leaping out
by Douglas Messerli
Deborah Lawlor Freddy / Los Angeles, The Fountain Theatre, performed at the Los
Angeles City College Theatre Academy’s Caminito Theatre, Frances Loy (director)
/ (the production I saw, with Pablo Capra and Paul Sands, was a matinee on
Thursday, September 28, 2017).
Born in 1936, Fred Herko—known by
his later friends in New York City as Freddy or Freddie—grew up in a
middle-class family in Ossining, New York, known for the maximum-security
prison Sing-Sing.
Despite their relative poverty, when, as a young boy, Herko began showing remarkable musical talents, particularly as a pianist and flautist, his parents made sure he had lessons and even purchased a grand concert piano for the young prodigy.
He later attended Juilliard Arts
Yet, at the same time Herko danced more traditional modern dance works
with James Waring, even choreographing new pieces. He also appeared as a
back-up dancer on TV shows such as Ed Sullivan’s weekly broadcasts, with
singers such Rosemary Clooney and Pearl Bailey.
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Extremely active in gay sex, moreover, Herko became a favorite of Andy
Warhol, performing in his movies such as Haircut
(No. 1), Kiss, The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, and Rollerskate, in which the dancer, on one roller-skate, rolled on
bloody feet through the New York streets.
The young talent was also a favorite in the Factory, showing up for
late-night revelries with a group of friends—described as the “mole people” for
their subterranean lifestyle and their heavy Speed usage—such as Ondine, Rotten
Rita, and Billy Name.
Herko’s long-time boyfriend was Johnny Dodd, who also appeared in Warhol
movies and later worked with the Living Theater, in 1964 doing the lighting for
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Rumors had it that Herko also had a longtime relationship with the son of a
wealthy Hollywood family and was kept for a while by a wealthy member of the De
Rothschild family in an Upper West Side apartment. He also had a relationship
with Di Prima’s husband, the poet Alan Marlowe.
But his heavy drug use, the injections of Speed and, later, LSD, began
to take its toll. By 1964 Herko had begun to miss rehearsals, and his body, so
beautiful, began to fail him: he lost teeth and had a “haggard” look about him,
friends declared.
Although, that same year, Waring had cast him in a dance production of
Wallace Stevens’ Carlos Among the Candles,
by October of 1964, Herko was homeless. Dodd, so he reports, found him in a
diner, covered with filth, dancing on the countertop, and offered to take him
to his home on Cornelia Street for a bath. Other reports, so Gerard Forde, now
working on a biography on Herko, assert that Freddy simply showed up a Dodd’s
door.
And the story after that is equally conflicted, most agreeing that
Freddy took a bath filled with Dodd’s perfume before walking naked into the
living room of the flat with the window wide open to a sunny fall day.
Some report that Herko demanded everyone but a few leave the room. But
yet many report claim they were there to observe Freddy dance to Mozart’s Coronation Mass. Dodd remembers that
Freddy danced wildly, at several times charging toward the window. He, himself,
wondered whether or not this was to be the “suicide performance” that Herko had
long promised his friends. One can only wonder why something wasn’t done to
stop the events.
After several thrusts toward the window, Herko leaped, like Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose, out the window,
landing, dead, on the other side of Cornelia Street, exactly one day and 53
years ago from the production I saw—surely not a coincidence.
Di Prima thought she perceived what was close to a suicide note when, in
clearing out his personal effects, she found a novel of Mary Renault, opened to
the page when the King throws himself into the ocean. But others argue that
Herko was not suicidal, but simply, drugged, wanting to desperately show that
he could fly. The planned Steven’s piece had him flying through a window at the
end. And, often, in his performances, Herko had leaped off the 20-foot ledge of
the Judson School stage without any negative effect.
The later memorial service at Judson Church was so crowded that only a
few could get it, and Warhol, soon after, offered another such service at the
Factory, showing Herko’s 3 films.
I recount this rather extended
mini-history of Herko simply to demonstrate why the Fountain Theater’s
co-founder, Deborah Lawlor’s, new production is such a natural and has
attracted so much Los Angeles attention.
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The multi-media-based play, Freddy,
looks at him through the lens of a young dancer friend named Shelley (Katie
McConaughy, possibly a stand-in for Lawlor herself) and a Present-Day Shelley
(Susan Wilder) who together, create most of the tension in the play between the
generational facts of Freddy’s life and later perspectives about it.
One must immediately commend this
production not only for using multi-media perspectives but for joining up, as
many LA productions recently have, with other organizations to achieve their
goals.
A few years back I saw a production of
Tennessee Williams’ nearly impossible-to-perform Camino Real at the Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena with several
cast members being students of the California Institute of the Arts that was so
superb that one immediately recognized the rewards of bringing younger and
older groups into the same space. Since then there have been numerous other
productions of larger companies, such as the LAOpera, using newer organizations
such as Redcat and the Wallis Theater for their more experimental productions
to great effect. And one can only commend the wonderful Fountain Theatre
choosing to produce their new Freddy at
the nearby Los Angeles City College Theatre Academy (Caminito Theatre) with
members of the award-winning LACC Theatre performers.
The use of actor/dancers such as Alexandra Fiallos, Jamal Hopes, Tristen
Kim, Jacqueline Mohr, Lamong Oakley, Connor Clark Pascale, Justice Quinn,
Savannah Rutledge, Brianna Saranchock, Trenton Tabak, and Jesse Trout gives a
remarkable sense of youth to this clear celebration of the young of his time
who Freddy himself obviously worshipped, as well as giving a spirit to the
period portrayed in the play.
Heading, with Stephen Sachs the
great theatre company of the Fountain, Deborah Lawlor, who was for years a
dancer herself and knew Freddy Herko, the fact of which gives the whole
production a further gravitas. This is, in part, her personal vision of the
completely charismatic dancer/performer, and, in that sense, it is a kind of
special vision which we must admire.
Unfortunately (and I wince, given admiration of both Lawlor and her
company and commitment to Los Angeles theater in saying this), it is a kind of
one-dimensional vision. In her production, instead of portraying what are the
obvious complexities of Herko’s sensibility, we see what can only be described
as authorial announcements of events: this happened and then and then. Herko’s
obviously conflicted life is attributed primarily to his endless sexual
activities and, primarily, his enchantment with drugs. At one dramatic point he
even introduces the totally innocent Past Shelley to heroin.
I’m not questioning whether or not that really happened: I’m sure it
might have. But the play, focusing as it does on his sexuality and drug habits
makes it almost appear that Herko was a two-dimensional figure who had little
else going for him; we see little of his dance, his theatrical talents, his
obvious “charismatic” encounters, not even his personal sexual relationships
with others. We’re simply told what happened, not who he really is or even was,
despite the dual perspective. I have to admit that, without any evidence, that
Lawlor’s script even hints that if Freddy hadn’t died of drugs and
self-destructive behavior, he might have died, soon after, of AIDS. Lawlor does
not say this. It’s just there is this simplistic statement of his problems
leads, unfortunately, to that conclusion. In this version, it appears, he was
suffering from too much drugs and way too much sex.
Marty Dew, playing Herko, is an attractive man who can obviously dance
well, given the help of Movement and Dance Director Cate Caplin and
choreographer Gary Franco. He’s an attractive figure who keeps one spellbound;
but, I’m sorry to say, he doesn’t yet have the theater “chops” to really
portray what were the obvious dilemmas of Herko’s life.
The play, using Javanese-like puppet figures, does attempt to reveal the
young Herko’s childhood where he was encouraged by his family to play the
piano. But it doesn’t truly deal with the awful truths such as when Freddy
revealed to his father that he wanted to change to ballet he was beaten.
That “little” fact alone suggests that this man was eternally torn by
the projectives of his life. The Julliard School reported that he was unable to
“focus,” which means, of course, that he had an inability to commit to the
years and years of intense practicing that it might take to become a concert
pianist. Herko was clearly a poly-talent, a man with so many gifts that he
didn’t quite know how to share them. And, looking back on his history, how
could he, given the time in which he lived, possibly find an easy solution?
Yes, there were many in his community who were intensely seeking to find
multi-cultural ways in which to experience art; but the society at large was in
closure, a world in which it was not so easy to cross “over” the many, many boundaries
that art and life put up before the individual. One only needs to read Michael
S. Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern
American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy to confirm it.
Diane Di Prima raged against Freddy’s endless gay encounters, for
example, in her poem “Fucking Again.” He was late for another date with her.
Herko’s current biographer, Forde writes that “He liked hanging out in sleazy
bars.”
What, I might ask, were not sleazy bars in that gay-phobic world? Even
in 1969, five years after Freddy’s death, I visited New York bars which anybody
in my hometown (and even in New York) would have described as sleazy, the
Stonewall being one of the worst of them!
Freddy was truly seeking love in everything he did. The night before his
death he performed on the roof of the Judson Church without a single person
having bothered to attend. I’ve had such poetry readings, but I can’t imagine
what that might have meant to this fragile man, physically falling apart before
his own eyes.
Lawlor’s production is one in which the audience must really “make
believe,” must imagine rather than truly experience the characters. For these
young actors don’t quite yet know how, despite their obvious talents, to put
the darker and lighter elements of their characters into greater relief. Whether
they are running through the openly sexual environs of Warhol’s The Factory, or
trying to discover their own personal sensibilities, they seem to be simply
sleep-walking through their own acting out of their characters. Surely the
figures they represent might have something deeper to say, to query their own
choices, even as they recognize they can no longer make such choices. Only
Wilder (as the Present-Day Shelley) seems to be able to understand some of the
errors of your younger perception.
And then, there is Herko himself, obviously a sort of Peter Pan-like
character, living out his life in as far more delusional “flower-child”-like
perspective than the West coast’s San Francisco figures of the early 1960s.
These New York folk, nonetheless, were also innocents gone over the edge
The great dancer Paul Taylor, also a late-to-life dancer, once told me
(when I was 21 or 22) that “You’re never too old to become a dancer.” But I
knew he was lying, that no matter how hard I studied (as I did that year at the
Joffrey Ballet Company) that I had come into to it far too late—despite some
very nice comments from my severely authoritarian ballet teachers.
Freddy suggested to Di Prima that he needed Speed to allow him to do
what he desired to do since he come so late to dance. But he clearly
misunderstood what Speed really was. As graduate students in the early 1970s, my
companion Howard and I—both of whom hated and continue to hate the use of any
drugs—did explore Speed a couple of times to finish writing deadlines. In fact,
I wrote a couple of my essays from my Masters’ Thesis on Eudora Welty with the
enhancement of Speed.
Yet, we both realized that instead of slowing down time so that we might
work against the imaginary clock, if we encountered one another during these
times we would suddenly engage in conversations that took hours away from our
true work, making us lose what we were actually trying to gain.
Herko wasn’t losing time, but actually gaining it, his body suddenly
decaying, his mind lost in a kind of space that took years away from his
talented imagination and physical abilities.
His final leap through that window may not have been an intentional
suicidal but it was a leap outside of reality, outside of time, outside of his
own remarkable contributions—a leap into a reality beyond us. And, in
retrospect, it is damnably painful for all those who might have wished he could
have lived on to exorcise/exercise his so-many talents.
But, in the end, I beg you, don’t read my piece alone. Go see the
performance, Freddy, which brought me
to all these words. It’s worth seeing and wondering after.
Los Angeles, September 29, 2017
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 29, 2017).
