Penny Arcade

The Art of Becoming, Part 3: Superstar Interrupted

Joe’s Pub, NYC, July 23, 2024

Reviewed by Betsyann Faiella

Penny Arcade has been performing her magnificent memoir project (a work in progress) at Joe’s Pub of late, and I was fortunate to catch it. Penny has packed a huge amount of living into 74 years. Her memories and experiences were technicolored, and her recollections about the creativity of NYC in the 1980s made the 21st century, as a whole, seem pale by comparison. The show was part 3 of 13 parts, which she is also writing as a memoir, but she was encouraged to put her story on stage, and she has done so along with her long-time collaborator Steve Zehentner. The resulting show was hilarious, confrontational, and multi-media. There were videos, still photos, and a score (that was mixed live), and original songs by Penny. In this, and other works of the pair that I’ve experienced, Zehentner’s skill and sensitivity in creating sensitive scores for Penny’s monologues were formidable. Fun, relevant, nuanced—it all just worked together. Penny wrote the show, and her songs had music by her, Chris Rael, Zehentner, and Zecca Esquibel.

Penny warned the audience early on that “I might be unpleasant. I’ve made an art form of it.” And, yes, I could see that. She delivered her monologue with such ferocity and assuredness that it would be hard to argue with her about the veracity of anything that wasn’t handed down on a tablet. I appreciated that she’s “pissed off” that the history of queer and counter-culture New York artists was being forgotten and/or co-opted. The erasing of an original queer artist, Jackie Curtis—forsaken, in Penny’s estimation, for the memory of Marsha P. Johnson (“never trans”)—particularly irked Penny Arcade.

As the first-generation child of Italian immigrants, she felt “othered” by her own family, and it didn’t help that they called her “puttana” (whore) just for using nail polish when she was a young girl. She started leaving home and roamed the world from Provincetown (“a gay bar spread out over a quaint village”) to Majorca to Amsterdam and the woods of Maine, where she met other queer people, artists, writers, and puppeteers. The list of famous people she met, hung out with, or created with rolled off her tongue: Patti Smith, Jane Fonda, Jackie Curtis, Andy Warhol, Robert Graves, Robert Mapplethorpe, The Factory, Ellen Stewart, and Holly Woodlawn.

The Art of Becoming, Part 3: Superstar Interrupted was enormously entertaining, beautifully nostalgic, and confrontational, and not only because of Penny’s memories. The show contained reflections from the artist on how all these puzzle pieces fit together: art, society, creativity, politics, sex. Her observations were funny, cutting, and true to her and what she had learned from her experience on planet earth. I can’t wait to hear Part 4, in which she moves on to the next chapter of her history.