Frank Maya blazed a trail for queer artists in the 1980s and 1990s, becoming the first openly gay stand-up comedian to appear on MTV’s “Half-Hour Comedy Hour.” He gave performances at offbeat venues like La Mama Experimental Theatre Club in New York, and he crossed over to the mainstream with a special on Comedy Central.
Maya’s pathbreaking career ended in 1995, when he died of an AIDS-related illness at the age of 45. Like many brilliant artists who perished in the epidemic, his name has been somewhat lost to history.
Morgan Bassichis would like to change that. The queer, nonbinary artist crafted “Can I Be Frank?,” a performance piece that pays tribute to Maya, while also incorporating original material from Maya’s 1987 work “Frank Maya Talks.” After performing the piece at La Mama in June, Bassichis is bringing it to the stage of the Wilma Theater Oct. 25-26.
“He left a huge body of work that didn’t necessarily get passed down, because like so many artists who died of AIDS, his name didn’t make it to future generations,” Bassichis said of Maya.
When Bassichis first discovered Maya, they said they felt “an eerie, cosmic kinship” to his work. “The entire process has been very cosmic,” they said. “I only found out about him kind of randomly, through meeting his brother, and then finding out after that meeting that I had all these other connections to him. We’ve performed in the same rooms, and we’ve shared an overlapping artistic trajectory. Even some of our songs and jokes sound a lot like each other.”
Although Maya died nearly 30 years ago, his individual voice still feels strongly contemporary to Bassichis. “It was amazing for me to encounter this artist whose work felt so present-day and resonant with my own,” they said. “I became obsessed with him, and this show is a kind of product of that obsession.”
Bassichis spent a year-and-a-half studying Maya’s material before they conceptualized “Can I Be Frank?” They expressed gratitude to the intrepid fans and archivists who preserved Maya’s work so that younger artists could still engage with it today.
“Luckily, there was video that was uploaded to the internet by Neil Greenberg, an amazing choreographer whom I knew previously, but who I found out was Frank’s former boyfriend,” Bassichis said. “He’s one of the many people who has tried to keep his legacy alive for many years. I tried to really track the themes and structure of his material, and I landed on this one particular show that he did in 1987. I also talked to many people who knew him and loved him — I interviewed about 30 of his friends, loved ones, collaborators, exes and colleagues in the scene at the time. It was great to get their memories and find out what he meant to them.”
One way that Maya seems ahead of his time, Bassichis noted, is the blurred line between performance art and stand-up comedy, especially in the contemporary queer and alt comedy scenes. They mentioned that the first time they posted a clip of Maya performing on social media, a friend within the queer comedy world sent a message asking how to book him for an upcoming show, not realizing he was long dead.
“Some of the more interesting performance art is coming out of comedy spaces right now, and he was absolutely blurring those lines,” they said. “He was throwing a lot of pasta at the wall. He was trying everything: he made pop songs, he had a choir, he did performance-art monologues that he called ‘rants.’ Eventually he was like, ‘Oh, I think this is stand-up,’ and he tried to make a pivot into that.”
Bassichis’s performances in Philadelphia are sponsored in part by the University of Pennsylvania, and they will meet with students in advance of the local run. With the overall endeavor, Bassichis seeks to promote Maya’s legacy and ensure that future queer artists will remember an important forebear.
“I had never heard his name,” Bassichis said. “He’s not even listed on the Wikipedia page for queer comedians. My hope with this show is that he gets in the record.”
“Can I Be Frank?” will be performed on Oct. 25-26 at the Wilma Theater, 265 S. Broad St. For tickets and information, visit wilmatheater.org.