“Shut Off the Raging Dialogue of the Story of the Week”
“The political climate that we live under says that diverse people from different strata of society, from different cultural orientations, would not all be together in the same room at the same time sharing a similar experience together. The political climate that we live under is divisive. It’s designed that way. It only reinforces the extremes in difference between us. And yes, while we are all very different from each other, we are overwhelmingly similar.
“There are lesbians in this room; there are gay men in this room; there are heterosexuals in this room; there are bisexual people in this room, are there not? There are transsexual people, asexual people. There are Catholics, Protestants, atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics in this room. There are Asians in this room. There are Blacks in this room. There are Hispanics in this room. There are Middle Easterners in this room. There are WASPs in this room. There is every kind of ethnic group in this room. There are trendy people in this room. There are people over fifty in this room. There are people over sixty, over seventy in this room. There are people under twenty-five in this room. There are at least five kinds of gay men in this room, and they don’t agree with each other about anything! There are people in this room who don’t identify with any particular group in this room.”
- Penny Arcade, early 1990s
During an April visit to New York I had the chance to see The Penny Arcade Experience at a club called the Poisson Rouge, which now fills the hallowed space of the old Village Gate. The original Gate marquee still stands, an historic landmark, on the corner of the beige brick building at Bleecker and Thompson Streets. It eternally announces the last two shows that appeared at that legendary forum when Art d’Lugoff had to close its doors in 1993: one by Jacques Brel and the other was Arcade’s long-running (more than 1,500 performances) Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!
Everything I have always loved about Penny Arcade’s performances was as vibrant and alive as ever on that April 2010 night in New York, starting with Penny – nee Susana Ventura, the girl from the Italian immigrant family in the mill town of New Britain, Connecticut who ran away to New York as a teen and soon landed as Andy Warhol’s youngest superstar – a tornado of truth-telling, humor, timing and authenticity. The male and female erotic dancers, actors and performers, video camerapersons and the lighting-sound-production-dramaturgy team on and off stage included a core group of the same talents that were collaborating with Penny on her works back in 1996 and 1997, when I last attended a Penny Arcade show: dramaturge Steve Zehentner, stage manager Lorie E. Said, dancer Kenny Angel Davis, videographers Dean Lance and Rick Jurgens. Hanging on to a team for 14 years and more (most go farther back than that) for a project of independent anything is itself a rare accomplishment, especially in the ego-heavy world of show biz, whether a project is economically flush or it is underground and often struggling.
There was also something new in the Arcade arsenal in 2010: Merchandise.