HOLY QUEER HORROR! IT’S JOEY MERLO
Joey Merlo may be best known (so far) for his On Set with Theda Bara, a “haunting and refreshingly funny fever dream” (Vulture), a one-man play starring David Greenspan — who also stars in the third play of the trilogy Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond the Closet!!! Currently the artist-in-residence at the William Steeple Davis House in Orient, NY, Joey is a theater maker and educator who has worked all over the world, including Greece, Peru and Ghana, where, in collaboration with Ghanian activists and students, he filmed a documentary on the illegality of homosexuality called Voices. In New York, Joey is a New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellow and a former artist-in-residence at Abingdon Theater Company. Joey has been awarded grants from The Puffin Foundation, NYSCA, and The Merchant/Ivory Foundation. Joey earned a BFA from NYU, Tisch’s Experimental Theater Wing, and an MFA from Brooklyn College.
Stage and Cinema’s Gregory Fletcher spoke with Joey about his dark, spooky, sexy, tragic-comic plays (and drag vamp) that make up the theatrical evening at the Tank on West 36th Street, now playing through June 23, 2024.
GREGORY FLETCHER: Were the three one-act plays written to be performed in one evening of theatre, or have they had previous debuts as individual plays?
JOEY MERLO: Yes, to both. They were written to be a part of one evening. I wrote them in order, and the first one-act Chair was a part of Mac Wellman’s Weasel Festival at Brooklyn College. It’s a festival where graduating MFA students present a play based on prompts from the previous year. I had this really weird dream where I was watching a couple (very much like the couple in the play) in the Lower East Side, and they find this chair made out of skin with dry patches, freckles, and veins, and they take it home. And in the dream, I remember watching the chair transforming into this creature, and I woke up really frightened. And then I wrote that play, and at the time I was thinking a lot about polyamory because of relationships in my own life, so maybe it was a subconscious reaction to that, I don’t know. I gave it to my very good friends, Rebecca Robertson and Curtis Gillen who are in the play. They’re an actual couple in real life, and I thought it was kind of diabolical and fun to cast them. I knew they’d have great chemistry. The MFA directors were sent our plays, and they had to pick which one they wanted to direct. I connected with Nick Brown, and that play was fully produced as a part of the Weasel Festival. Around the time that we were rehearsing [two years ago] I was thinking about having an evening of queer horror and realized Chair would be the perfect start for a trilogy.
FLETCHER: Were you interested in horror as a kid?
MERLO: I was always interested in Elvira (the midnight host) and Tales from the Crypt, which became my framing device for the three one-acts. Pretty early on, I knew that there was gonna be some kind of Elvira as vamp with a skeleton or skull sidekick. Then I wrote the second one-act, Daddy’s Girl, and more recently, the final one-act Alone Again. Then I focused on the frame and wrote the drag act.
Charlene Incarnate a.k.a. Midnight Coleslaw (Michelle Watt)
FLETCHER: Midnight Coleslaw [played by OUT100’s 2019 Showgirl of the Year, Charlene Incarnate] makes the perfect queer version of Elvira to host the evening and vamp in between the plays. She’s sexy, fierce, and no-holds-barred. Did you write her dialogue and repartee?
MERLO: Charlene Incarnate is incredible in drag, a young drag legend. She’s at the forefront of avant-garde drag and doing some really interesting new things. But the drag star Midnight Coleslaw is riffing on an old school drag, like Lady Bunny. Though clearly Charlene brings her own personality to the character. I told her, “If you don’t like any of these jokes, I can rewrite them or you can improv. And if you don’t like the songs I’ve picked for your numbers, you can change them.” I’m not going to tell a queen what songs she has to dance to.
John William Watkins, Charlene Incarnate, Priscilla Flore
FLETCHER: The music was great throughout. So much fun.
MERLO: I have a history working in nightlife. I used to be a gay club promoter and that’s kind of how I made money during college. I suddenly found myself in this world of drag and nightlife. It’s something I know; a world I know. I was very happy that Charlene thought I got it right and thought that the drag was spot on. For the most part, she really does stick to what I’ve written. And she liked all the songs too. She’s done all her own choreography for those, and Nick staged it. Even Amando Houser, who’s a brilliant comedian and clown who plays Boner, Midnight’s sidekick, they’re getting more and more comfortable with each other, with more and more moments of improv and playfulness between them. I wanted it to feel organic with those two—spontaneous. Charlene is a wild card performer, and that’s what’s so exciting about watching her—you never know what she’s going to do next. And I wanted to create space for that. Which allows her to surprise us.
Charlene Incarnate, Amando Houser
FLETCHER: Yeah, I love Boner—the character—they are the perfect “straight man” so to speak; though, that’s a term that probably needs to be updated. But Boner’s awkwardness and often expressionless face was hilarious. They didn’t have to do too much to get a laugh. Please enlighten me regarding something you said earlier about drag. When someone has completed the transition of physically becoming a woman—and Charlene Incarnate is clearly a very beautiful woman—would we still refer to her as drag? I always thought drag meant when men were dressing up as women (or when women dressed as men). But she really is a woman, so is she still doing drag? Sorry if I’m old, maybe I won’t include this part in the interview.
MERLO: You should include it because it’s a question that I think a lot of people have. You know, there was a lot of stigma around trans women doing drag. I actually don’t watch RuPaul’s Drag Race, but I remember there was controversy when they didn’t want trans women on the show. But drag is more about gender and playing with gender and expressions of femininity. It’s about gender as performance. As a result, it also transcends gender. This is also something that Charlene is at the forefront of because she won’t wear a wig. You know, Charlene’s not going to do the kind of drag that we sometimes see as more of a caricature. Charlene is a very sexy person and brings that into her drag. But drag is about the performance of femininity. Whether you’re a cis woman or a trans woman or a gay or straight man, it’s about how you’re performing gender. Charlene is an incredible talent when it comes to how she is performing and how she is creating this mystique. Is it wrong for a trans woman to be doing drag..? Of course not, I think that’s a misconception. Mind you, I said doing drag, not in drag, which would be very offensive to say. But a trans woman can certainly do drag, yes.
Curtis Gillen, Rebecca Robertson
FLETCHER: Thanks for that. Furniture plays a special part in each play. I love how you used a plain chair that doesn’t try to look like the one described. Our mind’s eye allows us to see better than any craftsman could’ve dressed.
MERLO: I was very explicit about it not being the chair described. Just a regular piece of furniture that the audience could project onto. I was interested in the audience being able to create this monster in their mind. I, of course, give them the language to do so. And because I was riffing off of vaudeville; a simple piece of furniture that could transcend what it was made for, and be used in fun, exciting ways. And they’re doing all this choreography with it. If you get the metaphor for what the play is talking about, it’s a Poly Horror about this third wheel coming into this heteronormative couple’s relationship. In society, we often create our own monsters, and sometimes we create monsters that don’t really exist. Queer folks have been the monsters of society for a very long time, and a lot of villains and monsters have been queer coded through our theater and cinema history. In that way, it’s also a metaphor, and this couple is seeing this monstrous thing that’s transforming before their eyes, but really it’s just about how they’re looking at it, and it’s about the limitations of their own perspective. And it’s about actually what’s being projected from their own subconsciousness. It’s not literally the monster that they are making it out to be, but it’s always a reflection of the person of the viewer. I wanted to explore that in the play.
David Greenspan
FLETCHER: The third play features a 10-minute monologue by the theater treasure David Greenspan. I read in your bio that you’ve worked together once before.
MERLO: Recently in fact, last February He starred in my one person play On Set With Theda Bara where he played four characters, staged around a long 40-foot long table in a kind of seance production. The audience sat around the table. David was inches away from the audience.
FLETCHER: I read in the press info that Haley Joel Osment is joining the cast in the last few performances. I’m wondering which role will he be playing?
MERLO: Which role do you think? Which role would you cast him in?
John William Watkins, Jan Leslie Harding, Priscilla Flores
FLETCHER: Well, if he’s mid-30s by now, he’s too young for the elderly man in play # 3 (which you wrote as 69!) and too young for the dead dad that haunts his lesbian daughter in play # 2. And surely he’s not playing Midnight Coleslaw—so I’d have to say the straight husband in play # 1.
MERLO: You’re right.
FLETCHER: How did casting him come about?
MERLO: He and I went to school together at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU Tisch. We loved working together, and we developed a friendship through the years and have remained friends. I’ve shared work with Haley. I sent him Chair and the video from the Weasel Festival two years ago, so he’s known about it for a long time now. The timing worked out because Curtis is one of the composers of the Broadway musical Water for Elephants. He’s doing our show the day of the Tonys and then running uptown to the awards ceremony. A lot of our cast members are incredibly talented and very busy working. So, lots of favors are being offered and we have to be as accommodating as possible. When Curtis had a conflict for the last few performances, I called and asked Haley, and he was like, “Yeah, dude, totally.”
Haley Joel Osment from forthcoming photo book benefiting @wagsandwalks
photo by Charlie Nunn PhotographyFLETCHER: He’s a New Yorker?
MERLO: No, he’s in LA, but he’ll be here, but not until right before. David Greenspan also came in only two days before we opened. And that was because another actor had been cast and had to leave the show for unexpected reasons. I called David in an emergency situation, and I was like, “Is there any way you can step in and do this?” David was very busy and said, “I don’t know, Joey, I just don’t know if I can swing it.” I told him that it was a ten-minute solo piece, and that he could do his own thing in a chair, whatever it takes. David is so brilliant with gesture and with creating a character that I wasn’t worried about any of that. I knew if he said yes, he’d be one of the only people who could come in and make it brilliant in two days. We threw him into our second day of tech. And he made it happen.
FLETCHER: How nice that you can pick up the phone and solve any casting issue.
MERLO: I feel very lucky to have actors like him in my life.
John William Watkins, Priscilla Flores, Curtis Gillen, David Greenspan,
Charlene Incarnate, Amando Houser, Jan Leslie Harding, Rebecca Robertson
FLETCHER: What do you hope audiences will walk away with from this camp, creepy, tragic-comic evening?
MERLO: I hope that they’re exhilarated; I hope that they’re inspired. These are things that people have told me they’re feeling, which I think is a good sign. I want to make people feel joy and a sense of awe, and I want them to feel disgusted and question that disgust. With queer horror, it’s very interesting because, like I was saying earlier, many of our villains and monsters have been queer coded. Like the 1970 slasher films that I grew up with and that I loved watching when I was younger (Prom Night and Sleep Away Camp).
At the end, spoiler alert, it’s a trans person who’s the monster. Even like Silence of the Lambs, I want to turn that on its head and give queer audiences a chance to look at stories and to see what truly is scary to them. To get a chance to have horror stories that are more relatable and that will resonate with them. I want straight audiences to question what they’re scared of and why. It’s this, you know, heteronormativity that’s the monster in this play. And it usually never gets to be the monster. What happens when we’re looking at it through this different lens? It’s subversive because yes, it’s campy, funny, and there’s a lot of spectacle. But it actually goes very deep to dark places. I think the best horror gets under your skin in that way and pulls out something from your subconscious. Hopefully, this play will allow people to question what they’re afraid of and why they’re afraid of it. And to recontextualize it through the framing of these plays.
FLETCHER: What’s coming up next for you?
MERLO: I’ll be having a public showing of a new play at Theater Lab sometime this winter.
FLETCHER: A full-length play?
MERLO: It will be, yes.
FLETCHER: I’m excited to see where all your success takes you. Congratulations and enjoy the ride!
Joyce Lai (sets), Euxuan Ong (projections), Michela Micalizio (puppet design)
production photos by Richard Termine
photo of Joey Merlo by Peter Bellamy
follow Joey on Instagram @JoeJoeMerlo
Midnight Coleslaw’s Tales from Beyond The Closet!!!
The Tank, 312 West 36th St
85 minutes with no intermission
Thurs-Sun at 7; in addition, Fri June 21 at 10:30 and June 16 and 22 at 3
for tickets ($25-$75), call 212.563.6269 or visit The Tank