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Director's Note:

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The Cino

In 1958 Joe Cino, at the age of 26, opened a small café on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. Cino, a trained dancer, had a passion for the arts and originally envisioned the space as an art gallery with perhaps the occasional poetry reading or folk musician. In 1959 the Caffe Cino saw its first play, Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, performed and the following year the Cino’s first premier, Flyspray by James Howard, was staged and the first Off Off Broadway theatre was born. More plays followed and the space was soon bursting with theatre. Many were brand new works from budding playwrights but the Cino also staged established plays. There was even a practice of running to the nearest drug store, buying a comic book and staging it, sometimes only hours before curtain, if there was a sudden cancellation or a hole in the busy production schedule. The space also became a haven for gay playwrights, performers, and theatre makers. Cino, himself gay, gathered friends and lovers to the space who found themselves doing every possible job a theatre requires. Plays with openly gay themes and characters were being staged as early as 1961 with Doric Wilson’s Now She Dances, even when such material would be unthinkable at the Broadway houses just a few subway stops away.

 

The Project

This project is born from my own investment in the Cino’s legacy as a pioneering space of queer theatre. My first year at Cornell I was introduced to Robert Patrick’s online archive of Cino material (found at caffecino.wordpress.com) through Professor Sara Warner’s Queer Performance class. As a gay theatre maker myself, I felt a deep kinship with Patrick’s trove of memories and the do-it-yourself website trying to chronicle and promote the Cino’s rightful place in theatre history. It reminded me of how very often the contributions of queer and trans individuals and collectives have been actively ignored in the historical record. Like other theatre makers who also engage with archival research and scholarship, I began to think about how might a performance animate this material? The first attempt to answer this question is the production you will see. It is meant to begin a conversation rather than provide a concrete conclusion. As such, this production is very much a laboratory work. You might see an actor with a script in their hand, a technical hiccup or perhaps even notice a prop or a costume that is not vintage 1960s. If anything, this feels in keeping with the spirit and aesthetic of the Cino, which favored doing as much theatre as possible and learning as much from the mistakes as the successes.

 

The Plays

During this production you will see four separate plays that each had their premier at the Caffe Cino: William M. Hoffman’s Good Night I Love You (1965), Robert Patrick’s Indecent Exposure (1966), Lanford Wilson’s Sex is Between Two People (1966), and Robert Heide’s Moon (1967). Choosing four plays from the wealth of the Cino repertoire was profoundly difficult. I knew I wanted to present plays by queer playwrights and looked for shorter plays to showcase as much breadth as possible in a roughly ninety minute time frame. Good Night I Love You immediately stood out for Hoffman’s blunt discussion of queerness in the play. The frank discussion of the character of Alex’s feelings of being a woman, especially during sex with his lover Tom, dives into the complex relationship between sexuality and gender. The conversation between Lisa and Alex could easily be a contemporary one and touches on queer themes including gay men’s relationship with masculinity and femininity, bisexual erasure, and polyamorous relationships. When first staged at the Cino, the two actors were at opposite ends of the tiny café. Instead of separating the two, I was interested in bringing the actors closer together trying to recreate the feeling of a phantom presence when you talk to someone on the phone for a long time. Originally written as a short story, the play is based on late night conversations Hoffman had with his dear friend and at one time lover, Lucy Silvay. Lanford Wilson convinced Hoffman to write it as a script.

 

Robert Patrick’s Indecent Exposure is the only one of the four plays that has no overt gay themes or characters yet it feels unmistakably queer. The offstage inciting incident of the play, Peter’s decision to walk down the streets of the Village naked, is a complicated attempt to undermine his male privilege and power through the vulnerability of exposure. Peter’s actions, as explained by Morna, demonstrate a desire to take direct action spurred by what could be considered a feminist politics, however dated some of the terminology might be. The subsequent labeling of his actions as “indecent” mark his nakedness with a queer brand and call to mind the countless gay men arrested for similar “indecency.” At the Cino, the play was lit by a single naked light bulb. While not a practical lighting choice for this production, this image helped inform certain staging choices for our performance.

 

The queer yearning keenly felt in Lanford Wilson’s Sex Is Between Two People singles out this play as the most personally tragic of the four for me. Set in a gay bathhouse—a traditional social and cruising spot for gay men to meet and have casual sexual encounters—we bear witness to Roger and Marvin’s attempts at “initiating something” only to be stymied by their nerves and internalized homophobia. Wilson is the most commercially successful of the four playwrights represented here, a dubious distinction to be sure among the largely anti-commercial sentiments held by many Cino and other Off Off Broadway artists. While another of Wilson’s plays, The Madness of Lady Bright, is often cited as a pioneering queer play, this brief script seems to be largely overlooked among his other work.

 

Our final play, Moon by Robert Heide, offers a disturbing picture of two heterosexual couples who trade emotional and even physical abuses as they confront their substance-fueled existential dread. Written and first performed in 1967, the play uses the impending moon landing as a promise for a fresh start, which Sally latches onto in her desire to escape her present circumstances. The only relief from the assaults these couples seem determined to inflict on one another is the character of Christopher, the newly arrived gay neighbor who pops by with a freshly baked loaf of bread to cheerfully introduce himself. Heide flips the heteronormative standard through his contrast of Christopher with the others characters. Though today he might read as homonormative, Christopher’s claim to “normalcy” and happiness when compared to the other characters reads as distinctly radical in a 1960’s context. Heide uses music to both emphasize and interrupt the action of the play. We have preserved this for our production but have occasionally truncated the amount of music played.

 

 The Magic

This project would not have been possible without the extraordinary work of Cino participants to chronicle their experiences. My sincere thanks to Robert Patrick for his inspirational archive and his willingness to share his time and memories with me. My deepest thanks also to Robert Heide for being willing to spend several hours on the phone with a total stranger sharing his memories of the Cino and his insights into his play, Moon. Thank you also to Maggie Dominic who reached out to me when she heard I was doing this project and offered encouragement and insight.
 

The goal of this project is invocation rather than replication in the service of memory. Rather than try to recreate the Cino, a project we would undoubtedly fail at, this production invites the ghost of the Cino to haut us through hints and fragments so that we might both remember and create anew. To that end, I invite you now to close your eyes for a moment. Imagine yourself in the heart of Greenwich Village and you happen to turn a corner and find yourself on a little block called Cornelia Street. Your eye catches a red sign that says “Caffe Cino” and as you step inside you find a cheery, lively space with about twelve tables and a rather rickety looking 8x8 platform in the center. Fairy lights hang all around illuminating the close surrounds. Amid the eclectic kitsch and memorabilia on the walls are pictures of hunky Hollywood stars like Rock Hudson. Over the hiss of the espresso machine you hear a bell ringing and as you turn a stout man with curly black hair bounds across the room announcing, “It’s magic time.”

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