Temple Slave, and: Whores of Lost Atlantis (review)

Temple Slave is a sprawling, evocative coming of age story that details the alternative theatres of the 1960s and their search for a professional identity apart from the large and commercial uptown venues. The book has an underlying innocence that, despite its frequent and graphic sexual accounts, seems quite true to the period. Patrick, one of the most prolific playwrights to have emerged from the early years of off-off-Broadway, continues to write plays and poems, to teach playwriting, and to lecture about the evolution of the off-off-Broadway theatre as well as gay theatre. A prolific letter writer, he aptly uses an epistolary frame for his novel. Temple Slave has no real plot; those looking for a tightly structured story will be disappointed, just as those embracing today’s reactionary attitudes about sex probably will be shocked.

The central character, nicknamed Yellowbird for his hooded pullover, narrates a letter to Mr. Franklin Anderson, the artistic director of the “Orbit Ensemble Theatre.” Writing from a window table in Phebe’s Bar and Grill, Yellowbird sets out to review the past in order to answer the questions: “how did it get like this? It didn’t start like this. It started as the Espresso Buono, for Christ’s sake. How did the first free art-theatre world in human history fall into the paws of foundation-fondling pickpockets?” (5).

The Cafe Buono, the book’s most important locale, and Joe Buono, its owner, are clearly modeled on the Café Cino and Joe Cino. The Buono’s cave-like mysteries can be illuminated only by literally stolen power and light. “Describe it as it hit you at that first moment. Dark. Narrow. Deep. Smells of dust and sweet syrup. A low, long shoe-box of a room. Little round tables everywhere. Wood-and-wire chairs. A tinkle and a twinkle. Fairy bells?” (17). The rough shows performed there speak immediately to their audiences. These plays are creations forged in the moment, disappearing as new waves of energy converge at the Buono. The driving energy behind them is not about reviving old forms or creating a lasting body of work, but about the discovery of new voices and the forms necessary to embody them.

Throughout the course of the novel, the world around the Buono changes while it remains as a home for the many artists whose creative lives were first born there. Ultimately, however, Joe and the Buono are destroyed by the same forces that reshaped the 1960s into the 1970s. Joe’s death is told with great love and tenderness, and the book concludes with a Buddhist-like recognition that “we do what we have to do” (460).

Because many of the playwrights of the off-off-Broadway movement of the 1960s did not write with an eye towards canonizing their work as “dramatic literature,” much of the excitement generated during that period has been lost. Perhaps we ultimately should look for the period’s true legacy in the attempt to redefine audience-event relationships in the very act of theatre rather than in texts.

Charles Busch’s Whores of Lost Atlantis moves from the West Village of the Cino to the East Village of performance clubs and galleries. The jump from the West Village to the East is also the jump from the 1960s to the 1980s:

I thought perhaps it was time to lay to rest all those impossible-to-resolve questions about identity and how one fits in. Experience is what defines a person. Our lives are cluttered curio cabinets full of experiences transformed into memory like ore into gold. It’s those memories of love and friendship and work that make us strong and complete.

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Patrick’s Yellowbird never wanted to “fit in,” having the wisdom to know that he never would; his offstage and onstage lives are essentially intertwined. In contrast, Busch’s hero Julian Young...