Gay Play Tuesdays: UP YOUR ASS

Up Your Ass
by Valerie Solanas

January 21st at 7pm

Join us for our next edition of Gay Play Tuesdays, on January 21st at 7pm, when we will read Up Your Ass by Valerie Solanas (1965) — the radical lesbian feminist who famously shot Andy Warhol.

Valerie Solanas’s rarely seen, legendary play explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp. The play, whose full title is Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez — a thinly veiled Solanas — a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. A fictionalized predecessor to the author’s SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

What is “Gay Play Tuesdays”?

What makes a “gay play?” Is it dependent on the identity of the author or characters? The reception of the play by LGBTQIA+ audiences? The play’s politics or aesthetics? Or is there something else, less definable, that might make a play a gay classic?Join our Resident Dramaturg, Jesse Marchese, for a monthly free play reading salon where we will investigate some of the most impactful, provocative, and fearless “gay plays” from the 20th and 21st centuries. Being a “salon,” this is not a professional performance. Rather, we treat each session as a classroom where the plays are our teachers.We will treat every session as a first read through, assigning parts on a first come, first served basis. You are welcome to come and read a role out loud or just listen along – no experience necessary! Once we finish reading through the play we will engage in a short discussion of its themes and ideas.