Reza Abdoh

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 131 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 132 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM
 5
Hypervalent Elegies: Death
and Loss in the Late Works
of Reza Abdoh

Daniel Mufson

The Iranian American playwright and theatre director Reza Abdoh

sharply divided critics and audiences over the course of his short life,
with critics such as Jim Leverett calling him “the most important
theater artist of his generation”1 while others dismissed or even
ignored him—the New York Times, for example, neglected to send
a critic to his penultimate production, Tight Right White, in 1993.
More than twenty years after his death from AIDS-related causes in
1995 at the age of thirty-two, the influence and critical estimation
of Abdoh seem surprisingly undiminished for someone who was
not exactly a household name when he passed away. This is in part
thanks to a 2015 documentary, Reza Abdoh: Theater Visionary,
directed and produced by Abdoh’s former videographer, Adam
Soch, and in part because Soch has made much of Abdoh’s work
available online via his Vimeo account. The editors of Bidoun, a US-
based publication focusing on the culture of the Middle East and
its diasporas, further promoted Abdoh by convincing curator and
museum director Klaus Biesenbach to let them design an exhibition
on Abdoh that opened at MoMA/PS1 in June 2018, an exhibition
that traveled to Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art in

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 133 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 134 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

February 2019 and which is expected to go to Los Angeles’ Museum

of Contemporary Art sometime after its Covid-19–related closure
comes to an end. The documentary and traveling exhibition have
revealed an eagerness to revive the discourse surrounding Abdoh’s
works and proved the durability of his reputation. Reviewing the
exhibition in The New Yorker, Hilton Als called Abdoh “one of
the more profound and original theater artists of the twentieth
century” (Als 2018); in Artforum, Jennifer Krasinski wrote, “It is
not an overstatement to say that had Reza Abdoh lived even one
more year, had he created even one more production, American
theater would look very different now” (Krasinski 2018: 162).
Krasinski’s remark is of particular interest. What was it that made
Abdoh’s work distinctive enough to make her claim even remotely
plausible? It cannot only have been a matter of Abdoh’s technical
prowess and use of various media—directors such as Robert Lepage
and Liz LeCompte have long demonstrated their virtuosic use of
technology onstage, before and after Abdoh appeared on the scene.
Nor is it “merely” the totalizing vision that would allow one to trot
out the well-worn notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk—artists such as
Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson had been experimenting with
text, set design, music, and all the other elements of stagecraft to
imagine cohesive, novel worlds since the late 1960s. I would argue
that Abdoh’s appeal, and the reason why his death may have cut short
the development of a new direction for American—and possibly
international—contemporary theatre, lay and continues to lie in the
distinctive way in which he fused his formal experimentation to
themes that had both a personal urgency for Abdoh himself and
a sociopolitical urgency for the culture at large. The nexus for his
work—formally and thematically—was death: death as loss, as
trauma, and as determinant of identity; death as memory and the
death of memory. Abdoh constantly confronts the finitude of the
human condition, the human impulse to deny our own transience
and decay—an issue affecting everybody but one that loomed over
him specifically because of his HIV diagnosis and also over several
other communities he was a part of. As a result, the tone of much of
his work is unmistakably that of the elegy—elegy wrought personal,
political, and universal.
Etymologically, elegy simply means a song of lament, and I
am using it to refer to a composition—of words, music, or stage
imagery—that mourns someone, or something, either dead or dying.

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 134 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 135

For critic Max Cavitch, elegies on their most fundamental level are
“poems about being left behind,” an expression of the “psychic
labor” of mourning (Cavitch 2007). Reza Abdoh’s approach to
elegy was unusually multivalent: I would say “hypervalent”—
that is, it took up multiple objects of mourning as a result of the
way in which his performances were both presentational and
representational, nonmimetic and mimetic, political and personal.
As Cavitch points out, elegy’s tradition has long been multivalent
in its impulse to mourn more than one person: “In their figures
of death,” he writes, “elegies seek to apprehend the ultimate, most
unknowable condition of privacy, while pointing, in their language
of loss, toward the sheer commonality of human experience.” Elegy
can look back on the death of others or look forward in anticipation
of our own fate. The fate of the deceased is the fate of us all. Part
of Abdoh’s accomplishment is the integration of identity politics
within this equation, acknowledging losses suffered by a subgroup
or subculture and depicting them as part of the trauma that defines
that group’s experience, all while nonetheless maintaining the
elegy’s traditional straddle between the experience of the individual
and of humanity in general.
As critics of poetic elegy have pointed out, elegy also has a
distinct ethical component, a preoccupation with justice. For R.
Clifton Spargo, this is often a matter of solidarity with the dead:
“There is an ethical crux to all mourning, according to which the
injustice potentially perpetrated by the mourner against the dead
as a failure of memory stands for the injustice that may be done
to the living other at any given moment” (Spargo 2004: 4). And
this solidarity is present in Abdohian elegy. More often, however,
Abdoh’s elegy corresponds to what Jahan Ramazani (1994) so
eloquently describes in Poetry of Mourning: as modern elegy turns
away from its historical traditions, it becomes an elegy of rage,
guilt, resentment, or self-recrimination, a rejection of redemption
and closure. Formal aspects of modern elegy that Ramazani locates
in poetry are also present in Abdoh’s theatre elegies, particularly the
use of fragmentation and quotation.
Abdoh’s works, too, frequently provide cultural flashbacks
of sorts that mourn the loss of history; in terms of multivalence,
they multiply the amount of “pointing” going on to the extent
of becoming “hypervalent.” In part, the difference inheres in the
larger number of people involved in the creation of a performance

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 135 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 136 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

versus a poem. Abdoh’s elegies typically refer to a stage character or

persona; to the actor speaking the lines, or someone the actor knew;
to a class of individuals who’ve experienced similarly traumatic
loss (the queer community, persons of color); to Abdoh himself, or
perhaps someone Abdoh knew, such as his father; and, finally, to the
commonality of human experience mentioned by Cavitch (2007).
Despite the cliché about the personal being political, seldom do
artists manage to synthesize the personal, political, and universal as
convincingly as Abdoh did, and the key to his success on this score
was in his focus on the body as a vulnerable object embodying all
three: the body as a site of traumas experienced on multiple levels.
As such, he may have been drawing inspiration from visual artists
such as Nan Goldin or performance artists such as Ron Athey, but
Abdoh’s work transcends any single subculture or milieu.
Although the near-chronic fractiousness of US politics should
not be underestimated, the period from 1985 to 1995—the period
of Abdoh’s maturation—can be viewed as a time when disparate
conflicts over minority and civil rights issues came to be viewed
as interlocking facets of one deep and broad culture war. Into this
politically charged environment came Reza Abdoh, born in Tehran
in 1963 to a wealthy and well-connected family that experienced
a sharp reversal of fortune with the Iranian revolution in 1979,
the year Abdoh emigrated to the United States. The themes of
identity, sex, and death figured prominently in Abdoh’s directorial
choices starting with his first production, a selection of one-acts
by Howard Brenton in 1983. By Abdoh’s own account, however,
he became significantly more politically and socially engaged after
he learned he was infected with HIV in 1989 (Vaucher 1999: 44).
The diagnosis also had a more ecumenical impact: HIV, he told the
New York Times, “can’t help but color my work, the idea of life as
a clock ticking” (Collins 1992).
When asked to describe the political philosophy underlying
his final work, Quotations from a Ruined City, Abdoh answered:
“I believe that one has to not be a victim” (Bell 1995: 37). The
revelation of his diagnosis did not diminish the breadth of
his interests. Arguably, it strengthened the universalism of his
preoccupation with repression, sex, and death expressed in the
plays staged prior to 1989 and broadened, rather than narrowed,
his interest in identity. Whereas playwrights such as Tony Kushner
and Larry Kramer foregrounded queer characters and issues as if to

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 136 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 137

compensate for the heteronormative culture’s attempts at rendering

them invisible, Abdoh treated the repression of homosexuality and
denial of the AIDS epidemic as but two expressions of humanity’s
historical compulsion to persecute numerous manifestations of
difference and—broadly speaking—to deny sexuality and bodily
decay. The pairing of sex and death, after all, predated the AIDS
crisis. As Philippe Ariès points out in The Hour of our Death, the
rationalism of modernity viewed sex and death as twinned threats
from “the chaos of nature” (Ariès 1981: 405); Abdoh’s explorations
of sexuality’s connection with death may well have derived their
dynamism from the AIDS crisis, but ultimately he was exploring
pathologies that had far deeper roots.
In the discourse of identity politics, the notion of “universalism”
has become tainted. When women or minorities have created
works foregrounding their “groups,” they have often been unfairly
dismissed as parochial, while heterosexual white males’ works
centered on heterosexual white males could somehow be lauded
as “universal.” Here, however, I would like to redeem the word
“universal” as something other than a code word serving the
dominant culture. Abdoh’s universalism clearly did not cater to
the norms of heterosexual white males. Instead, it derived from
the way he found a kinship among the oppressed that transcended
geographies, ethnicities, and time periods while questioning the
foundations of identity not only in terms of race, ethnicity, and
gender but also by undermining the binary of oppressor and
oppressed.
The undermining of this binary, one should hasten to add, offered
no consolation to the oppressor or absolution of his guilt; instead,
the blurring of these boundaries was simply an inevitable result of
acknowledging the complexity of history and culture. Abdoh was
aware of the ease with which roles could be reversed, be those roles
political, economic, sexual, or any combination thereof; in that sense,
the fluidity of status within BDSM culture provided an apt analogy
for the oppressors of one era to become the oppressed of another—
the kind of reversal Abdoh hinted at, just to name one example,
in a scene from Quotations which he adapted from Ivo Andrić’s
novel, The Bridge on the Drina. In Andrić’s novel, sixteenth-century
Turks drive a stake through the anus and torso of a Serbian peasant,
while in Quotations it is Serbs of the 1990s who do the same to a
Bosnian Muslim (Andrić 1967: 45–49; Bell 1995: 149). Historically,

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 137 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 138 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

then, the story of homophobia was but one chapter in the ongoing
persecution of various alterities; indeed, the foregrounding of the
BDSM subculture and gays of color in some of his works could
also be seen as a comment on the struggle encountered by those
subcultures to become visible and “respectable” within what was
then known as either the LGB or LGBT community: the LGBT
community was capable of marginalizing alterity within its own
constituency. This nuanced view of guilt and innocence informs the
ambiguous nature of Abdoh’s lamentations.
The elegiac nature of Abdoh’s work may relate to one of the other
distinguishing features of his work: the downplaying of irony in favor
of emotional vulnerability. Watching one of his productions, one is
aware not only of the vulnerability of the characters represented on
the stage but also of the way in which the works constitute an act of
psychological exposure for Abdoh himself as well as his performers.
While all expression constitutes an act of exposure, the argument I
am making here is one of degree, emphasis, and kind. The irony that
has suffused so much of the cultural creation in the West in recent
decades is not entirely absent from Abdoh’s oeuvre, but Negar
Azimi, one of the curators for the MoMA PS1 exhibition, made a
telling remark in a recent interview: “As unappealing as earnestness
can be, all of Reza’s work had a clear and present social conscience”
(Azimi et al. 2018). This “earnestness” is probably what Charles
Marowitz was referring to when he wrote that Abdoh’s Bogeyman
“occasionally has the quality of a child’s temper tantrum,” that it
is “too busy railing against the injustices of life to combat them
with  artistic composure” (Marowitz 1991: 101). I  would argue,
however, that this earnestness, this sincere and deeply personal rage
against cruelty and inhumanity, becomes a central asset of Abdoh’s
work because it is paired with an extraordinary knowledge of
the formal experiments of the twentieth-century avant-garde and,
crucially, a deeply held conviction that, as Abdoh once said, “History
is loss” (quoted in Drake 1999: 93). A merely ironic elegy can
hardly “do justice” to the depths of the emotional and intellectual
repercussions of loss, and this “ethical crux” to mourning is key to
understanding the peculiar balances of the personal and the political,
the specific and the universal, and the mimetic and nonmimetic in
Abdoh’s work.
The omnipresence of death in his oeuvre also relates to his
own sexual traumas—not just his diagnosis and illness but also,

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 138 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 139

for example, the way in which his sexual identity alienated him
from his virile, homophobic father. Reza’s stepsister outed him to
his father; some in the family attributed the father’s death shortly
thereafter to the upset this revelation had caused, combined with
the financial distress of losing his wealth. By Abdoh’s own account,
these autobiographical details inform the patriarchal characters in
Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice and Bogeyman; in both cases, Abdoh
both slays and mourns the oppressive father figure; in Father Was
a Peculiar Man and Tight Right White, Abdoh also selected source
texts—Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Kyle Onstott’s
Mandingo, respectively—in which oppressive and debauched
patriarchs are murdered. What does it mean to mourn the patriarch
that you yourself have—at least artistically—killed?
Abdoh’s elegies are as much about the loss of childhood, youth,
and community as about the loss of life, evident in frequent
references and allusions to childhood as well as in his use of music
and dance to evoke cultural moments of the past. This, too, is not
only Abdoh’s individual story but belongs to the experience of
diasporic communities in general—and what is American culture
if not a story of diasporas? Abdoh constantly unearths folk dance
and traditional songs—nearly lost artifacts from faded and fading
cultural moments—and fills his theatrical works and his sole feature
film, The Blind Owl, with them, taking full advantage of their rich
histories and associations. From Iranian sitar music and ballroom
dances with a crooning Fred Astaire to Jewish wedding dances and
Spanish lullabies, Abdoh often creates a surprisingly nostalgic aural
and choreographic landscape. Sometimes, Abdoh played with such
allusions, as when he instructed choreographer Ken Roht to upset
the standard sequence of movements in Broadway musical dance
sequences (Roht 2009), but just as often he presented songs and
dances “authentically,” imbuing them with additional meanings
by virtue of their context within the performance. This persistent
impulse to look back to mourn the passage of time, to mourn the
present’s inexorable march into history, along with his perception
of the struggle with decay and death as part of the universal, human
experience, contribute to the sense that Abdoh is as much an heir of
Proust as he is a critic of culture and politics.
At the same time, his approach to personal memory may well
have informed his approach to cultural memory and identity:
memories are records of experience, but they are also products of

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 139 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 140 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

imagination, and sometimes they are fabrications. They comprise

varying ratios of truth and myth. Abdoh himself created histories
for himself that were often untrue and that varied over time. To
mention just a few fictions: early in his career, he told people his
mother was Italian and that his upbringing was partly Catholic
(both his parents were Iranian and secularized Shiites); he said he
had performed as a child in Robert Wilson’s 1972 production of
KA MOUNTAIN, GUARDenia TERRACE in Shiraz, Iran (not
true); and he claimed he had traveled to India to study Kathakali
(his brother says Reza never went to India). One can imagine
different rationales for Abdoh’s invented histories—inventing
an Italian Catholic background to avoid the stigma faced by the
Iranian Moslem diaspora in the United States, for example, or using
the falsehoods about his mother and the other stories to fashion
an identity that was even more intercultural and interdisciplinary
than the truth already offered. The point here is not to judge
Abdoh for lies he told in his early twenties but to consider what
these particular lies reveal about Abdoh’s conception of identity.
Identity is both inherited and created, truth and fiction. Abdoh
knew that identity is based on memory; he also knew that certain
kinds of trauma and persecution become collective memories that
can foster a sense of community and collective identity. Yet given
his clear understanding of memory as construct, he also understood
communities as “imagined”—no less real for being partial acts of
imagination, and yet also provisional, fluid, and—to the extent that
they are assumed either without self-conscious deliberation or with
overly deliberate calculation—suspect.
Abdoh’s productions were—on a fundamental level—acts
of recollection and remembrance; moreover, these acts were
fundamentally political. The connection of death and dying
to identity politics adds an important layer to the depth and
complexity of Abdoh’s work. The process of aging toward death,
as Abdoh himself pointed out, is part of the process of life and
should be embraced instead of feared or repressed; Abdoh criticized
the obsession with youth and denial of death in interviews, and
numerous allusions to plastic surgery as a perverse impulse to
deny aging function as refrains within and between his works. But
the experience of premature death and gratuitous suffering as a
product of cruelty are not, for Abdoh, parts of human existence that
should merely be accepted: they are wounds, traumas, experienced

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 140 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 141

individually and collectively, and our experience of those traumas,

the way we integrate those experiences as memories, informs our
individual and collective identities. In order to fully understand
the political significance of memory and elegy in his work, I would
first like to consider basic aspects of trauma and memory along
with their relation to identity formation and the AIDS crisis in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, and to make some broad connections
between these observations and Abdoh’s work before taking a closer
look at Quotations from a Ruined City and the Bogeyman trilogy.

Trauma and Memory in Identity

Formation
Memory has long been regarded as the foundation upon which
identity rests, and the connection of identity formation to the arts
goes at least as far back as antiquity. It is Mnemosyne, the goddess
of memory, who is the mother of the nine muses. The muses,
representing various forms of poetry as well as tragedy and history,
played a role in shaping the self-conception—the identity—of the
polis. In turn, the memory of trauma can play a destructive role in
the consciousness of the individual but, paradoxically, a constructive
role in collective consciousness—“constructive” not in the sense
of being beneficial or leading to happiness but rather in the literal
sense of building a collective consciousness. This is because of the
different manifestations of trauma when spoken of in individual
and collective contexts, and both manifestations are evident in the
works of Abdoh precisely because his plays function simultaneously
as recollections of individual and collective trauma.
“Trauma” comes from the Greek word meaning “wound.” In
the field of psychology, Freud considered trauma as early as 1914
in the context of repression and memory. That year, he published
Erinnern, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten—“Remember, Repeat, Work
Through”—a work focused on how we deal with difficult aspects of
our past. As more recent psychologists have pointed out, pathologies
of memory can result in seemingly contradictory symptoms: on the
one hand, the victim of trauma may experience “amnesia for part,
or all, of the traumatic events to frank dissociation, in which large
realms of experience or aspects of one’s identity are disowned.” At

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 141 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 142 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

the same time, “Such failures of recall can paradoxically coexist

with the opposite: intruding memories and unbidden repetitive
images of traumatic events” (quoted in Caruth 1995: 152). These
intruding memories may take the form of flashbacks that are
typically fragmentary in nature. The deliberate recollection of
memories as stories with a beginning, middle, and end can be taken
as a sign that the memory has been integrated into an individual’s
sense of self; the fragmentary nature of the flashback indicates that
an experience has not been successfully integrated—it is “a history
that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not
fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise  images
and enactments are not fully understood” (Caruth 1995: 153,
emphasis in original). Features of Abdoh’s performative style—the
fragmentation, the repetitions, the deliberative obstruction of sense
and meaning by various methods such as rapid-fire dialogue and
split focus, the use of venues that themselves embody or signify
transience—reveal themselves as more than the latest iteration
of avant-garde traditions of, say, bricolage or hermeticism. They
serve as formal manifestations of traumatic memory, echoing the
pathologies experienced by the individual psyche wrestling with an
unbearable history.
The first writings on psychological trauma by Freud and
others typically focused on trauma as something experienced by
an individual rather than a collective, usually relating to discrete
incidents instead of prolonged experiences. Trauma has been
associated with people who had “withdrawn into a kind of protective
envelope, a place of mute, aching loneliness in which the traumatic
experience is treated as a solitary burden that needs to be expunged
by acts of denial and resistance” (Erikson 1995: 185). Over the
years, however, the understanding of trauma has broadened to
include what may be “a persisting condition” that affects a group
of people (p. 185). As sociologist Kai Erikson points out, “trauma
can create community … in the same way that common languages
and common backgrounds can” (p.  186). Positive memories can
shape individual and common identities, too, but suffering takes a
stronger hold on the psyche. The phenomenon of “memory studies”
as propagated by writers ranging from Andreas Huyssen to Avishai
Margalit has mainly revolved around the memory of trauma.
Three sociologists—Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and
Daniel Levy—have described how the “memory boom” that began

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 142 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 143

in the late 1970s arose in tandem with identity politics, typically

fostering identities that “nursed a wound and harbored a grudge,”
so that “past oppression has seemingly become the coin of identity”
(Olick et al. 2011: 3). Communities bolster themselves by invoking
collective memory that “often becomes a form of mourning and a
paradoxical sign of loss” (Weissberg 1999: 22). As we shall see in the
discussion of his individual works, Abdoh often examines trauma
and performs mourning from the perspectives of both oppressor
and oppressed; perhaps this results from his aforementioned refusal
to “be a victim,” or his discomfort with binaries such as oppressor/
oppressed, or his identification with both. The patriarch murdered
in so many of his works, after all, not only represents the patriarchy
that oppresses society but also his own father—and fathers, however
tyrannical, instinctively inspire impulses of identification and love.
Abdoh’s refusal to foster a narrow identity based on the
recollection of traumas encountered by only one group broaden the
sense of community that he builds, even if that sense of community
may seem temporary. Tight Right White, for example, centered
on slavery and racism as encountered by American blacks, using
the blaxploitation film Mandingo as its central text; the cultural
oppression encountered by Jews, women, and the queer community
was also present in a work that, at its core, questioned the process
of group identity formation through various strategies of parody,
strategic juxtapositions, blackface, whiteface, and masking,
ultimately creating bodies whose belonging to a group identity
was ambiguous and polysemous. This carried itself beyond the end
of the “performance.” As Ehren Fordyce describes it, many of the
actors remained nude during the curtain call, displaying

an unselfconsciousness achieved by embracing the body. A

slightly turned penis, a set of heavy breasts—these minimal
irregularities from the norm became acceptable, pleasurable.
Perhaps it was only a hallucination, a projection, a fantasy,
but I felt compelled to imagine a “we.” Together, “we”—the
actors and the audience—seemed to share an acknowledgment
that “something had taken its course,” and we had both played
our parts.

And, more crucially to our argument here: “At the end of Tight
Right White, ‘we’ seemed to share a faint feeling of common

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 143 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 144 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

survival. This attenuated utopia of an imagined, inclusive ‘we’

had something to do with feelings of solidarity and empathy over
the common vulnerability of being human” (Fordyce 2004: 234).
Fordyce articulates one of the most remarkable aspects of Abdoh’s
work: there is an undeniable focus on the suffering of individuals,
often on the suffering associated with group identification, and
yet the result is a sense of community based on “the common
vulnerability of being human.” Fordyce’s focus on Abdoh’s use of
bodies to create this effect is fully justified, but it is only one aspect
of Abdoh’s ability to turn an individual’s or community’s story into
a part of the human experience.

Queer Trauma
Notwithstanding Abdoh’s universalist impulses, his work was
also responding to complex dynamics within a highly diverse
queer community whose members were reacting to the ongoing
traumas of persecution and the AIDS crisis in very different ways.
The conflicting impulses caused by trauma—the compulsions
both to repress and to remember—were strongly felt by the queer
community and the culture at large in the years when Abdoh was
producing his work.
The impulse to deny the crisis was linked to the stigmatization
of gays themselves. Art historian and AIDS activist Simon Watney
recounts being inspired to write a book on AIDS, Policing Desire
(1987), after attending the funeral of a friend who died of AIDS
in  which no mention was made of the cause of death as part
of the  family’s desire to conceal the deceased’s homosexuality.
Recounting Watney’s experience, curator and art historian
Douglas  Crimp asserts that it is “probably no exaggeration to
say that each [member of the gay community] has a story like
this, that during the AIDS crisis there is an all but inevitable
connection between the memories and hopes associated with our
lost friends and the daily assaults on our consciousness. Seldom
has a society so savaged people during their hour of loss” (Crimp
2002: 134–36). Crimp sees this forced silence and omission as a
form of violence. Abdoh restages this repression in that neither
AIDS nor HIV is ever mentioned in any his works; in Bogeyman,

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 144 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 145

for example, Blake, the hospitalized son, is said to have

“dementia.”2 Elsewhere in the same script, the patriarch, a “virus
engineer” who heads a pharmaceutical conglomerate, approaches
his son  Billy (identified in the script as the actor Peter Jacobs)
and says, “Like to tell me about it?” Peter: “About what?” Tom
Fitzpatrick, the actor playing the father: “Accelerated hepatitis.”
Peter: “About what?” Tom F: “Accelerated rabies.” Peter: “About
what?” Tom F: “Accelerated cancer.” At which point another actor
interjects: “How long can we keep this thing under wraps, Doc?”
To which Tom F replies, “I don’t know, but we sure are getting
good at it.”
But the repression of mourning came from within and without the
gay community. In 1989, Crimp had written an essay, “Mourning
and Militancy,” in which he explored the queer community’s
propensity to be “silent precisely on the subject of death, on
how deeply it affects us” (Crimp 2002: 130). As evidence for this
propensity, Crimp pointed to figures such as Larry Kramer, who
dismissed AIDS candlelight marches as “slightly ghoulish” (p. 131),
and other, unnamed activists who perceived public mourning
rituals as “indulgent, sentimental, defeatist” events that reinforced
the media’s depiction of people with AIDS as “hapless victims”
(pp.  131–32). Importantly, Crimp—in an impulse of kinship that
parallels Abdoh’s—connects the psychology of AIDS activists to that
of other activists from history, from beyond the queer community:
the phrase “Don’t mourn, organize!” became (incorrectly) known
as the last words of labor organizer and martyr Joe Hill, Crimp
reminds us. This entreaty, which has become a lasting slogan for
the labor movement, captures the generic activist’s resistance to
reflecting on the dead: Commemoration looks backwards instead
of forwards; it seems passive instead of active, reactive instead
of progressive. Crimp also suggests the impulse toward silence
within the gay community may stem from guilt at having survived
one’s friends as well as uncertainty about whether one will in fact
ultimately survive the epidemic.
In the context of the AIDS epidemic, Crimp ponders Freud’s
observation that mourning can be directed not only at the loss of a
loved one but also at “the loss of some abstraction which has taken
the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal” (p. 139)—and
Crimp considers an abstract death that particularly resonates with
Abdoh’s work. “What many of us have lost,” Crimp writes,

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 145 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 146 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

is a culture of sexual possibility: back rooms, tea rooms,

bookstores, movie houses, and baths … Sex was everywhere for
us, and everything we wanted to venture … Now our untamed
impulses are either proscribed once again or shielded from us by
latex … Our pleasures were never tolerated anyway; we took
them. And now we must mourn them, too. (p. 139)

Crimp ties the loss of this culture of sexual possibility to those

people, both within and outside the queer community, who have
fervently tried to censor behaviors that the dominant culture
could label as deviant—ranging from drag queens to the S&M
community. In their 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will
Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s, social scientists
Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen proposed fighting homophobia
by creating “positive” images of gays that would require the gay
community to “clean up our act” by suppressing “fringe” gay
subcultures such as drag queens and “cocky mustachioed leather-
men” (Kirk and Madsen 1989: 183). The “sex and love lives of
gays and straights today,” they insisted, “are both similar and
conventional” (p. 107).
The presence of representatives of gay subcultures on Abdoh’s
stage, then, carries a great deal of ambiguity. To some extent,
the presence of “nonconventional” queers dressed in costumes
belonging to the BDSM scene could constitute an insistence that
the “sexual possibility” embodied by a given culture has not in
fact died—the subcultures’ visibility onstage represents a refusal to
suppress themselves in order for community members to assimilate
their way into acceptance by heteronormative society. At the same
time, the precariousness of the scene was underlined by the health of
some of Abdoh’s performers, if not of Abdoh himself; Bogeyman’s
Cliff Diller, iconic in LA’s subcultural scene as a founder of Club
FUCK!, a nightclub known for performances featuring various
types of body modification, was infected with HIV and died a year
after the production. Granted, no one watching or taking part in
Bogeyman at the time could not have known that Diller would pass
away the following year, but the body modification movement of
which he was a part, diagnosis aside, draws attention to the ways in
which the body is simultaneously resilient and fragile. Even as the
presence of a marginalized queer onstage functions as a declaration
that breaks the silence imposed disproportionately upon certain

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 146 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 147

parts of the queer community, Diller also represents endangerment

and mortality. Abdoh may well have been inspired to stage this
paradoxical duality by the artists who participated in Club FUCK!;
as Ron Athey has since said, much of his work at the time—at
FUCK! and elsewhere—was formulating an emotional response “to
the political identity of AIDS, as well as the issue of being in a dying
culture” (Battersby 2012).

Quotations from a Ruined City

This duality of strongly declaring one’s presence while questioning
its permanence is most explicitly articulated in Quotations from a
Ruined City in a monologue by Mario Gardner, another performer
who was infected with HIV at the time and who committed suicide
in June 2002. His speech is, I would argue, the defining moment of
Quotations and is set apart from all the other scenes by the relative
absence of stage distractions vying for the audience’s attention
and the fact that Gardner’s was the only text spoken “live”—the
rest of the performance text was lip-synced. The scene begins with
Gardner’s black, naked body crawling to a tree that looks like a
direct reference to Waiting for Godot (see Figure 5.1). The tree is
brought out specifically for this monologue, and it immediately
hints at the subtle choices that are often made by a director who
is seldom credited with subtlety even by some of his admirers. The
tree in Godot is dead, or at least leafless, and strikes Vladimir as
too weak for him and Estragon to use to hang themselves; here,
in Quotations, the tree bears green leaves. In Act 1, of Godot,
Vladimir hints at the tree’s significance: “Hope deferred maketh
the something sick, who said that?” (Beckett 1954: 8). Beckett’s (or
Vladimir’s) allusion is to Proverbs 13:12: “Hope deferred makes
the heart sick; but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” AIDS marks a
desire fulfilled that was not a tree of life, and yet Abdoh’s green tree
rejects Godot in favor of declaring that Proverbs 13:12 still holds
truth. The desire fulfilled was and was not a tree of life: had he
used Beckett’s barren tree, this “both/and” quality would have been
gone. Instead, the tree resonates with other “both/and” qualities of
Mario’s speech—which, one should note again, makes no direct
mention of AIDS or HIV.

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 147 9/26/2020 7:39:23 AM

 148 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

Figure 5.1  Mario Gardner in Reza Abdoh’s Quotations from a Ruined

City, 448 W 16th Street, New York, 1994. Photo © Paula Court.

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 148 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 149

Mario begins his speech by “correcting” the centuries-old

children’s prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord, my soul to keep.

That’s not right. I’m not going to sleep. Excuse me, God, I wonder
why it’s so dark in here? Nurse, why is it so dark in here? My
buddy had to learn how to make whiskey from scratch … And
he had to dodge the law all the time. Nothing the law likes better
than to bust a moonshiner … Nurse! Why is it getting cold in
here? I’m running a fever.
… Generation of Vipers, Yipers, Whoppers I spew you out
like a reluctant cocksucker who won’t swallow the load. Strange
thing about me and my old buddy. We had a secret pact. We
scratched each other’s initials on our arms with the tips of our
pocket knives. Me using his knife. Him using mine … Deep
enough to make a scar when the scabs peeled off. I guess the
undertaker will see it when he lays me out.
And when the graves start yielding up the dead, I’ll rise like
Christ in drag and you best not offend me with your innocence,
sister, because I bet you could tease a queen to death without half
trying, so stop trying and let me tell you something. You reckon
I ought to have a lot of regrets, my orgasm like being directly
plugged in my hypothalamus socket and all, and my body in
ruins after years of abuse. But I have just one regret: I never
made a drop of whisky in all my life, and if I last long enough
I’ll remedy that. And the preacher came in right after my old
buddy left. Asked me if I was ready to go. Ready to go? I put my
mascara on, my lipstick on, and my yellow pumps and I snapped
back, I’ll go when I’m good and ready. There were so many
things I wanted to say to my old buddy. But this haze I’m in,
bedimmed from the ailment and all, I just sort of wander in and
out of things. I did tell him I love him though. I remember telling
him that. I never could have told him years back. Even though
I should have. Funny how menfolk have trouble telling each
other things like that. Until the pale horseman starts to gallop
by the door. Gallop. Gallop. Gallop. Gallop. Gallop. (Abdoh and
Abdoh 1995: 127)

One could take this speech as a microcosm demonstrating several

of the points I have been trying to make about Abdoh’s work.

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 149 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 150 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

Gardner’s character is delivering an elegy, a lament, for his partner.

The speech makes it clear that Gardner and his “buddy” are gay by
virtue of his self-comparison to a “cocksucker,” his promise to “rise
like Christ in drag,” the allusion to a differently sized hypothalamus,
his (remembered) application of makeup, and his declaration of
love for the deceased. Their “secret pact” can also be interpreted as
referring to the taboo status of gay love.
At the same time, there’s an odd element of non-gayness about
the way he talks about his “buddy”—including the insistent use
of the word, “buddy.” Gardner refers to AIDS obliquely as “the
ailment.” On the one hand, the obliqueness of these word choices
could be a representation of the aforementioned silence that
Douglas Crimp and Simon Watney describe as being imposed on
the queer community from forces within and beyond itself. On the
other hand, those moments of veiled references to queerness open
the text to the nonqueer perspective, so to speak. The occupation
as a moonshiner and the ritual of using a pocket knife to make
the pair blood brothers, while certainly plausible as parts of
an experience of being queer, aren’t specifically associated with
queerness and are more often depicted in narratives centered on
heterosexuals. In other words, making whiskey and becoming
blood brothers are narrative references, clichés, even, that
men outside the queer community are probably familiar and
comfortable with, even if Gardner is drawing out the homoerotic
subtext of the “blood brother” ritual. The confession of emotional
repression—the difficulty that “menfolk” have in saying they love
someone—describes an emotional reticence or coldness that is
stereotypically associated at least equally, if not more so, with the
community of heterosexual males. The speech thus simultaneously
calls upon known images of queerness and clichés of heterosexual
experience while undermining gay stereotypes. The choice of
Gardner, an African American, to deliver the speech was also a
gesture against stereotype, because Abdoh’s casting of gay black
males—which he also did in Tight Right White and Bogeyman—
was done at a time when gayness was represented (if at all) as
synonymous with whiteness, as Marlon Riggs made so clear in
his 1989 documentary, Tongues Untied, and José Esteban Muñoz
further describes in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics. Gardner’s nakedness foregrounds the
black body; the thin veneer of white makeup on his face signifies

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 150 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 151

the paleness of death rather than “whiteface” as used in Tight Right

White. At the same time, the nakedness strips away the uniforms
of fetish communities or any fashion markers used to highlight
the gay body as “other”: it is just a man’s body, a human’s body,
confronting “the pale horseman” like everyone.
And this raises again the mixed nature of Abdoh’s elegies.
This speech is an elegy delivered by Gardner for his “buddy.” He
commemorates his loved one. He is noting the absence of his buddy
but the act of remembering brings the buddy, abstractly, into the
present. At the same time, the eulogy raises the specter of Gardner’s
death, and then oscillates between refusals and acceptances of the
inevitable: He lays himself down to sleep, but no, he’s not going
to sleep. But the signs of the inevitable are there: the darkness, the
cold, the fever. The undertaker will see Gardner’s scars when he lays
him out. But Gardner’s response when the preacher asks him if he’s
“ready to go” sounds like it has a double meaning—ready to go out
of the room, and ready to “go” as in “die”—and Gardner defiantly
explains that he’ll go on his terms (which, tragically, the performer
did when he killed himself years later). His promise to rise from
the dead is another denial of death, and, in invoking resurrection,
Abdoh is picking up on a traditional theme in elegiac poetry.
But ultimately, Gardner is swept away by the sound of the pale
horseman. Even the “liveness” of his voice has an ironic duality to
it, like the tree of Proverbs/Godot: Gardner’s is the only “live” voice
in a sea of prerecorded dialogue, but it is precisely that liveness that
marks it as something that is not and will not be preserved; from the
perspective of the audience seeing the performance (and unaware
that there will be a video recording that preserves the show), the
liveness of Gardner’s words means that they will disappear as soon
as they are spoken, living only in memory.
Shortly afterwards, at the close of the performance, the two male
lovers who have been dressed in bandages, like mummies, take the
stage; above them, four large sides of beef hang on meat hooks.
They sing a song that ends: “I had wished that the bones would
be more silent. / When men saw their cities set fire start burning. /
The flesh wasn’t gentle, the dream wasn’t ending. / The night was
unfolding.” The “Final Dance” ensues, in which couples remove the
strands of barbed wire that had been separating the stage area from
the audience. The lovers, Tom Pearl and Peter Jacobs, then speak
the “Final Text”:

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 151 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 152 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

Tom P: I remember.
Peter: I remember.
Tom P: A dream of my childhood.
Peter: A dream of my childhood.
Tom P/Peter: I am in a beautiful garden. As I reach out to touch
the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare feeling
of desolation comes over me as a great dragon-shaped cloud
darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time.
Remember. Remember. We are bound to the past as we cling
to the memory of the ruined city. (Abdoh and Abdoh 1995:
135–36)

The lights fade, lingering finally on the slabs of beef, until the
audience sits in darkness, hearing only the sound of the actors
breathing heavily. These last lines make explicit Abdoh’s association
of death and dying with the act of remembering, an action that has
two agents: I remember, Tom and Peter say, but then they utter the
verb as an imperative: You, the witness to this, must also remember,
because it is not just the “I” of Tom and Peter but “we” who are
bound to the past. A dream of childhood, the beautiful garden
that withered, the legacy of ruins: Abdoh’s story, the story of these
imagined lovers and the lovers they represent, and our story. All, in
time, reduced to rotting flesh and bone.

The Bogeyman Trilogy

Abdoh considered the Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, Bogeyman, and
The Law of Remains as a trilogy, although their relation to one
another would not be obvious simply by looking at their synopses:
the first, an adaptation of myth in which Orpheus travels to the
Underworld in a failed attempt at recovering his wife, Eurydice; the
second, a loosely autobiographical work about three sons enduring
a tyrannical and bigoted father and a suicidal mother, while one of
the sons is watching his lover die; and the third, a fantasy in which
serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer has his life story filmed by Andy Warhol
as part of his progress through an afterlife modeled on the Egyptian
Book of the Dead. The first and the third parts of the trilogy have
substantial sections that take place in the afterlife, while death is

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 152 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 153

almost omnipresent in Bogeyman, in which the mother jumps out

of a window on page 17 of the 95-page unpublished script after
having made several declarations of her intention to kill herself,
AIDS is a constant threat, and the father ends the play dead on the
ground.The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice is Abdoh’s first “mature”
work insofar as it represents a total vision consistent with the
major theatrical works that followed. In Hip-Hop, we first begin
to recognize the qualities of hypervalent elegy as characteristic
of Abdoh’s final works. The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice begins
immediately as a bricolage of elements creating a timeless world
that is both past and not past: Tom Fitzpatrick/Eurydice is cooking
with a modern blender, while Juliana Francis/Orpheus works at a
typewriter and listens to a vacuum tube radio. A recurring image
appears for the first time: Borracha, one of the two performers of
color in the piece, occupies a large video screen; his video image
knocks on the screen as if it were a window. He and his partner
Amen seem to represent an undefined, elemental force that Orpheus
and Eurydice need to shut out. Borracha is shunned every time he
knocks; when Amen’s head pops out of the mythical couple’s bed,
mewing incessantly, an alarm sounds and Orpheus and Eurydice’s
lines overlap: Orpheus says “Disrupt. Attack. Disappear,” while
Eurydice says “Look away. Ignore. Forget.” Orpheus turns to the
Captain (renowned Beckett interpreter Alan Mandell) for guidance:
“What do I do?” “Push,” the Captain commands repeatedly, until
Julia has pushed Amen’s head back down into the bed and it has
disappeared. The Captain then commands Orpheus to sing, and s/
he obliges with “I am sixteen going on seventeen / innocent as a
rose …” Borracha and Amen reenter from the wings, dancing the
martial dance of capoeira, until a stagehand appears and hands
Amen a child-sized coffin to carry downstage (Abdoh 1999: 64).
This small coffin is another recurring image, and its recurrence,
along with passages such as the one just described, suggest that
the figure of the Captain not only represents the repression of
sexual urges—though that is clearly his primary role—but also
represents the repression of bodily decay and death. Abdoh once
again refrains from any mention of AIDS, but the emergence of
Amen’s head from the bed connects a corporeal threat to the locus
of bodily pleasure. When Eurydice dies and Orpheus asks “her”
ghost what to do, Eurydice responds with a quote from Rilke: “The
place that you rip open again and again that heals is God” (p. 67).

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 153 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 154 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

This citation resonates with Jahan Ramazani’s description of the

“melancholic mourning” typical of the modern elegy as a work that
seeks “not to heal but to reopen the wounds of loss” (Ramazani
1994: xi). Certainly, Abdoh’s work busies itself with the cycle of
reopening wounds rather than the process of healing, but then, as
Ramazani reminds us, Freud conceded that mourners may “remain
inconsolable and … never find a substitute” for their loss (quoted in
Ramazani 1994, n. 84, 376). This is equally true for the loss of our
selves-as-children, and this is how I would interpret the recurrent
image of the child’s coffin. We see it after Orpheus sings “I am
sixteen going on seventeen,” and it comes again shortly before the
end of the play, towards the end of an eleven-minute fragmentary
speech by the Captain in which his recollection of an encounter with
a male oriental whore is threaded with evocations of bodily decay
and death. He begins by saying “I want to avoid a face-lift. Does it
make sense for me to do facial exercises like clenching my teeth and
so on?” The lowering of the casket from the theatre’s fly space then
marks the end of the speech, coming after the Captain’s last lines,
which are repetitions of the question, “Is my body now obsolete?”
His words are abruptly cut off when he opens the casket and a light
from the coffin bursts onto his face. The video screen then shows
the coffin being thrown through a window, and the collapsing glass
crossfades into images of collapsing buildings, a ruined city in
the making. Aside from its visual connection to the “ruined city,”
the coffin appears as an early visual manifestation of the distant
“dream of childhood” mentioned in Quotations. Mourning the loss
of childhood becomes equated with mourning one’s own life; the
impulse to repress, to “look away, ignore, forget,” inevitably fails
against the spiritual compulsion to “rip open” the wounds of loss in
the hope of some miraculous healing, in the longing for the elusive
scratch that ends the relentless itch.
Most astonishingly, Abdoh ends Hip-Hop preoccupied not with
the suffering of the illicit lovers but with the self-elegizing of the
Captain, now emaciated and cold:

1. At night I am woken up, bathed in sweat, by a cough which

strangles me. My room is too small. It is full of archangels. 2.
I know I have loved too much. I have stuffed too many bodies,
used up too many orange skies. I ought to be stamped out. 3. The
thin white bodies, the softest of them, have stolen my warmth,

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 154 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 155

they went away from me fat. Now I’m thin and freezing. Many
blankets are piled on top of me. I’m suffocating. 4. I suspect they
will want to fumigate me with incense. My room is flooded with
holy water. They say I have got Holy Water Dropsy. And that’s
fatal. 5. My sweethearts bring a bit of quicklime with them in
hands which I have kissed. The bill comes for the orange skies,
the bodies, and the rest. I cannot pay it. 6. Better to die. I lean
back. I close my eyes. The archangels applaud. (Abdoh 1999: 87)

The scene fades to black amidst the sounds of the Captain’s shivering
breaths and the howling of wolves, and it is hard not to imagine a
degree of identification with the patriarch on the part of Abdoh,
also facing a bill for the orange skies, the bodies, and the rest. Years
later, Abdoh would mirror the Captain’s surrender by deciding to
stop taking his HIV medications.
Bogeyman, the second part of the trilogy and the one that Abdoh
has described as the most autobiographical, is also the work most
openly obsessed with memory. It begins with the ninth line of its
Prologue, where the seventeen-year-old son’s illness, presumably
AIDS, is mislabeled as dementia, but maintains itself with constant
references, direct and indirect, to memory, the act of remembering,
and histories both personal and societal. The sense of longing for
the past reaches its apex at the end of the play, when the father
collapses center stage, dead, while one of his sons, calls out “Dad!”
and reaches out to him. Unable to touch his father, the boy returns to
socking a baseball in a catcher’s mitt while another character sings
a dirge-like, a cappella version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
The amplified and reverberated sounds of the ball hitting the mitt
evoke footsteps slowly walking away. The familial focus of the play
feels personal, but Abdoh constantly uses cultural references—the
ballgame song, quotations from The Brady Brunch and popular
TV advertisements—to insist that this family’s traumas and losses
are representative of those suffered by the broader culture. And
while Bogeyman visually asserts the presence of marginalized gay
subcultures by using actors from Club FUCK! and by costuming
many of the performers to refer to the BDSM scene or body
modification culture, the production frequently historicizes or
generalizes its tone of lamentation and mourning—ambivalently, as
one might by now expect.

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 155 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 156 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

Abdoh’s ambivalence about death, trauma, and identity

formation is most densely expressed in the mixture of sound and
imagery accompanying a long monologue by Tom Fitzpatrick as
the oppressive, bigoted patriarch. In the middle of it, the stage goes
dark, except for a light shining on an actor (Tony Torn) shaking
his head maniacally while we hear Fitzpatrick’s disembodied voice:
“The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten / The woman sleeps and
dreams, forgotten / The bells calling to prayer awake him. / The
bells calling to prayer awake her. / In the end all identification comes
down to trifles.” The lights come up and Fitzpatrick continues his
monologue, “Number 2 pass the bucket. Number 2334 get in the
line. Number 65 walk slowly to the gallows,” and so forth, before
moving on to other verbal riffs. Toward the end of his monologue,
he describes a police bust that ends with him reciting a graffiti
message, “Kill all niggers, spics, dagos, queers and Jews,” before
the visual chaos and audio cacophony abruptly stop again as two
spotlights shine, one isolating a whirling dervish dressed entirely
in black, the other showing Julia Francis, “in her mother’s hat,”
washing a naked male body whose face is covered by a rag. We hear
the refrain, “I am Rachel of old, weeping for her children” about
half a dozen times, until Julia removes the rag from the body’s
face to reveal the actor Tom Pearl’s bearded face as he suddenly
starts shivering on the ground. Fitzpatrick’s monologue and the
accompanying stage hubbub then resume only to rush toward the
speech’s final nine lines:

There is a prison riot in progress. The moon is void of course. A

killer horse is on the loose. Everyone always needs an enemy. If
there isn’t one you have to make one up. This is what the radio
disc jockey blurts out over and over and over. Is Death fast or
slow? Is Death fast or slow? Is Death fast or slow?

Parsing the above, we find that the mise en scène and text point
in a variety of interpretive directions. The first lines about forgetting
one’s self and identification’s consisting of trifles are adopted from
Jorge Luis Borges’ A Personal Anthology. In “The Witness,” Borges
writes of a man lying in a stable near a church, “with gray eyes and
a gray beard, stretched on the ground amidst the animal odors,”
where he “meekly seeks death like someone seeking sleep … The
man sleeps and dreams, forgotten. The bells calling to prayer awake

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 156 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 157

him” (Borges 1967). Even if one is unaware of the original context

from Borges, Abdoh’s cutting-and-pasting of the text suggests
that identity derives from consciousness; in sleep/death, the self is
forgotten. And yet identity is not merely a product of one’s own
consciousness. When Fitzpatrick orders “Number 65” to the gallows,
he summons memories of the Holocaust; referring to persons as
numbers reminds us of a society’s ability to erase individual identity
as a means of dehumanizing people, erasing the individual as part
of the bigotry of group identification. Abdoh thus connects both the
negation and the imposition of identity with death.
In Borges’ “The Witness,” the man lost to the deadness of sleep is
awakened by the call to prayer; in Bogeyman, the actor who is dead/
asleep, his identity literally effaced by a death shroud, is mourned,
or called, by multiple Abrahamic traditions. The reference to Rachel
occurs in both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles—in Jeremiah
31:15, where Rachel is used as an archetypal mother inconsolable
over the exile of her children, and in Matthew 2:18, where
Matthew interprets Rachel as prefiguring Herod’s slaughter of the
boys of Bethlehem. Beyond that, the so-called dervish of Islam’s
Sufic Mevlevi order “whirls” as an act of dhikr, or remembrance
of God, signifying an ecstatic “annihilation of self” (Çelebi 2019)
in an act of spiritual transcendence. When Julia removes the rag
from Tom Pearl’s face, the incantations about Rachel’s mourning
are still happening; Julia then withdraws, leaving Pearl surrounded
by a dark stage and looking terrified, as if he had suddenly awoken
from nonexistence into existence, becoming aware of all its terrors.
Clearly, the mourned body here is meant to represent multiple
instances and types of loss.
In a 1992 interview with his videographer, Adam Soch, Abdoh
was discussing the forthcoming Tight Right White when he said,
“People are afraid to face their identity in ways other than ethnic or
cultural, but I think there’s a spiritual identity, a social identity, that
somehow are [sic] closer to who we are, and you can’t name, you
can’t objectify, even though—every day—people try to objectify it”
(Abdoh 1997). This privileging of a spiritual or social identity above
ethnic and cultural identities has deep roots in various mystical
traditions, but it also seems to resonate with the lines he cribbed
from Borges’ Personal Anthology: in sleep and death, the identity
of the body is forgotten; in Bogeyman, religion wakes the sleeper
from oblivion, but to what reality does he awaken? To a history

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 157 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 158 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

of humans reduced to numbers, to the violent condemnation of

minorities in the here and now. Even as we hear the Borges lines
about identity coming down to trifles, we see Tony Torn violently
shaking his head—is he shaking his head to say “no?” The gesture, at
any rate, undermines the text, creating an unsettling picture against
the aural backdrop of what should be lyrical, soothing words.
Tom Pearl’s body also has multiple significations derived in part
from the text about Rachel’s mourning. The dual meanings of the
allusion to Rachel resonate broadly with the rest of Abdoh’s works:
Matthew makes the quote about mourning the dead, but the original
context in Jeremiah is about exile—that is, the loss of home, the
sorrows of diasporic existence. Pearl’s shrouded body is an object of
two types of mourning, two types of loss: it represents actual death
as well as the loss and trauma associated with diaspora. For Abdoh,
leaving home is a kind of death. Both Eurydice in Hip-Hop and the
mother in Bogeyman die when they are thrown, or jump, out of
the windows of their homes. The diasporic undefinability of home
also represents loss. In Tight Right White, the stereotypical Jewish
character, Moishe Pipik, commands Blaster, a black stereotype, to
pack his bags; “Where am I going?” Blaster asks. “Home,” Pipik
says. The two are then joined by other cast members arguing over
whether “this” (America, presumably) is home or not. And, of
course, it is home—and it’s not. The ambiguity of home mirrors the
ambiguity of identity: in both cases, the sense of loss predominates.
The Law of Remains traces Jeffrey Dahmer’s journey to a
dystopic heaven by way of a biopic directed by Andy Warhol.
Abdoh rechristens the serial killer as Jeffrey Snarling (played by
Tom Pearl; the script uses actors’ names to assign lines). Law, too,
raises the specter of rootlessness in its first pages: “Don’t you have
a home?” actor Peter Jacobs/Andy Warhol asks the actor Kathryn
Walsh, playing a “cock-eyed little boy who is really scared.” She
answers: “I don’t want to live at home.” Not long after, actor
Stephen Francis similarly encounters Tony Torn: “You don’t have
a home?” he asks; “No sir,” the reply (Abdoh 1996: 14, 18). The
lost souls around Warhol’s Factory blend into the lost souls who
fatally stumbled into Dahmer’s orbit. Because of the high-speed
and high-volume delivery of these exchanges, and because of their
early placement in the performance, the sense of loss they betray
has an ominous quality: things are bad for these homeless souls, but
they’re probably going to get worse.

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 158 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 159

New York Times critic Stephen Holden called Law “one of the
angriest theater pieces ever hurled at a New York audience” (Holden
1999: 102). As Jahan Ramazani points out in his discussion of
Sylvia Plath, though, anger and elegy are not mutually exclusive.
Abdoh commemorates Dahmer’s victims but does so by faulting
not only Dahmer but the culture that created him—a culture that
stigmatized homosexuality and persons of color. These stigmas were
reflected in Dahmer’s choice of victims, most of whom were persons
of color, but also in his steadfast refusal to identify himself as gay
in spite of having raped only male victims. Abdoh’s fury at bigotry’s
role in the deaths of Dahmer’s victims comes through most strongly
in multiple allusions to the (actual) incident in which white police
officers, responding to a 911 call and ignoring statements from black
witnesses, returned the fleeing fourteen-year-old Laotian Konerak
Sinthasomphone, naked and bleeding, to Dahmer, who strangled
him shortly thereafter. While Tom/Snarling stabs and eats parts of a
victim as they lie on the floor, Julia barks questions at Tom (“How
old was your youngest victim? How old did you tell the police he
was?”), and when he tells her that he never heard the police report
made after the Sinthasomphone incident, she provides the audience
with the information: “[The police] said, quote, ‘intoxicated Asian,
naked male was returned to his boyfriend.’ There is laughter on the
tape.” The ensemble laughs mirthlessly (Abdoh 1996: 34). Dahmer
pathologically repressed his own gender identity and used identity as
a basis for most of his crimes; as Law represents it, societal bigotry
enabled him to perpetrate his crimes for as long as he did. Coupled
with the implications this has for the possibility or desirability of
shedding identity, there is also the interpretation, expressed by
multiple critics, that Dahmer/Snarling, as a “mass murderer of gay
men,” is a personification of AIDS, and the initial indifference to the
disappearance of his victims paralleled governmental indifference
to the AIDS crisis (Schildcrout 2014). Again, Abdoh’s lamentation
functions as multilayered social criticism.
Law also deploys elegy in an attempt to recall, that is, to bring
back, Dahmer’s victims. Dances frequently punctuate scenes, and
the song used most often in “Mayhem,” the section of Law before
the seventh and final “Heaven” part, is the punk anthem “It’s
Catching Up,” by NoMeansNo, the first words of which are: “Have
you heard the news? / The dead walk.” The capability of both elegy
and theatre to revivify the dead aligns here. This is the section in

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 159 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 160 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

which the names, ages, and ethnicities of Dahmer’s victims are

recited, alternating with refrains in which Tom/Snarling speaks an
obliquely morbid sentence followed by the phrase, “Soft sadness of
death.” The recital of names situates a memorial service at the apex
of the performance. Abdoh semi-erases Dahmer by referring to him
as Jeffrey Snarling, but the victims’ names are unchanged. And,
ironically, the “Mayhem” section is where Law slows down; while
much of the preceding dialogue was difficult to decipher because
of the speed or volume with which it was declaimed, the details of
Dahmer’s victims are recited slowly and clearly. Toward the end of
the litany, the phrase “Soft sadness of death” is replaced by “This
is America.”
The velocity continues to slow down in “Heaven,” which largely
consists of Tom/Snarling monologues, recited as letters to Bridget
Geiger, the girl Dahmer took to his high school prom, punctuated by
movements and dances executed by the ensemble. The right side of
the stage is lined with hospital beds; Snarling, in a morbidly comic
gesture, is wearing a chef’s hat. He is joined by Ronald Reagan,
whom he identifies as the actor from the 1964 crime movie The
Killers, in which Reagan played a mob boss. Snarling impregnates
Reagan in heaven, but the baby is killed, Snarling tells Bridget,
when an angel tears through Reagan’s pregnant body. Snarling’s last
letter closes with a vision recognizable from the other plays in the
Bogeyman trilogy: “Tonight I will have a facelift. An incision will be
placed in the hairline and the skin lifted forward and upward from
the temporal bone. All my wrinkles will be removed. I will feel no
pain. I will be young again, happy again, free again. Yours, Jeffrey.”
He sings another tune that was sung or referred to throughout the
performance: “Old Mammy Redd of Marblehead,” which refers to a
victim of the Salem witch trials: “Old Mammy Redd of Marblehead
/ hanged from a tree ’til she was dead.”
Law closes with features that should now be familiar. As in
Hip-Hop and Bogeyman, we have a reprehensible figure, an
embodiment of repression, self-elegizing, here in reaction to his
death. While expressing sympathy for Dahmer’s victims and rage
at their suffering, Abdoh also recognizes the perpetrator as a victim
of sorts, a product of a culture and societal history of violence
and repression, bookended here by the Salem witch trials and the
Reagan administration—just as he gave voice to the frailty and fear
of Hip-Hop’s Captain and Bogeyman’s father. As Abdoh revived

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 160 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 161

the memory of the victims and named them as individuals rather

than treating them as the mere “17 dead” of a news report, he also
recalled Dahmer’s childhood, the history of the “wounded kid,”
as Snarling describes himself (Abdoh 1996: 70). Abdoh deploys
naked bodies and pushes his actors to physical and psychological
extremes, again emphasizing the humanity of the actors. Revealing
another way in which the lines between actor and character were
blurred, company member and Law performer Anita Durst has said
of Law rehearsals that “the way [Abdoh] would make the story
was … he would say, ‘Tell me something personal about yourself.’
So that’s where the lines came from … he would take from our
personal lives and put it into the production.”3 According to Tony
Torn, real dialogue and arguments between the actors in and out of
rehearsal were also integrated into the dialogue of Law.4
The blur between art and reality may apply not only to the actors
but to Abdoh himself; as Jordan Schildcrout points out, one can
view Warhol as a doppelgänger of sorts for Abdoh, “the auteur who
offers an artistic representation of a celebrity serial killer that is
somewhat different from the mass media image, but still attached
to the culture of commodity and consumption” (Schildcrout 2014).
Abdoh shows that an auteur director need not physically be present
onstage, as, for example, Tadeusz Kantor was, or visibly offstage,
like Richard Foreman, in order to make his presence felt; Abdoh’s
presence is implicit in his combined status as writer and director,
in his presentation of a distinctive stylistic approach that sets the
work off from other performances, and by virtue of the way his life
resonates with a given work.

Abdoh’s Confrontation with Oblivion

The final tension in Abdoh’s work negotiates the nature of elegies
as acts of memory and the nature of theatre, the quintessentially
ephemeral art. Abdoh was clearly fascinated by memory, and yet,
at the end of his life, he expressed a desire that would nearly efface
his works: none of the performances, he instructed, were to be
restaged, and he did not want the videos of the performances to
be widely disseminated. Abdoh meant to write his elegies, then,
in disappearing ink. While he did authorize video recordings to

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 161 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 162 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

be made and stored at a handful of theatre libraries, it is unlikely

that he would have consented to the uploading of the videos for
consumption on the Internet, or even, perhaps, to the exhibition
of his oeuvre in the exhibitions at MoMA  PS1 and the KW
Institute for Contemporary Art, which relied almost solely on video
installations to introduce visitors to his productions. Perhaps that
was Abdoh’s final elegiac lamentation: He recognized that texts
etched on tombstones become weathered and illegible, that there is
an innately false promise in words like “permanence,” “posterity,”
or “immortality.” As such, his staged elegies existed as temporary
commemorations, simultaneously committed to remembrance
and forgetting. While this could be interpreted as an extension of
Artaudian influence—the ghost of Artaud always seemed to haunt
Abdoh—it is also reflective of Abdoh’s deeper convictions that the
West suffers from a pathological denial of death and that death must
be accepted as something that marks the transience of all things,
including memory. This also goes beyond discussions of theatre
as being transient by definition; it would seem to be an argument
about memory that goes back to Ecclesiastes 1:11: “There is no
remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who came after.” It is another
case of “both/and”: each performance a commemoration, each
commemoration and act self-consciously destined for oblivion. The
specificity of each performance’s signifiers and meanings demands a
rejection of posterity: each production was not just about its scripted
narratives or themes but was also tied to the offstage lives of the
performers as they existed at that particular moment—whether it
was Ken Roht confronting his sexuality or Cliff Diller his mortality.
Each production was a careful interlocking of personal and public
histories.
Today, the United States is experiencing another cultural moment
that would seem to require Abdoh’s sensibility. The ascendancy of
Donald Trump marks the apotheosis of the cultural wars that were
germinating in Abdoh’s time, with all parts of the political spectrum
convinced of a culture of loss, a “greatness” either destroyed before
Trump or by virtue of his ascendancy. Abdoh spoke to this need
to commemorate loss, to acknowledge and question the nature of
loss and the identities to which it gave birth. He captured the way
in which we embody networks of identities and histories, and he
understood our need to remember as individuals and as members

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 162 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 163

of communities while embracing the inevitability of oblivion as an

antidote to the pathological denial of death. He understood that
a culture defined by loss, trauma, and death required an aesthetic
bold enough to remove the protective masks of irony and reveal
the vulnerability behind the creative impulse. At the same time, and
perhaps most important of all, he was nevertheless able to develop
a sophisticated and complex formal vocabulary appropriate to
a culture whose traumatic losses demanded—and continue to
demand—an endless effort to “remember, repeat, work through,”
recognizing, finally, that this was a process of the living—and one
to be made by the living.

Notes
1 Memorial Service – NY (DVD), Prod. Adam Soch, 125 min., 1996.
2 Reza Abdoh, Bogeyman, unpublished rehearsal script dated
September 19, 1991. See also online video at: https://vimeo.
com/156807754
3 Reza Abdoh: Theater Visionary (Film), Dir. Adam Soch. No
distributor, 2015.
4 Personal communication, February 10, 2019.

Works Cited
Abdoh, Reza (1996), “The Law of Remains,” in Bonnie Marranca (ed.)
Plays for the End of the Century, 9–94, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Abdoh, Reza (1999), The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, in Daniel Mufson
(ed.) Reza Abdoh, 51–89, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Abdoh, Reza (1997), “Interview with Reza Abdoh by Adam Soch, Los
Angeles, 1992.” Interview Tapes (DVD), prod. Adam Soch collection,
August 17.
Abdoh, Reza (2016), Quotations from a Ruined City. [Online video.]
https://vimeo.com/156807956. Video of 1993 staging.
Abdoh, Reza and Salar Abdoh (1995), “Quotations from a Ruined City,”
TDR, 39 (4): 108–36.
Als, Hilton (2018), “The Aural Dissonance of Reza Abdoh,” The New
Yorker, June 25. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/25/
the-aural-dissonance-of-reza-abdoh

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 163 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 164 Rodríguez, Sellars, Abdoh

Andrić, Ivo (1967), The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Lovett F. Edwards,
New York: Signet Classics.
Ariès, Philippe (1981), The Hour of Our Death, New York: Alfred A.
Knopf.
Azimi, Negar, Tiffany Malakooti, and Krist Gruijthuijsen (2018), “Rage
against the Machine: The Theatrical Whirlwinds of Reza Abdoh,”
Mousse Magazine, 65. http://moussemagazine.it/reza-abdoh-negar-
azimi-tiffany-malakooti-krist-gruijthuijsen–2018
Battersby, Matilda (2012), “Ron Athey: The Writer Who Puts Masochists
Under His Spell,” The Independent, April 4. https://www.independent.
co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/ron-athey-the-masochist-who-
puts-writers-under-his-spell-7615265.html
Beckett, Samuel (1954), Waiting for Godot, New York: Grove Press.
Bell, John (1995), “Excerpts from ‘To Reach Divinity through the Act
of Performance: An Interview with Reza Abdoh’,” in Daniel Mufson
(ed.) Reza Abdoh, 34–37, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
(Originally published in TDR 39 (4) (1995): 48–71.)
Borges, Jorge Luis (1967), A Personal Anthology, ed. Anthony Kerrigan,
New York: Grove Press. Kindle edition.
Caruth, Cathy (1995), “Recapturing the Past: Introduction,” in Cathy
Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 151–57, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cavitch, Max (2007), American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the
Puritans to Whitman, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Kindle edition.
Çelebi, Celaleddin (2019), “Whirling Dervishes, Sema,” Melvana.net
website, http://www.mevlana.net/sema.html.
Collins, Glenn (1992), “Theatrical Director’s Calling Card: Sex and
Death,” New York Times, February 24. https://www.nytimes.
com/1992/02/24/theater/theatrical-director-s-calling-card-sex-and-
death.html
Crimp, Douglas (2002), “Mourning and Militancy,” in Crimp,
Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, 130–
149, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original presented at the “Gay Men
in Criticism” session of the English Institute at Harvard University,
August 24–27, 1989, and published in October, 51 (Winter 1989).)
Drake, Sylvie (1999), “A Chaotic Plain for Our Fouled Nest,” in
Daniel Mufson (ed.) Reza Abdoh, 91–95, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press. (Original published in the Los Angeles Times, May
14, 1989.)
Erikson, Kai, (1995), “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Cathy
Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 183–99, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 164 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

 DEATH AND LOSS IN THE LATE WORKS 165

Fordyce, Ehren (2004), “This Is Home, This Isn’t Home: Reza Abdoh’s
Tight Right White,” Modern Drama, 47 (2): 219–36.
Holden, Stephen (1999), “Theatre in Review: The Law of Remains,” in
Daniel Mufson (ed.) Reza Abdoh, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press. (Original in the New York Times, February 26, 1992).
Kirk, Marshall and Hunter Madsen (1989), After the Ball: How America
Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s, New York:
Doubleday.
Krasinski, Jennifer (2018), “Loosed Threads,” Artforum International, 57
(2): 160–71.
Marowitz, Charles (1991), “Los Angeles in Review: Bogeyman,” in
Daniel Mufson (ed.) Reza Abdoh, 99–101, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press. (Original published in TheaterWeek, 5 (10): 34–35.)
Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (2011),
“Introduction,” in Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and
Daniel Levy (eds.) The Collective Memory Reader, 3–61, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Ramazani, Jahan (1994), Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from
Hardy to Heaney, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roht, Ken (2009), “Interview with Ken Roht,” Daniel Mufson: A Home
Page website. https://danielmufson.com/the-abdoh-files/interview-with-
ken-roht/
Schildcrout, Jordan (2014), Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal
Homosexual in the American Theater, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press. Kindle edition.
Spargo, R. Clifton (2004), The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and
Responsibility in Elegiac Literature, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Vaucher, Andréa R. (1999), “Excerpts from an Interview with Reza
Abdoh,” in Daniel Mufson (ed.) Reza Abdoh, 44–47, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press. (Original published in Andrea R. Vaucher,
Muses from Chaos and Ash: AIDS, Artists, and Art, New York: Grove
Press, 1993).
Weissberg, Liliane (1999), “Introduction,” in Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane
Weissberg (eds.) Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity,
7–26, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 165 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM

9781350045590_txt_prf.indd 166 9/26/2020 7:39:25 AM