Mel Gordon — drama scholar and author taught at UC Berkeley
Mel Gordon, a drama scholar who penned unconventional and eclectic writings on theater history, died March 22 in Richmond. He was 71.
The cause of death was complications related to renal failure, said Gordon’s former wife Sheila Gordon.
Gordon is perhaps best known for “The Grand Guignol,” about the graphic genre of theater in 20th century Paris, and “Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin,” on sex culture and prostitution during the Weimar Republic. He also directed more than 20 productions in Frankfurt, New York City, Paris, Zurich and San Francisco.
Gordon taught theater at UC Berkeley starting in 1990, including a popular course on bad acting. In recent months, Gordon had been working on two books, one on fascist love cults of the 1930s, and a second on 1920s flappers, said Sheila Gordon, who was married to Gordon from 1985 to 1994 and remained friends with him. He retired from teaching two years ago, she said.
“He influenced me and my life and my teaching greatly,” said Sheila Gordon, an assistant professor of acting and voice at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, and a former student of Gordon’s. “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if it weren’t for him. He influenced many of his other students that way. He touched lots of lives, generations of students.”
Melvin Irwin Gordon was born Feb. 18, 1947, in Detroit, to Rose and Joseph Gordon.
His academic career began at New York University, where he taught at Tisch School of the Arts in 1970s and 1980s before moving to the Bay Area in 1990 to teach at Berkeley.
“In the academic world, he was considered a bit of an oddball,” said Adam Parfrey of Feral Press, who published a number of Gordon’s books including “The Grand Guignol” and “Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant.” “His interests coincided more with mine than actual academia per se,” said Parfrey, who knew Gordon for nearly 40 years.
They met in 1979 at a theater journal where Parfrey was typesetting and laying out pages.
Gordon’s interest in his subjects came, in large part, from the fact that they weren’t well known, Parfrey said.
“He didn’t want to do or wasn’t interested in things that you could just find on television,” Parfrey said. “It wasn’t like he was a weirdo per se, but he had an interest in things that weren’t overwhelmingly discussed.”
Gordon also had a knack for digging up new information, forgoing the secondary sources held in libraries for firsthand ephemera that he’d find in small stores throughout his travels.
“He was the most interesting person I knew,” said Gordon’s nephew, Maer Ben-Yisrael. “He loved art and culture and the weird side of both of those things, and made a career out of it. He would find singular obsessions and really go to town on them.”
Gordon is survived by his brother, Norman Gordon of Prescott, Ariz.; and his nephews, Ben-Yisrael of Oakland and Mark Gordon of Morgan Hill.
A memorial service is being planned.