Like many great epiphanies, Anthony Hudson realized it in the shower—shortly after he fell off Jeffery Gibson’s massive sculpture of red pedestals, the space in which to place me.
Hudson had been invited to perform in the US pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale where Gibson, a queer Choctaw and Cherokee artist, had created an installation addressing the forced displacement of Indigenous communities by colonialist settlers. And Hudson, a queer Grand Ronde / Siletz artist, decided to get right up on that pedestal in a Lara Croft costume, as Hudson’s drag clown persona Carla Rossi.
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“Falling off the sculpture in front of a bazillion people felt appropriate for Carla. But later I realized I was feeling that Carla’s ongoing story was over. You know, she’s a soap opera; she’s a mythology. I had done everything I wanted to do as her.”
It took him two years to actually retire Carla, and when he did, Hudson says he timed the announcement to coincide with a lunar eclipse, Lunar New Year, and the Year of the Fire Horse—hoping all that energy would help Carla stay dead. Full disclosure: Hudson is also the Mercury’s horoscopes columnist.
One reason Hudson retired his trickster persona was to cut down on his performing schedule. Already a full-time film programmer at the Hollywood Theatre—managing series like Isn’t She Great, Vault of Horror, and Thank God It’s Queer—Hudson was also hosting a regular advice night at Tomorrow Theater as Carla.
What Hudson really wanted to be doing was writing—especially finishing his first book Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances, which Northwestern University Press will publish on October 15.
Though Lamp Back is a book of plays, it’s also clearly a work of memoir. “Nobody’s Going to Fund This” is arguably an essay you could read, and aside from the title work, the collection’s six pieces are presented in chronological order.
The collection’s earliest piece, Hudson’s breakout identity work, “Looking for Tiger Lily,” was once adapted for multiple roles and slated to be staged at Artists Repertory Theatre in the spring of 2020. The Mercury actually put Carla on the cover for that particular Spring Arts Issue, but pandemic shutdowns canceled both Mercury print issues and the rest of Artists Rep’s spring season. For Lamp Back, Hudson returned “Tiger Lily” to its original monologue-with-Keynote format; it feels appropriate because the Keynote aspect was inspired by Hudson’s memories of presentations his father made as a Grand Ronde Tribe social worker.
The pandemic is present for much of Lamp Back, as it would be for any memoir of the past 10 years. “Nobody’s Going to Fund This” directly responds to the shutdown. “The Carlalogues” is an audio play, and the title work, “Lamp Back,” is actually a video script. Hudson says the last piece, “A Tale as Old as Time, or: If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Plunge ’Em,” is a transcription of an improvised piece he performed onstage with an audience. It’s a fascinating finale because it recounts a particular 2018 drag queen storytime in Portland that became the focus of national conservative media outlets.
“It took years for me to comprehend the psychological impact of what happened,” Hudson writes in the work’s stage directions, “how children were wrongly sexualized and exploited by rabid strangers on the Internet in the name of destroying me and people like me.”
Much like putting down Carla, explaining the drag queen storytime from hell and recording a response to it does not ensure that it stays dead. “Let’s be real,” Hudson writes, “the current ‘war on drag’ is a coded war on trans people,” and that is very much alive.
Hudson later reached out over email to explain another reason he had to step away from performing: navigating burnout and nervous system distress. He received a level 1 autism diagnosis this year and wants to be more open about it.
“It has explained a lot to me about myself, my work, and the 10 million footnotes and references in Lamp Back,” Hudson writes. “And [it also helps to explain] my lack of endurance as a performer. It’s something I want to open up about publicly because I just don’t think most people know much about it.”
Chatting with Hudson about writing possibilities and future projects gets complicated quickly. He has a lot of plans and most of them are in a state of flux. It’s like herding cats—if the cats were sparkly and hilarious. Right now, he says he’s been adapting a version of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, joking, “I’ve always wanted to do a show about Italian identity.” He lowkey worries people will think he only responds to Disney movies—then wonders if he should write a land acknowledgment-style disclaimer for the play’s opening to let the audience know he never saw that version. He’s also been writing a historical romance centered around Moby Dick.
Hudson hopes to perform “Girl with a Cigarette” from Lamp Back at Portland Book Festival in November because the actual Moses Soyer painting of the same name hangs there—the piece was commissioned by Portland Art Museum. He says he’ll read it as himself.
Anthony Hudson reads from Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances at Powell’s City of Books 1005 W Burnside Mon Oct 19, 7 pm, FREE, all ages who can .
