IT’S BETTER TO START OUT UGLY at JOAN and The Lab 2023

Asher Hartman and Gawdafful National Theater present a “no time for oblivion” thirst trap for queer psychosis, aging and dementia, fascistic white gay nuttery, near ventriloquism, fake theater and untranslatable gut goo of buried antipathies neatly played out on a hairy stage. Starring red hot actors and aesthetes José Luis Blondet, Michael Bonnabel, and Philip Littell, and written and directed by miniature puppeteer Asher Hartman, this 90-minute slippery ghost town of a play promises to leave you shaking your head at the nearest wine bar and taqueria.

It’s Better to Start Out Ugly began with the stories of two characters, Alfred and John, from Hartman’s 2019 traveling play The Dope Elf. Alfred and John are two gay white men living in dire financial circumstances on the edges of Los Angeles’ society. Once celebrated and handsome, they are struggling now. John, a former hustler, sells stolen goods on the street, hooks occasionally, and Alfred, an agoraphobic, stays inside. The couple live below their landlord, whom we never see, who shits on them from above.

Retreating into their couple’s games of violence and domination, John and Alfred imagine that they control a family of people they fear are gangsters living below. Alfred fantasizes a relationship with a Latinx boy, innocent and devoted to God, who sleeps next door. Meanwhile, another man, a “foreigner”--sometimes Spanish, sometimes Italian, but maybe neither--Sebastiano, wanders their apartment. They suddenly see each other, and the play lunges toward a psychedelic dementia-dream of hundreds of dead, victims and victimizers, ghosts of their emotional-political forebears, poisoners and agents of liberation active and alive inside them.

“You will not replace us!’ is a white supremacist cry borrowed from gay French author Renaud Camus’s book of the same name and his Great Replacement Theory.  The men in this absurdist play, once beautiful, are now outcasts in what they perceive as their culture, competing for power, inhabited by the psychological residue of their shadow histories.  Lust becomes the power to eat, to love, to consume the body of another, to release oneself in an erotic death.  Influenced by Klaus Theweleit’s two-part volume on the psyches of fascist soldiers, Male Fantasies, and Jasbir Puar’s theories of homonationalism and queer exceptionalism, the play uses slapstick and other comedic abstractions to look at the complications of racism and white supremacy in gay communities, but also at the human pleasure in consumption that underscores our violence, thinking about dementia, aging, and the dream space as vehicles to unlock our tightly guarded unconsciousness material.

90 minutes with no intermission

Assistant Direction, Zut Lorz

Set and costume design, Brian Getnick

Sound design, Jasmine Orpilla

Lighting design, Chu-Hsuan Chang,

Graphic design, Jinha Song

Still photography, Ian Byers-Gamber

Videography for JOAN, Justin Streichman

Read Martin Harries review “Having Once Been Beautiful,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 6, 2023.