The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [111]
ACT II
RICHARD BASCIANO COULD easily have filled 60 percent of his selling area with Bruce Lee movies, but he was a man with a broader vision. Basciano spent, according to Fahringer, over $100,000 reconfiguring the upstairs rooms where he had shown live sex acts into theatrical stages; and then he began to look around for a producer to provide legitimate theater. Basciano found that well-established theater companies did not want to relocate above New York’s most notorious sex parlor; unhoused avant-garde troupes were not so choosy. A group called Collapsible Giraffe began putting on plays in 1998. In the summer of 1999, Aaron Beall, a promoter of what is loosely known as Off-Off Broadway, stumbled into Show World with his girlfriend while three or possibly four sheets to the wind. Already in an impressionable state, Beall was overwhelmed by Show World’s surreal décor—leering clown, carousel figures, coffin—“the circus of death,” as Beall calls it. He had, he decided, found his new home. By October, Beall’s Todo Con Nada theater had replaced Collapsible Giraffe.
I first met Aaron Beall in December 2001. He was sitting in Show World’s black box theater, wearing a scarf and a red nightcap. He was a young man with a middle-aged man’s shapeless tummy, octagonal granny glasses, and a beatific smile—something in between a dime-store Santa and a Jewish leprechaun. Aaron was one of those people who require no encouragement whatsoever to tell his story. “I opened up my first theater in 1989, at 167 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side,” he said, sitting in the darkness of GoGo 1, Show World’s principal theater. “We kept opening up more and more theaters on Ludlow Street—the House of Candles, the Piano Store, the Pink Pony, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.” The theaters were typically named after whatever it was the storefront had done in its previous life. “My basic method of producing plays was, I would sit by the phone and people would call up and say, ‘Can I do a show?’ And I would say yes. We were the epicenter for nineties theater on the Lower East Side. In twelve years we did twenty-five hundred shows.”
I assumed that I had misunderstood and asked, “You mean twenty-five hundred performances?”
Aaron corrected me. “No, individual productions. We had shows at seven, ten, and midnight—three shows a night, and sometimes we did four showlets at midnight. We put on a total of ten thousand performances, with fifteen thousand performers. It was like an explosion of activity.” Aaron and his mates also started up the International Fringe Festival, which mushroomed into the largest theater festival in the United States.
And then Aaron learned a lesson about the relationship between culture and real estate. “We were,” he said, “brought in by a couple of landlords to gentrify the neighborhood.” By the nineties, thanks to people like Aaron, the Lower East Side, which had already evolved from a shtetl to a Hispanic and Asian slum, metamorphosed into Bohemia; and Todo Con Nada—“Everything with Nothing,” a jokey reference to Aaron’s willingness to soldier on with very little outside support—was evicted from one theater after another as the buildings were converted to co-operative apartments. Aaron had also lost control of the Fringe Festival to more mainstream and well-heeled players. “I was experiencing the lessons of capitalism,” he said with a shrug. Aaron accepted the verdict; he did not buy the idea that the avant-garde had to fail the test of the marketplace in order to prove its legitimacy as art. Quite the contrary: Aaron saw himself as the impresario of a burgeoning counterculture he called Alternative Broadway. What’s more, Aaron wasn’t quite the mooncalf he appeared to be. He