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  • Do It Again! Do It Again! An Interview with Ronald Tavel
  • Matthias Haase (bio), Marc Siegel (bio), and Ronald Tavel

Ronald Tavel (1935–2009) was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, poet, and essayist. He was one of Jack Smith’s longtime friends, an important collaborator of Andy Warhol in 1964–66, and a cofounder of the Theatre of the Ridiculous, the seminal queer theater movement that started in New York City in the mid-1960s. Tavel wrote fifteen screenplays for Warhol, including such seminal works as Screen Test #2, The Life of Juanita Castro, Vinyl, and Kitchen (all 1965), and later collaborated with director John Vaccaro in adapting a number of these scripts for the stage to inaugurate the Theatre of the Ridiculous. He was the author of over thirty-five stage plays, as well as the novels Street of Stairs, written in the early 1960s and published by Olympia Press in 1968, and Chain, published posthumously by Fast Books in 2010. The following text is based on a series of discussions in May 2001 in Berlin. At the time, Tavel had already been interviewed frequently about his work with Andy Warhol. For that reason and because we had just collaborated with him on two theater productions,1 we guided the discussion away from Warhol and towards Tavel’s own work in theater, his perspectives on the Theatre of the Ridiculous, his work with Jack Smith, and his and Smith’s undying fascination for 1940s Hollywood actress Maria Montez. Tavel was an experienced, highly skilled, intelligent, and thoroughly entertaining raconteur. Readers familiar with his other published interviews may recognize similar anecdotes here.2 We allow some of these repetitions to remain in the following text both to retain the flow of our original discussions and to enable hitherto underemphasized aspects of these stories to come into focus. An earlier version of this interview, authorized by Tavel, was published in German translation in 2006.3

—Marc Siegel [End Page 329]

Matthias Haase (MH) and Marc Siegel (MS):

The Life of Juanita Castro is one of your most celebrated plays. It was initially a scenario for an Andy Warhol film and then it became the first play of the Theatre of the Ridiculous. How did you come to write it?

RT:

I know exactly when it was written, by the way. On February 22, 1965.

MH/MS:

In one day?

RT:

In three hours. The pressure was on me to write quickly. I wrote Shower [1965] in forty-eight hours. That was the longest it took me. I only stopped to sleep for eight hours. I didn’t even eat or drink water. That was the pressure. I didn’t take those scripts seriously or being at the Factory seriously. I thought it was just something to do while I looked for a publisher for my novel Street of Stairs [1968], which was finished and would take, I think, five years before Olympia Press published it. This was just a way to kill time. I was naturally curious about the whole Warhol scene and the theater scene. It fascinated me. But I didn’t take my writing seriously. A writer writes novels. He doesn’t write dialogue. That’s how academics looked at it in those days.

MH/MS:

When did you start taking the work seriously?

RT:

When other people did. Andy often wanted me to write the next one as soon as the last one was finished. I said to him, “But I want to see the film first.” It could take as little as a week between filming and the film’s screening in a theater. He didn’t want the films sitting around. So I said, “But I want to see this one before I do the next one.” And he said, “What for?” I thought that was so weird and said, “Obviously to learn from it.” He mumbled something like “People always want to learn something these days.” But Juanita really began at dinner on the Lower East Side. We were invited to dinner by Waldo Balart—I think that was his name—a cousin of Fidel Castro and—

MH/MS:

Who is “we...

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