In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• • • The World According to Jack Smith In 1965, the year after New York Criminal court declared his film Flaming Creatures obscene, Jack Smith created his first performance piece, Rehearsal for the Destruction ofAtlantis. Stage directions indicate that the audience would be blindfolded, led into the theater by "very tough lesbians," then instructed by a "mad voice" to imagine that they were all winos, brutalized by cops. At that point, the curtain would open. Time: the present. Place: "Atlantis.... A child's vegetable garden of foreign policy cadavers." Siamese twins named North and South (representing Vietnam) tell the audience to remove its blindfolds. The twins then smoke marijuana and quarrel over who will get to use the single arm of their armchair. The Lobster enters. Narcotics agents wearing rat masks cut the twins apart with a circular saw, and the Lobster tries to cover the twins' bodies with crepe-paper lettuce leaves. Smoke erupts while the Lobster screams at the audience to get out. Sounds like a memorable production, yet eyewitness accounts remain opaque. In the catalogue accompanying the 1997Jack Smith retrospective at P.S.l, theater innovator Richard Foreman admits that he saw the performance but can't remember anything about it. Could it have unfolded according to the script? Probably not. I saw Smith perform sometime around 1980 and remember little but the mood, the somnambulant pacing, and the fastidious rearranging of props. Smith's performances were always more or less about the problem of doing the performance. But Foreman also called Smith "the hidden source of practically everything that's of any interest in the so-called experimental American theater today." Born in 1932, Smith came of age with other cultural rebels, but he wasn't so much unwilling as genuinely unable to conform. What interested him was that state of mind one enters while creating, and that's 326 FIN-DE-MILLENIUM what he wanted to show onstage. Therefore-post-Creatures, anyway -he would not finish anything. No two performances were ever alike, and he was notorious for actually re-editing his films during screenings. He did not believe in acting-which he called "hoodwinking ." Or in memorizing lines-which rendered one a "mynah bird." If his ideas sound crazy, he actually had a consistent worldview, and his shows, for all their exoticism, came from his daily obsessions. Smith wrote one of the strangest art manifestos on record: "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness ofMaria Montez." A worshipful appreciation of the B-movie actress he considered his muse, the essay also summarizes Smith's attitude towards performing, and what's striking is how much of it is about "belief." The Montez filmography reads like an honor roll of high camp: Cobra Woman, Siren ofAtlantis, just about anything with a sarong or a casbah. But camp does not work unless the actors perform their inane roles with total conviction; they can't be ironic. Smith knew that Montez was "pathetic as an actress," but she believed so thoroughly in her own beauty that"one of her atrocious acting sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with imaginative life and truth." Emulating his idol, Smith made his own persona the center of each performance, and he dressed for Montezland-as a sheik, a pharaoh, a Sinbad. The sets usually resembled a downscale Trader Vic's, but then most of them were built from whatever he could scavenge. Among the characters in this desert milieu were lobsters (villains, played by Smith) and a penguin (Smith's alter ego, played by a stuffed animal). For years, Smith performed in his own loft in shows scheduled for midnight, but usually starting later, before small audiences ("the scum of Baghdad"). Critic Stefan Brecht's Queer Theater remains a valuable record of the work Smith did in the early '70S. In 1971, for example, Smith decided to film Hamlet, a play he considered badly written-but salvageable with much cutting. His version would focus on landlordism , "the central social evil of our time." (He did not understand why people had to keep endlessly paying.) He envisioned the Danish royals as a family of landlords and decided to set the play underwater, in the Midwest, with the usual Arabian Nights look. Brecht describes building the set with Smith in the impoverished artist's basement living space. Smith had changed into his ruffled "stage-renaissance" Hamlet costume to do this construction, using what he'd gathered on the street-plastic Christmas trees, a doll, an artificial leg...

Share