing in a lousy girl like this? ’” Such a witty inversion of the standard pick-up line ( “ What ’ s a nice girl like you doing in a lousy joint like this? ” ) in the service of undercutting pious belief in the Immaculate Con ception is pure Patrick. No one seemed to appreciate “ the fun off-off-Broadway could be ” more than he. The same spontaneous inventiveness and almost demonic creativity that made Patrick so popular in the 1960s and ’ 70s are what caused his reputation to decline thereafter. The politi cal and pop cultural icons whose momentary visibility invited Patrick ’ s skewering invariably lost their resonance, making it unlikely that the plays exploiting them would ever be revived. Many of the scripts were so ephemeral that, late in life, Patrick was reduced to asking on his website if anyone could share a copy of any of the two dozen titles that he listed. Presumably the plays had been improvised under his direction, and no one had bothered to make a transcript of what had apparently proven a popular but short-lived production. Perhaps most damaging to hisplays ’ longevity was the impossibility of replicating the zeit geist that had provided the haphazard spark for their initial pro duction and performance. Patrick ’ s plays were inextricably linked to the Sexual Revo lution of the 1960s. For example, it seems unlikely that a later production of Mercy Drop, or Marvin Loves Johnny (1973) en joyed the challenge that the original production faced when, as Patrick explains in the preface to the printed version of the play, “ two days before the opening, the very handsome and talented [lead actor] Douglas Travis ... came down with the most God awful hysterical warts on his penis. Rather than give science

tate Theatre, where he could direct productions of his own plays. (On his seventy-fifth birthday he performed a one-man show about his career titled What Doesn ’ t Kill Me Makes a Great Story Later .) And he worked tirelessly with an organi zation for high school drama students, hoping to instill in the next generation the reverence that he still had for theater as mad improvisation and fun. “ I abide in good-natured despair about the failure of the ideals of the 60 ’ s revolution, ” Patrick posted on his blog a decade before his death. Yet, ironically, the three plays for which he ’ ll probably be best remembered all deal in some way with the recognition that the political idealism and raw creative energy of the 1960s were impossible to sustain. Both The Haunted Host (1964) and T-Shirts (1979) deal with the clash between a mid dle-aged playwright who eschews renown and has willingly sacrificed traditional creature comforts for the benefit of his art, and a young, handsome up-and-comer who hungers for the trap pings of success as depicted in Life or People magazines. Patrick points out that Jay, the playwright in Haunted Host , is the first “ queer with pride ” to appear on the American stage, coming four years before the commercially more successful Boys in the Band (1968). In T-Shirts , an older pair of gay men entertain themselves with outrageous banter and wit, while the young man who visits them looks to TV for social validation and narcissistically associates physical beauty with success. It seems the hippie æsthetic of the ’ 60s has been replaced by the carefully coiffed and blow-dried look of the ’ 70s. Patrick ’ s one commercial success, Kennedy ’ s Children (1976), is a heartfelt elegy for what was lost after the ’ 60s. Set in a bar in which the denizens have no social contact with one another or with anyone else, Patrick ’ s six characters deliver through interior monologues haunting recollections of what the world seemed on the verge of becoming just a decade earlier, and their disappointment with life in the present. “ We were building our own counter-culture. It looked as if, maybe, at last, right here on this planet, and right in our own lifetime — civi lization had finally begun, ” one character recalls. But “ the sev enties are just the garbage of the sixties! ” Maybe American theater did not want to be saved.

TheG & LR

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