Reza Abdoh

The impact of wunderkind theatre director Reza Abdoh's explosive work is finally brought to light twenty years after his death of AIDS, with live performance footage and interviews with those closest to him.

The world premiere in 1990 of an avant-garde, queer retelling of the myth of Orpheus (Tommy) and Eurydice (Dora Lee), focusing on an antagonistic couple who find themselves exploited by Orpheus's overbearing and sexually-predatory boss.

The world premiere in 1990 of an avant-garde, queer retelling of the myth of Orpheus (Tommy) and Eurydice (Dora Lee), focusing on an antagonistic couple who find themselves exploited by Orpheus's overbearing and sexually-predatory boss.

Staged in a loft on Lafayette Street, across from the Public Theatre, the piece used the film adaptation of Kyle Onstott’s 1957 novel, “Mandingo,” as its primary script. Sitting on cushions on the floor, audience members had to crane their necks to see the proceedings. Enter Moishe Pipik (the amazing Tony Torn), a long-nosed Jewish character in a huckster’s checked suit. When he pisses in a pot of earth, a money tree springs up. Moishe has a friend, Blaster, a black teen-age junkie and drug dealer. They’re refugees, in a sense—racist and anti-Semitic parodies of Jewish liberal identification with blackness. Sometimes they hang out as if they were on a talk show, their chatter intercut with all that “Mandingo” mess, Mandingo’s black phallus looming in the minds of the white people who constructed their dream of an antebellum South on black backs.

In 1992, Reza Abdoh wrote and directed a movie called The Blind Owl. It uses many of the actors who have come to constitute the Dar A Luz company, including Tony Torn, Tom Fitzpatrick, Juliana Francis, and Tom Pearl. It will disappoint those who approach it looking for a film analogue of the “faster and louder” aesthetic that critics have used to characterize much of Abdoh’s stage work. The Blind Owl does use a variety of techniques reminiscent of his stage direction, giving it an unusual theatricality.

"The Law of Remains" is a blood-soaked pageant of contemporary Grand Guignol depicting mass murder, sexual mutilation, necrophilia and cannibalism simulated by actors portraying the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (named Jeffrey Snarling in the script) and Andy Warhol and his entourage. The work is divided into seven scenes, scattered over two floors of the hotel, that are intended to trace the soul's journey as described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

In 1992, Reza Abdoh wrote and directed a movie called The Blind Owl. It uses many of the actors who have come to constitute the Dar A Luz company, including Tony Torn, Tom Fitzpatrick, Juliana Francis, and Tom Pearl. It will disappoint those who approach it looking for a film analogue of the “faster and louder” aesthetic that critics have used to characterize much of Abdoh’s stage work. The Blind Owl does use a variety of techniques reminiscent of his stage direction, giving it an unusual theatricality.

A raucous, angry exorcism of relationships and assorted fears, shadowed by the Big One: the plague of AIDS.

An avant-garde video film short in which actors in various languages, states of dress and undress, standing or lying prone, pontificate about Geraldo Rivera's interview with Charles Manson (as well as the Greek myth of Medea), chopped and edited with off-screen directions and asides by the filmmakers and crew, to a state of borderline incomprehensibility.