"As much as I get off to gay porn, I really do consider it to be a form of theater."
By Brandon Voss
Divine, the cross-dressing gay prostitute from Jean Genet’s controversial 1943 novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, blooms anew in Yvan Greenberg's psychosexual melodrama Genet Porno. The multimedia theater piece, which runs through September 26 at Here Arts Center, stages the story with the help of a real-life contemporary porn star's confessional vlog. Greenberg, who stars in the piece with Oleg Dubson and Joe Joseph, talks about communing with gay ghosts and provoking audiences with his questionable queer taste.
Next: Tell me about Divine and what drew you to her.
Yvan Greenberg: Genet created a really wonderful and complex character with Divine. It should be noted that in the novel Our Lady of the Flowers, a character named Jean Genet is in prison, making up stories to pass the time and jerk off to. All fantasies, they don’t actually exist as real people. Genet Porno doesn’t really deal with this aspect of the novel, but the fact that Divine and the other characters in the novel are jerk-off fantasies is interesting to note given the themes of the show. To me, Divine is one of those classic tragic figures, maybe even somewhat like Blanche from Streetcar Named Desire, who lives a bit in her own fantasy world, and who is too fragile for real life. Divine is continually betrayed by the men she desires — but this is partly her own doing. She thinks she falls in love with these men, but it’s not really love; it’s a kind of false desire. These men are all of an archetypal type — idealized masculinity, narcissistic, transient — who will never truly love her and will always end up abandoning her. So Divine constantly sets herself up for betrayal. In effect, she betrays herself.
What inspired you to stage this story within the context of contemporary gay porn?
Porn has always been really fascinating to me — in many ways! I love gay porn as something to get off to. But also, as an artist, I think porn may actually be the most interesting theater that exists. Porn became a lens for me to look through to figure out how to create a piece based on the novel. I started thinking about how Genet’s novel is incredibly sexually explicit — and was considered pornography for a long time after it was first published. It created all these interesting comparison points between gay porn now versus this novel from 1943. The kind of work I create is very based in the techniques of collage and appropriation, so these two source materials — the novel and the porn star video blog — actually sit side-by-side with each other in the show, sometimes uneasily, and sometimes collide with each other. But the show isn’t really about porn. The show is really about what happens when we expose ourselves, when we willfully shed our privacy, and what happens when we blur the boundaries of our public and private lives. This is something now that we are all constantly doing online via social media.
Do you see Genet Porno as primarily for a gay audience — or is one of your goals to challenge a mainstream theatergoing audience?
Genet Porno may appeal more to gay audiences, but I think the deeper themes of the show would resonate with a broad cross-section of the public. It’s an incredibly moving and emotional show. That said, not only is the show pretty homosexually explicit, it’s also experimental theater. I see it as my job as an artist to challenge everyone in the audience, whether they are gay, straight, mainstream, etc. I’ve been told by others that I have an adversarial relationship to audience. [Laughs] But I don’t think that’s true. When I’m an audience member, I like to be challenged and provoked. I don’t want to be spoon-fed anything. As a director, I’m making shows that I would want to go and see myself, of course!
How does your own queer identity inform this piece?
At some point while creating Genet Porno, I realized that I had been in the process of creating works based on gay artists of the past who I felt a kind of kinship with. The previous piece I created was based on a novel by William S. Burroughs. This piece works with Jean Genet. The next piece I want to make will likely tackle Andy Warhol and the group of gay speed-freaks who inhabited his Silver Factory world. All three of these figures were really incredibly radical in their individual ways, and all three occupying a place very much outside the mainstream of culture. I think this series of pieces I’m making is my attempt to commune with the ghosts of these gay artists from the past who have influenced how I think of myself both as an artist and as a queer man. My identity as a queer man, my politics — pretty radical left — and my spirituality are all bound up together in my aesthetics and how I go about art-making.
How racy does the show get? And in exploring the gay porn world, how do you find the balance between art and smut?
The language in the show is very explicit, and there are a handful of gay sex porn-shoot scenes. There’s no actual sex happening during the performance. After all, porn isn’t really like real-life sex. Porn is a completely choreographed and constructed thing, not only during the filming of it, but then in the editing room too. So the sex scenes in the show are more like dance than anything else. That said, it’s incredibly racy and raunchy — partly, perhaps, because the theater is quite intimate in size. But in work-in-progress performances of the show, we have had audience members walk out because they felt it was so explicit. As I said before, as much as I get off to gay porn, I really do consider it to be a form of theater. I don’t really see things in terms of “low art” and “high art” — anything is fair game. Many people will tell you that I have somewhat questionable taste! But really, I think things get much more interesting and exciting when different kinds of materials are rubbing against each other. Friction is exciting.
Next, September 2015.
Photo: Paula Court