Presented by Inter Poets Theater

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10/26/2023

KGB Red Room

This is the company’s inaugural live show

 

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A fashion show by the dead for the living! A Barnumesque séance that smashes together the Civil War and the AIDS crisis. A morbidly transgressive and experimental play featuring a parade of gay ghosts! 

 

Derek McCormack plays with the spatial materiality of language. His expressive restructuring further contends with the impact of censorship within storytelling by weaving a range queer histories: Abraham Lincoln’s unspoken homosexuality and Margiela’s anti-capitalist design ethos. This haunted evening is both an eulogy and critique of our methods for recording history.

 

Starring Six Replicas:

Ed Malone - Abraham Lincoln

Patrick Sarmiento - Mary Todd Lincoln

Gabe Rubin - their dead son, Willie

Alix Curnow - Nettie Colburn Maynard

Tavish Miller - Stephen Foster

Tom Cole - Martin Margiela, the Devil

 

Adapted and Directed by Cammisa Buerhaus

Based on the novel by Derek McCormack

Dramaturgy by Stephanie LaCava 

Produced by Lonely Christopher

 

Production History:

Anorak, Berlin, Germany, independent, June 2023

 

Buy the Novel

Read: Lonely Christopher on The Well-Dressed Wound

 

Cast and Crew Bios

 

Cammisa Buerhaus is an actor, musician, writer and visual artist. For the past ten years, Buerhaus has worked between artistic disciplines, developing a hybrid practice across harsh noise, theatre, and visual art. Buerhaus writes and directs confessional-performative psychodramas written in her signature hallucinatory prose. Her music releases, performances,

and plays have been reviewed in Texte Zur Kunst, The Wire Magazine, and Artforum. She has performed at MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Metro Pictures, The Whitney, and at many other venues and festivals internationally.

 

Lonely Christopher is a multidisciplinary queer experimental writer of poetry, fiction, and drama for stage and screen. He is the author of five books, most recently the poetry collections In a January Would and the 10th anniversary reissue of Death & Disaster Series. He is the founding creative director of Inter Poets Theater, managing director of the Segue Foundation, and an editor for Roof Books. His plays have been presented in Canada, China, and the United States. His film credits include several international shorts and the feature MOM, which he wrote and directed. He has worked for a decade in the field of HIV treatment and prevention for homeless youth, at the Ali Forney Center and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and dog.

 

Tom Cole is a writer, performer and artist living in the Lower East Side. His work has been presented at Participant Inc, Thread Waxing Space, Art on Air, Dixon Place, Clocktower Gallery, ICA Boston, Performa, Howl Arts, and the Boston Center for the Arts. He is a MacDowell and Edward Albee Foundation Playwriting fellow. He heads the New Play Commissioning Program at True Love Productions, where he has commissioned new work by Heidi Schreck, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Craig Lucas, and Sheila Callaghan, among others. He co-curates Experiments and Disorders, a literary series at Dixon Place. He has collaborated extensively with Anohni, most recently appearing in She Who Saw Beautiful Things at The Kitchen.  His work has been anthologized in Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles, as well as Dopamine X Semiotext(e)'s Sluts (spring 2024) edited by Michelle Tea.

 

Alix Curnow (they) is an actor and teaching artist with Roundabout Theatre Company. Recent TV credits: "American Horror Story" FX, "Mean Girl Murders" Investigation Discovery. Alix is represented by Bright Artists Management and GTA. You can learn more about Alix and their work at alixcurnow.com.

 

Ed Malone is an actor, clown, writer, director and teacher based in New York City. He trained at Ecole Jacques Lecoq and with Philiippe Gaulier at Ecole Philippe Gaulier. As an actor Ed has appeared on HBO, NBC, FX, Peacock and in several Off-Broadway productions, most notably with the Irish Repertory Theatre and Theatre for a New Audience. Ed teaches Clown at Suny Purchase College and also teaches at Suny Old Westbury College.

 

Derek McCormack's most recent books are Castle Faggot, a novel from Semiotext(e), and Judy Blame's Obituary, a collection of essays from Pilot Press. He writes about fashion sometimes for Artforum. He lives in Toronto.

 

Tavish Miller lives in New York City.

 

Gabe Rubin is a multidisciplinary artist who often performs as anachronistic and creaturely characters. Rubin explores the psychoacoustic and hormonal nature of vocal production across musical theater, folk and classical ballad, and Panto. His films have been screened at the Brooklyn Film Festival and the MIX Queer Experimental Film Festival. He has performed in Shelley Hirsch’s Book-Bark-Tree-Line for Blank Forms, in Jill Kroesen’s Collecting Injustices at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as featured in Soraya Zaman’s trans-masculine photo series American Boys, published by Daylight Books. Together with Felix Bernstein he is represented by David Lewis Gallery in New York. Their work has been presented at Wexner Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, Luma Westbau, Reena Spaulings, the Drawing Center, and MOCA Los Angeles.

 

Patrick Sarmiento is an artist living and working in Brooklyn.