In the cavernous interior of New York City’s Park Avenue Armory, The F****ts and Their Friends Between Revolutions, until Dec 14) unfolds on a mostly blank stage. Close your eyes to imbibe its mixture of music, myth, manifesto, and polemic, and it feels like being around a campfire of wry and fantastical incantations.
The performance—adapted from a 1977 book by Larry Mitchell, with illustrations by Ned Asta—feels very much of the Lavender Hill Commune, a queer commune in Ithaca, New York, that Mitchell and Asta were founder members of. F****t—a term of anti-gay abuse that the Daily Beast does not write out in full—is here used as badge of honor and pride, both a warrior word and casual descriptor drained of its homophobic viciousness.
On stage are a group of performers who sing and tell stories of a group of men called “the f****ts” who undergo three revolutions, which leave them variously isolated, energized, and determined to bring down the patriarchy that seeks to control and mold them. Through a kind of vivacious grit, they prevail, victorious over the forces of repression.
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