Prince of the City

THEATER

Eric Bogosian's cast of dark characters light up the stage

Generally speaking, I do as I am told. So when someone said, "Go and see Eric Bogosian," I went. He was having a run at an Off Broadway theater, doing a standup comedy routine, or a performance piece, or whatever you want to call it, titled Drinking in America. I found the thought of sitting in a theater listening to one person for one and a half hours without an intermission a little depressing. But that's not how it was. Because Eric Bogosian, with his hot-smoke eyes, all wild black hair and inhuman energy, came onstage and transformed himself into one character after the next—bam, bam, bam—with splitsecond timing. There I sat, listening to their life stories, each boiled down to a crazed and joyous five, fifteen, or twenty minutes. It was impossible to tell who would show up onstage next, although each man seemed to be saying the same thing: "Sit down and shut up—I have something to tell you."

There was a wino and a drug addict and a Hollywood agent and a Top 40 D.J. and a heavy-metal rock star and a junior account executive and a ceramictile salesman and a Christian evangelist. The whole business was mesmerizing. It was like reading a bunch of short stories without actually having to go to the trouble to read. Or like sitting in a restaurant (a pretty crummy restaurant, one of those places with menus that list moussaka and knishes and spaghetti and hamburgers and Breakfast Specials twenty-four hours a day) and having the chance to eavesdrop on all the customers while they tell their life stories.

The lives of Bogosian's characters are terrible and full of anguish, but recited without judgment. His men are just there, getting blowjobs from prostitutes or shooting heroin or stealing cars and leading lives of quiet desperation—just like the mass of men. And for some reason it's impossible not to like these people. They're very funny, even though they're sad; with their wants and needs and desires—for power, for fame, for freedom — they're searching for some kind of salvation. And because it is all so true, it's easy to laugh—blackly and with irony, the best kind of laughter.

Sometime after I saw Bogosian's show I went to meet him in his dressing room, and one of the first questions that occurred to me to ask was if he was married. It was easy to see that he was a person with whom one could never get bored; there would always be a wide range of other men to choose from. Unfortunately, he has an Australian wife. "In that case," I suggested, "I may be forced to write a less than favorable article—unless you fix me up with a single, eligible type of guy." He looked a little nervous and sipped Perrier from a Styrofoam coffee cup; obviously he didn't quite know what to say. "Blackmail?" he said. "No," I said, "just show biz."

Which is something Bogosian knows about. He's been around, been downand-out, and had success. He comes from a town outside Boston called Wobum. It's a tough town, full of tough people. It's on a major industrial highway, and is best known as a place to go and take a driver's test. Bogosian left Wobum to go to college (Oberlin), and then moved to New York. He became a downtown person who lived in a run-down apartment in Little Italy. He still lives there, only now he can afford to buy all the Tropicana orange juice and pizza slices he wants.

In 1981, after running the dance program at the Kitchen, an experimental performance center, he went off to do his own things. He toured around with several of his one-man shows: Voices of America was somewhat successful, FunHouse (at the Public Theater) was even more successful, and Drinking in America has been the most successful yet. Many critics raved about it when it first opened, including Frank Rich from the New York Times, who went on and on about how great Bogosian is. In a way, what Bogosian does isn't all that different from what Lily Tomlin does, only his work has a harder edge. Nothing that comes out of his mouth ever lapses into the sentimental or the cute. He has a downtown sensibility, which is about living on the edge.

All of a sudden Bogosian is a very busy person. And now he finds everybody wants to be his friend.

Now Bogosian is thirty-three years old, which he seems to feel is ancient. This fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he is going to do Talk Radio (with Tad Savinar), a play, with slides, about the host of a latenight radio talk show. He also just starred in an episode of The Twilight Zone and appeared on Miami Vice, and is writing a play for the Off Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons. And so on and so forth: all of a sudden, Eric Bogosian is a very busy person. And now he finds everybody wants to be his friend.

But you can tell this isn't going to go to his head—probably because there are too many people up there already. "Even now," Bogosian said when we talked, "I'm trying to figure out which person you want me to be."

After I saw Drinking in America I thought, Wouldn't it be nice to go to Burger King and sit quietly and eat a hamburger? On my way a man approached me and said, "Give me money! Lady, money!" He was waving his arms and staggering, dressed in layers of clothing (seedy and decrepit and elegant), as if this were the way all people should dress. At that moment it seemed everybody was Eric Bogosian.

All I could think about was one of his characters, a kindly drunk who kept talking about life's being a Fried-Egg Deal. "They flip you this way, they flip you that way—you never know what side you're going to end up on." True, but it gave me hope for the future that there was a person like Bogosian who was paying attention to the way life is in the late twentieth century, and that I could go to hear him to find out what was going on.

Tama Janowitz