titleUp by Wednesdayin 2017, it often happened 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 Cinowhere, 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 producedmost notably, 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 theaters very name was a reminder of the occasional, improvisational, and highly social nature of the venues that Patrick preferred. Stephen Bottoms describes Patricks Joyce Dynel (1969)first produced at the Old Reliableas 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, Whats a nice joint like you doing in a lousy girl like this? Such a witty inversion of the standard pick-up line (Whats a nice girl like you doing in a lousy joint like this?) in the service of undercutting pious belief in the Immaculate Conception 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 political and pop cultural icons whose momentary visibility invited Patricks 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 hisplayslongevity was the impossibility of replicating the zeitgeist that had provided the haphazard spark for their initial production and performance. Patricks plays were inextricably linked to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. For example, it seems unlikely that a later production of Mercy Drop, or Marvin Loves Johnny (1973) enjoyed 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 Godawful hysterical warts on his penis. Rather than give sciencefiction overtones to what is, after all, essentially 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 imitation 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 abandoned New York City for the West Coast, frustrated that the surviving off-offBroadway 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 announce their production season months in advance. In Los Angeles, Patrick became artistic director of the forty-seat Fifth Estate 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 Doesnt Kill Me Makes a Great Story Later.) And he worked tirelessly with an organization 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 60s revolution, Patrick posted on his blog a decade before his death. Yet, ironically, the three plays for which hell 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. BothThe Haunted Host (1964) and T-Shirts (1979) deal with the clash between a middle-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 trappings 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. Patricks one commercial success, Kennedys 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, Patricks 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 lifetimecivilization had finally begun, one character recalls. But the seventies are just the garbage of the sixties! Maybe American theater did not want to be saved. 26 TheG&LR Robert Patrick. Becket Logan photo.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTk3MQ==