Previewing a performance art show, sight unseen, can
be a bit of a gamble. Take Tragic Magic, running one night only
at the Miracle Theatre this weekend. Three New York-based artists will
each perform a brief set—one of the performers, Glenn Marla, has
been described in the press both as a “downtown prophet” and an “obese
transvestite in tights.” Well, which is it?
Only one way to find out, and given that the annual summer slump has
shuttered the doors of most local theater companies, now’s as good a
moment as any to take a chance on something new.
Marla, Heather Ács, and Silas Howard are currently touring
the West Coast, working their way south to San Francisco’s Homo a Go
Go. The performers promise a platter of queer performance art, ranging
from Marla’s drag-influenced comedy to Howard’s more traditional
storytelling.
“We’re definitely targeting queer audiences but the shows are not
queer, per se,” Ács tells me over the phone from Seattle. “My
hope is that there are certainly themes that connect [the shows], but
we’re all very different performers. Anyone that comes to see it is
going to take something away from some or all of it.”
Of the obese drag queen cum downtown prophet, Ács says,
“Glenn is very good at using humor to get at issues that are very
difficult to talk about. [He’s] male identified and trans but he’s very
queeny and colorful and fabulous, and his work is very sneaky.”
Howard, meanwhile, is a former member of the seminal punk band Tribe
8 and a movie director who made a film about Billy Tipton, a jazz
performer who lived as a man but was discovered, after his death, to
have been biologically female. Howard’s piece, Thank You for Being
Urgent, deals with his work on the film, and the intersection of
the queer punk scene and Hollywood.
“I’m not interested in the type of art that is so conceptual that no
one can understand it,” Ács says. “My goal is to do something
that’s nonlinear and experimental, but that invites the audience in.
We’re really all just interested in telling stories, and there are a
lot of different ways to tell a story. The world we live in is very
complicated, and the stories that we’re telling are stories that are
not often told.”