Joe-Joe 1993, 53:00
written by Leslie Singer, directed by Cecilia Dougherty
with Leslie Singer, Cecilia Dougherty, Kevin Killian, Rosa Ellis, and Amy Scholder
Joe-Joe is an adaptation of the diaries of 1960s British
bad-boy playwright Joe Orton. The piece evolved during the collaboration,
and our original simple fascination with the work and the reputation
of Joe Orton took precedence over themes that emerged about the
normalizing of gay culture and what it might mean to relinquish
outsider status. Other issues that interested us were the construction
of stardom and the increasing positive visibility of gay men within
contemporary popular culture and pop consciousness in comparison
with the infinitely unfashionable character of the lesbian.
Within those themes we play freely and create a new genre of bio-pic
as Joe-Joe presents Orton not as one gay rogue,
but as two fabulous gay women, both named Joe Orton. In this piece
we do our best to confound Freudian notions of narcissism as it
applies to women and homosexual men, and indeed to confound the
notion of individual identity itself. Sometimes we are both the
same Joe Orton, mirror images; sometimes we are separate Joe Ortons,
as lovers, as sisters, and as the unlikely spawn of the cult of
stardom.
