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The Genre Jumper

Greg Giovanni makes one fine mess of theater art.


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Published: Sep 10, 2008

Michael T. Regan

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If you're going to engage in conversation with Greg Giovanni, be ready for a mind sprint. He's a fountain of knowledge on all sorts of subjects, including Restoration theater, Japanese Noh theater, Jean Genet, mythology, Buddhism, word origins, children's science fiction, gothic fiction, etiquette, drag queens ("In many religions of the world," he says, "the drag queen is revered as prophet and seer" — who knew?) and lots more.

"I'm a bit of a geek," he says.

OK, so the private Greg Giovanni is a voracious bookworm. But on the public side, he's recognized for being a provocative and often outrageous director/playwright/actor. An early proponent of Philly's underground theater scene, Giovanni is being honored with a retrospective of his work at the Painted Bride Art Center Oct. 31 through Nov. 8.

This is the guy who founded Big Mess Theatre, and that title is no misnomer. Years ago, he performed — or, more accurately, shouted — excerpts from Shakespeare while hanging naked in dance clubs. A video he directed for WHYY-TV, Medea of Springfield, was temporarily yanked off the air because viewers were offended by the plot of children being killed. "The little kids were great in it. There was lots of blood and screaming and I have a cameo in it as a heroin addict," he recalls. At a spoof of the Barrymore Awards — called the Scarymores — where actors and theater companies received sandwich tributes, Greg's contained corned beef, extra cheese, whipped cream and a cherry on top.

"I kind of clobber these things together that don't seem like they should go together, but hopefully they're kind of delicious," Giovanni says. "For a while I loved the term 'post-modernism,' because we were at the end of modernism, and modernism includes surrealism, absurdism, cubism, formalism — you just mush all the isms together and that's what I do. ... That's why it was a big mess."

One of Giovanni's specialties is crafting unconventional productions based on ancient Greek theater (see above-noted Medea video).

"He kind of blows it up," says Deborah Seif, who has acted in numerous Giovanni plays. "He understands that kind of theater so well that he doesn't need to stick to a strict rule when he works inside the genre ... he flips it on its head."

Giovanni's Automatrix, his still-talked-about interpretation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, performed in 1989, famously featured 14 gallons of fake blood, explosions and a punk-rock band. And while making crazy salad from classic material can befuddle viewers who have no idea where the play is coming from or where it's supposed to be going, that's fine by this playwright.

"I don't care if they get what I'm getting out of it," Giovanni says. "There's a lot of room for interpretation. That's what's really interesting, and that's what creates discussions after the performance is over."

There will no doubt be much discussion following the Painted Bride's Big Messy Retro-Fest, not the least of which will come from Giovanni himself: Each show is a reinterpretation of one of his works as envisioned by other theater companies and artists. Giovanni has varying degrees of involvement with these reproductions: For The Ixiondae, a Jacobean Masque, to be restaged by Robert Smythe (best-known as founder of the recently shuttered Mum Puppettheatre), Giovanni stayed out of the way. Smythe preferred to do this own thing, and Giovanni said, "'OK, surprise the hell out of me.'"

Even with reimagined versions, Retro-Fest is sure to show that Giovanni's take on theater is as genre-jumping and one-of-a-kind as the man himself.

While his early, freewheeling-est Big Mess productions won't be represented (since those scripts were "written on cocktail napkins" and are long gone), this celebration of his oeuvre features four works from "the middle years" (1990-2000), along with the original Medea video. Madi Distefano is directing Naked Cocktail, a "giant cabaret about losers, misfits and giant insects" in which she performed in 1997 and 2001. A kindred spirit of the theater world as well as a close friend of Giovanni's, Distefano says she and Greg "like to mix the tawdry and everyday gritty urban truth, or an exaggeration of that truth, with the beauty of art. This guy was doing Fringe before anyone knew what the word fringe meant — in terms of performance, anyway." Distefano credits her pal with pioneering the local underground theater scene, bringing new audiences into the theater and "influencing many artists, myself [included]. ... He's set an example of what is possible. How not to look at the limitations but to look at the possibilities of how and where theater can be created."

For his part, Giovanni says he's "not so full of myself" to take credit for affecting other artists. He will, however, allow that "one hopes to influence the scene and one hopes to be an inspiration to young upcoming artists. For me, I've always just been true to what I am doing. I am not writing or directing or producing plays to please someone else. I'm doing my vision. And that, I think, influences people more than anything ... to be true to yourself as an artist."

Giovanni does admit that people have told him they've been influenced by his work, and he says, "By god, that is the greatest compliment you can give me ... but you know, I'm not getting my lifetime achievement award just yet."

(deni.kasrel@citypaper.net)

Greg Giovanni Big Messy Retro-Fest, Oct. 31-Nov.1 and Nov. 7-8, 7 and 9 p.m., $25 per performance, Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St., 215-925-9914, paintedbride.org.