LEGENDARY PLAYWRIGHT Robert Patrick died earlier this year, on April 23rd, at the age of 85. The author of some sixty surviving playsin 1983 he estimated that hed already written between 250 and 300he 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 tosaving American theater.His intention, he wrote, was to set fire to the minds of a generation. Robert Patrick OConnora mistake made on the poster for his first play resulted in his dropping his family name in professional matterswas 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 poemhed 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 whod recently moved to Manhattan. On a street during his first day in the city, he followed a beautiful young man into a dilapidated coffee house cumtheater. He was so immediately engaged by the Caffe Cinos atmosphere of raw magic and open homosexuality that he remained there until it was forced to close following founder Joe Cinos death in 1967. 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 birthplace of American gay theater. (See also Darren Patrick Blaneys article in the January-February 2014 issue of this magazine.) The secret of the Caffe Cinos success seems to have been Joe Cinos 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 playwrights concept, or prevent him from enjoying the surprises that the production had to offer. (Its magic time, hed announce 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 ESSAY Robert Patrick at the Caffe Cino RAYMOND-JEANFRONTAIN Raymond-Jean Frontains most recent book is Conversations with Terrence McNally. boundary between the audience and the performers and creating what was often an electric connection. Also, as Stephen Bottoms, historian of the off-off-Broadway theater movement, points out, because the better part of the Caffe Cinos staff and regular patrons were gay, the Cino became a haven for individuals excluded from mainstream society, fosteringthe celebratory 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 foundsustenance for my pagan spirit.Patrick willingly functioned as a temple slave, doing anything needed to support the Cino and its productions: waiting tables, hanging and operating 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 movements 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 downmost prominently, 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 Yorks avant-garde theater world kept vigil outside his hospital room, before succumbing to his self-inflected wounds. 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 Wilsons The Madness of Lady Bright, Doric Wilsons And He Made a Her,TomEyens WhyHannasSkirtWont Stay Down, and PatricksownThe Haunted Host attracted the attention 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 Patricks early plays, giving the impression that they were actually 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 As Patrick later recalled, theCaffe Cino was the Ground Zero of the 1960s: a coffee house, a theatre, a brothel, a temple... SeptemberOctober 2023 25
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