The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
History’s lost folks: ‘Radicals in Miniature’
Arts & Ideas play has 2 performances this week
Ain Gordon has always been a history buff. The writer-director-performer of “Radicals in Miniature,” which runs Tuesday and Wednesday as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, proves that, at least in Gordon’s case, he who knows his history is bound to repeat it — with music, visual projections and humor for leavening.
“I love (history) and I interrogate it,” said Gordon, who’ll perform “Radicals in Miniature” at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street. “It’s kind of what I do all the time.”
“Radicals in Miniature,” co-created by composer-percussionist Josh Quillen, drags Greenwich Village’s “alternative” culture of the 1970s and ’80s, bringing all-but-forgotten neighborhood denizens and local legends to the fore. Included among the play’s 20 characters are punk
drummer David Hahn; dance reveler Elaine Shipman; python-hugging club performer John Sex; and disco artist Sylvester. These people, however marginalized posthumously, had a profound influence on Gordon, a native New Yorker who lives there still.
“We call them ‘unfamous’ legends in the script,” he said.
Gordon’s lifelong affinity for history took root when, as a lad, his parents would routinely leave him with their parents when work parted them from their young, impressionable son.
“I grew up an only child to entertainers,” said Gordon, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Playwriting and three-time Obie Award winner. “My mother’s parents are British, and my father’s parents grew up in Coney Island. I was deposited regularly with one set of parents or the others.”
With little else to busy himself, the young Gordon prompted his grandparents for stories about themselves, requests they seldom denied.
“Over the many visits, the stories would change,” Gordon said. “Different details would come out, and contradictions would come out. So I began to really push for these details, for these contradictions, and my parents knew nothing about them. So there were these unreliable yet fascinating, constantly evolving histories coming out of these old people. I never turned away from that as source material.”
Gordon and Quillen developed “Radicals in Miniature” in 2015 at Vermont Performance Lab in Brattleboro, where they had created three years earlier “Where (we) Live,” which explores Vermont’s 18th-century history and politics. In 2016 they developed “A Gun Show,” which delves into the multifaceted debate on firearms. They’ll return in September to develop a piece covering the roughly 15 years between the “Summer of Love” and when AIDS first became news.
Gordon, who has collaborated with Quillen since he first encountered him in his band (called So Percussion) several years ago, said he never wanted to invent a traditional oneman show.
“And I didn’t want to be alone onstage,” Gordon said. “I thought, who would just be game, even when I don’t know what we’re going to make? Who is not at all like me, and comes from a completely different environment that will stretch the envelope of the show?
“But, aesthetically, we have a lot of overlap,” he added.
Gordon doesn’t return to Vermont every fall strictly for the foliage. With access to several local libraries, such as the one at Marlboro College, Gordon quenches his thirst for knowledge of the past, particularly history below the mainstream radar.
“It interests me to look at communities, or groups of people in society who needed to move under deep cover in order to thrive,” said Gordon. “And, therefore, they don’t leave the kind of traces that traditional history likes to use in order to historicize.”
Gordon, who described himself as “a research junkie,” welcomes whatever piques his intellectual curiosity, either from hard copy or the internet, as long as either source proffers original artifacts.
“For a long time, it was only in-person that I responded to — the actual documents.” Gordon said. “I’m generally not attracted to someone else’s distillation of the history. History is like a movie on the cutting room floor. It can be cut a million times. It’s a collection of facts sorted by other people. I’m always interested in seeing what I can find that wasn’t included.”
While Gordon prefers his research straight from empirical evidence, he is well aware that memory, long called a “terrible liar,” is subjective.
“We call that out,” said Gordon, repeating the sentence for emphasis. “In the show, I often say, ‘What I think I remember somebody said …’
“Many of these characters died before the internet,” he said, explaining the relative paucity of objective facts compared with the personal subjectivity regarding the characters that inhabit “Radicals in Miniature.”
Gordon also said that his aim is to capture the characters’ quintessence rather than slavish mimicry.
“Yes, absolutely,” he said, adding: “In some way, they affected the eco-culture that we do value. The word we use frequently is ‘influence.’”
While Gordon’s acting experience predates his brief attendance at NYU, he felt compelled to perform “Radicals in Miniature” himself.
“The material is so personal and autobiographical that I just wanted to make a personal tribute to these people who were overlooked,” said Gordon, who considers himself primarily a writer-director. “It just seemed not an option to put in someone else’s mouth. Whatever discomforts I had performing my own piece, I just felt like this was the only option for this work.”
Perhaps because extant historical sources on the lives of these influential people is harder to come by than that of those who lived in the public eye, Gordon reasons that his style of storytelling suits his subjects.
“This kind of history is where theater can intervene,” he said, “because the history is incomplete, so I am allowed to step into that incomplete space and imagine.”