Why queer director Reza Abdoh was American theatre’s greatest punk

As humanity widens its recognition of oppressed queer histories, artists continue to posthumously enter the spotlight. For Aids artists, many of whom were tragically taken from the world at a tender young age, the spotlight comes in a string of retrospective exhibitions and documentaries aimed at showing how these artists used their work as a form of protest. Among this cadre of creatives was queer Iranian theatre director and playwright Reza Abdoh whose politically potent productions were so piercing that anyone who got to witness one still frames Abdoh and his performers with god-like status.

Abdoh was American theatre’s greatest punk. His ruthless commitment to experimental performance pushed the boundaries of theatre and sobered viewers to the stark reality of queer rights in 1980s-90s America – an influence in direct line with his queer contemporaries like David Wojnarowicz and Keith Haring. His plays, which were usually set in abandoned warehouses and buildings, took theatre out of the theatre hall itself and meshed it with reality while treating social and political life with pure anarchy. From scenes of BDSM to rave culture, crime thrillers, and fairy tales, Abdoh’s dark, yet equally luminous plays provoked viewers to consider the political atrocities of their time, including president Ronald Reagan's oppressive regime, the stigmatisation of Aids, and America’s deeply embedded homophobia and racism.

At the age of 32, Abdoh sadly passed away from Aids. In light of the visionary’s influence is a current retrospective Reza Abdoh at KW Institute Berlin running until 5 May. In collaboration with MoMA, the exhibition will show screenings of Abdoh’s plays and filmmaker Adam Soch’s 2015 documentary Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary. The screenings will show alongside workshops and talks about the permanent impression Abdoh has left on contemporary theatre. Below, we delve into six reasons why Abdoh is American theatre’s greatest subversive.

HIS THEATRE IS INHERENTLY PERSONAL

For Abdoh, art was both an escape and a tool for processing trauma, reality, and survival, making every second of his experimental productions deeply personal. “I am an artist living with Aids. I am a homosexual born in Iran,” Abdoh once reflected. “In my life, I have had to work through problems of stigmatisation and prejudice. When I discovered the power of the arts to express my pains and joys, it became clear to me that there would be no other way to work through the demons except to fully embrace the process of creation. The work was not personal therapy but had a connection to other people’s realities. As I grow older and more mature, it becomes clearer to me that personal struggles and conflicts are connected with universal struggles and conflicts. It is this knowledge, ironically, that gives me the freedom to experiment in my work.”

The earliest personal strings Abdoh pulls upon in his work were memories from his childhood, including his Iranian heritage, and his tumultuous relationship with his father. Born in Tehran in 1963, at age 13, Abdoh relocated to live with his grandmother in London where he fell in love with theatre after seeing a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the wake of the Iranian revolution, in 1979 the artist and his family relocated to California where his father died a year later. In 1983, he began directing plays in Los Angeles by adapting classics like King Lear and King Oedipus. Abdoh’s affination to Iran finds its way into plays like his 1988 play Peepshow, where Abdoh includes excerpts from the Iran-Contra hearings and war images, while references to his father appear in his 1990 production Father Was a Peculiar Man.

HIS ART IS INEXTRICABLE FROM SEX AND THE AIDS CRISIS

In 1988, Abdoh was diagnosed with Aids – the same year David Wojnarowicz appeared at ACT UP’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) protest with a jacket that read “If I die of Aids – forget burial – just drop my body on the steps of the FDA”. Aids was at crisis point and queer artists of this moment were unflinching in stating so. When reflecting upon the inherent sexuality of Abdoh’s work, critic Hilton Als stated in The New Yorker that, “What was on his mind from the time he tested positive for HIV, in 1988 – when he applied for a green card that year under Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act, an HIV test was required – was what was happening to the queer body in America.”

Sexuality was inextricable from Abdoh’s work. Not only did he use sex as a vehicle for exploring the human form, but he created a platform for queer artists stifled by their sexuality to be openly proud and expressive of their own identity. “Abdoh didn’t rely on metaphors for the gorgeous confusion and frequent disillusionment of being sexual; he showed those things,” Als adds. “His actors tore at their skin, slathered their faces with makeup that ran down their shirt fronts or their naked chests because Abdoh wanted sex to look like sex, not like a polite version of closeness or romance.” Al’s description translates right through Abdoh’s 1991 production Bogeyman which lifts the lid on secret BDSM acts that play out in a nine-square grid that looks like a dollhouse. In Bogeyman, latex and chain-clad queer men partake in castration, piercings, torture tanks, and simulated sex scenes set alongside idyllic prairie scenes and the occasional naked man who would step out of character to lighten the mood by singing and dancing.

“His actors tore at their skin, slathered their faces with makeup that ran down their shirt fronts or their naked chests, because Abdoh wanted sex to look like sex...” – Hilton Als

Abdoh’s 1993 production Quotations From A Ruined City is entirely underlined by the suffering of the Aids crisis – the show being a metaphor for the ruins of the body, as Abdoh once described in an interview. The play follows two male couples, the first is a gay couple who decay both physically and psychologically across the entire play, while the second couple travels through time. As critic Elinor Fuchs once reflected in a 1999 biography on Abdoh: “Dying of Aids is the very architecture of the performance, which reels from graveyard to oxygen mask to the sound of gasping for breath to coffins to funeral and da capo to graveyard to hospital, with the central sufferers each time a little weaker, a little more transparent. In between come brief remissions: feverish dances and love scenes.”

Fuchs adds, “The torrential repetitions – throwing the actors into one more dance, one more speech, bringing on one more image, one more idea and geopolitical association – represents perhaps the most heartbreaking mimicry of the attempt to stay alive in the losing struggle with Aids.”

HIS WORK WAS IMBUED WITH POLITICS AND SHOCK WAS KEY TO HIS POLITICAL VOICE

Abdoh’s deeply political approach to theatre blurred the lines between theatre as abstraction and theatre as a form of social commentary – his deeply surrealist, beautifully queer approach allowed him to critique reality through a lens of frantic fantasy.

In 1996, he produced The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, which critiqued the social and political reality of America in the 1990s through a queer retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice – a play Abdoh referred to as a "gut reaction to systemic repression and erosion of freedom". The original myth traces the fateful love of Orpheus and Eurydice, while Hip-Hop focuses on an antagonistic, genderless couple Tommy and Dora Lee. As the show’s synopsis reads: “America is crumbling! Projecting (poet Rainer Maria) Rilke and (Jean) Cocteau into an Orwellian post-nuclear world reworked by the Marx Brothers, an explosive insane waltz in which Orpheus and Eurydice – heads shaved, batteries in the neck and genders reversed – explore a punk underworld where eroticism is strictly forbidden.”

In 1992, The New York Times declared Abdoh’s production The Law Remains as “one of the angriest theatre pieces ever hurled at a New York audience” – a statement which bolstered Abdoh’s inherently radical approach to theatre. The seven-scene play is a critique of violence and its social impact as studied through the lens of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and Andy Warhol and his entourage. There is no political or social reality left untouched by The Law Remains as Abdoh uses shock as a tactic to interrogate everything from murder to sexual mutilation and necrophilia. “It’s nauseating, all right, but is it art?” once asked critic Julius Novick of the show in the essay Creating Out of Death: An Introduction to the Work of Reza Abdoh. “For Abdoh, shock is not a ‘tactic’; it’s prerequisite to communicating in a forum where the listeners have learned to assume a passive and comfortable position.”

HE TOOK THEATRE OUT OF THE THEATRE SPACE

“Dar a Luz” is the Spanish term for ‘giving birth’, and also the title of Abdoh’s production company which he launched in 1991. Dar a Luz is a direct expression of Abdoh’s influence because of the way in which the company not only gave birth to a space for queer artists to proudly and openly express their identity but how Abdoh gave life to a whole new understanding of theatre as an artistic medium.

One of Abodh’s most defining factors was the setting of his plays. He would physically remove performance from the theatre itself and place it in unsuspecting locations, such as disused hotels and abandoned warehouses for the ways in which these spaces translated his ideas. For example, his 1990 production Father Was A Peculiar Man took over four blocks of Manhattan’s meatpacking district – a location chosen because of its brooding underbelly of sex workers, drug dealers, ravers, and teen hustlers which Abdoh used as a metaphor for a show about corruption and redemption, and breaking down archetypes of masculinity. “I have the feeling that something is going on behind closed doors in this neighbourhood all the time,” Abdoh told The New York Times after the show’s premiere. “Various segments of society with different energies converge here, and yet they maintain a strange balance.” Peep Show (1988) followed a similar vein as it took over an old hotel, forcing viewers to move physically through six scenes in six different hotel rooms.

HE REBELLED AGAINST THE TRADITIONAL RULES OF THEATRE

Settings aside, Abdoh’s meticulously designed productions radicalised the production of theatre from every aspect. His works were loud and fast, intended to zap like a lightning bolt that would leave the minds of his viewers embossed with his social and political critiques. This lightning bolt effect relied on radicalising the traditional structure of theatre by placing greater emphasis on vivid imagery and ditching linear plot narratives. The Law Remains (1991) is a direct example of this as the play’s non-linear presentation relies on loud imagery and sound to bolster its narrative. According to theatre scholar Jordan Schildcrout, Abdoh’s work is in line with French dramatist Antoin Artaud. As he explained in the book Murder Most Queer, “Abdoh's assaultive use of loud noises and bloody images (in The Law Remains) outside a traditional theatre space is very much in line with Artaud's notions of a ‘theatre of cruelty’, intended to shock and provoke the audience. In this way, Abdoh uses a form of theatricality that does not offer enlightenment or catharsis but rather demands that the audience experience the brutality of (the protagonist’s) crimes on a physical and visceral level.”

Abdoh’s characteristic avant-gardism also relied on the blending of different artistic and theatrical styles. His word reached over Dada, surrealism, Muslim Ta’ziyeh plays, a unique Afro-Brazilian art form combining martial arts and dance called Capoeira, and many more. His plays also recreated traditional theatre through a queer lens. Peep Show is a hazy reimagination of William S Borough’s work, while Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov becomes a radical piece of street theatre interrogating the decline of the traditional American family in Abdoh’s Father Was A Peculiar Man.

HIS WORK IS CRITICALLY POSTHUMOUS

At the tender age of 32, Abdoh passed away from an Aids-related illness, cutting his otherwise skyrocketing career short. “Theatre didn’t so much save Abdoh’s life as reshape it into something more vital, more bearable, more controlled,” Als reflected in The New Yorker. “Abdoh felt that his work could not be performed after his death – and he was right because the impulses that moved him to destabilise the audience by destabilising a world that he’d built can’t be re-created. His nerve and his nervousness were particular to the chemistry of his own body – a chemistry that, ultimately, failed him. But, until he died, he allowed us to inhabit his righteous and turgid, pure and debased universe, which he filled with the true and fake news of who we were, if only we would listen.”

The most punkish thing about Abdoh is how his legacy today is still as critical and as radical as it was nearly 40 years ago. The themes which Abdoh radically addresses, particularly those of homophobia and racism, are still scarily pertinent today making his works forever relevant to a world still fighting for human rights. As Als critically calls for, hopefully, the world will soon listen to Abdoh’s desperate plea for humanity.