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HIV UNIVERSITY
Direct from New York City, Purgatorio Ink presents its
iconoclastic Suddenly Something Recklessly Gay
January 8
▼
HIV & You.
by C. Jay Wilson Jr.
January 1 1
anarchic theater amidst the rise of Islamic funda
ietzsche’s vexatious The Gay Sci
mentalism. He was exiled in 1979 after the Iranian
ence contains the aphorism “The
Revolution and the subsequent installation of the
secret of reaping the greatest fruit
Ayatollah Khomeini and moved to New York to
fulness and the greatest enjoyment
continue
his career of contumacy in the United
from life is to live dangerously!”
Babilla continued to stir up controversy as
Most artists would certainly agree with States.
Nietzsche,
his
subject
matter freely explored homosexuality
yet those artists who actually strive to ascend to
and a host of social and sexual taboos.
the Nietzschean apogee of iconoclastic dissen
The controversial subject matter of Bani’s
sion are few. Enter Assurbanipal Babilla, the
plays has been likened to that of Nabokov’s, and
prophet of the perilous, who brings to the Pacific
his influence upon artistic communities and the
intelligentsia in his native Iran was compared to
the legacy here of Andy Warhol. Bani’s most
recent autobiographical composition, Suddenly
Something Recklessly Gay, employs the stark
minimalism of Beckett’s plays and combines it
Northwest for the first time the offense of his
with the dark dementia of Genet’s diseased world.
controversial company Purgatorio Ink in its per
The plot involves
formance of Sud
child abuse, incest
denly Something
and murder as ex
Recklessly Gay or
perienced by a four-
Cirque de Ca Ca,
member circus fam
Jan. 22-24 at the
ily on the eve of the
C linton Street
Second Coming.
Theater. The pro
Challenging
con
gram is part of the
ventional percep
Portland Institute
tions
of familial re
for Contemporary
lationships, Bani’s
A rt’s 1995-96
play offers an ex
season.
amination of the
Assurbanipal
nature of social au
B abilla, known
thority and its ini
simply as Bani,
tiation of violence
combines a formal
and abuse in a world
stag ecraft and
sustained by misan
classically struc
thropy.
tured texts with el
Suddenly Some
em ents draw n
thing R ecklessly
from sym bolist
Gay was produced
im agery
and
originally by La
stand-up comedy
MaMa, New York
to communicate
City’s theater fa
ideas that wrestle
mous for bringing
with themes of ho
to life brilliant un
mosexuality, reli
derground works of a more absurdist inclination.
gion and sexual grotesqueries. His work force
This play’s exploration into the obscene promises
fully attacks the moral and social constructs that
to be an experience that has the unique ability to
define the delicate matrix of our society, estab
simultaneously delight and horrify.
lishing him as the avant-garde Momus of contem
porary U.S. theater.
Suddenly Something Recklessly Gay runs Jan.
A former Protestant minister who studied the
22-24 at the Clinton Street Theatre,
ology in Beirut, Lebanon, Bani found it increas
2522 SE Clinton St., in Portland.
ingly dangerous to exist as an Assyrian, Christian,
Tickets are $14, call 242-1419.
homosexual playwright producing his brand of
with Turn
McPherson.
w
January
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