Building on years of archival, oral, and site-specific research, Giulia Palladini's The Scene of Foreplay impressively reexamines icons of 1960s New York City performance art—including Penny Arcade, Jackie Curtis, Tom Eyen, Ruby Lynn Reyner, Ellen Stewart, Jack Smith, Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro, and Andy Warhol—through the theoretical lens of “‘foreplay’” (4). Palladini redefines foreplay as a “labor of pleasure” (4) and argues that these artists, who are already well documented in performance scholarship, may be reconsidered by thinking about their work as sites of anticapitalist activism, where successful labor is valued not by monetary gain but by the formation of communities that actualize queer kinship. The author suggests that this approach paved the way for distinct sorts of performance to take shape as a kind of underground “‘scene’” (4), moved by a shared desire for a more inclusive world.
Even as the subsequent chapters successfully paint pictures of this scene, the most vivid portraits are found in the brief but colorful vignettes that open the volume. Palladini's application of theories by queer scholars varies widely across this book, but the text that clearly provided the most inspiration is the late José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia (2009), which Palladini extends in the Introduction through a Marxist lens. Although riffing on Muñoz to unpack LGBTQ+ artists is hardly groundbreaking (and, indeed, is found at the core of many books printed in the past five years on queer American performance), Palladini's intervention is in her unique approach to audience consumption as another kind of distinct, unproductive work. Following this model, she shifts the notion of capitalist exchange value beyond the monetary to the sociocultural. More simply, she argues that the artists under consideration blurred the line between labor and leisure and between professional and amateur, which led to the creation of spaces that venerated queerness as a mode of expressive, countercultural production. Although this concept is complex, Palladini's elegant prose brings her concept of foreplay vividly to life, even if it is never completely clear how she is using the unfixed term queer.
Following the Introduction, in “Interlude I” Palladini defines the “underground” as a general disregard for “agendas,” even as she also illuminates her important ethnographic research with theatrical legends like Ellen Stewart, founder of La MaMa (26). Chapter 1 then introduces the concept of process as “show-idleness,” by demonstrating how the work of Tom Eyen and, more substantially, Jack Smith forged experimental performance making as a craft, drawn from the refuse of the streets and the detritus of cultural norms (21). Palladini cleverly mashes together Jerzy Grotowski's and Richard Schechner's writings from the 1960s with Walter Benjamin's theory of “idleness,” elevating Eyen and Smith's contribution as putting into practice a model of stylized amateurishness (22). This work, which rejects the time-centered demands of performance events intended to make a profit, inherently critiques capitalistic labor and markets by embracing failure as a systematic, queer approach.
The second chapter, dedicated to the collaborative relationship among Vaccaro, Smith, Reyner, Curtis, and Tavel, fills a gap in theatre scholarship by reconsidering the early practitioners of the Ridiculous theatre beyond the arguably more celebrated Charles Ludlam. Palladini maps Vaccaro's metamorphosis of amateurism into a style by tracing its history back to vaudeville and the freak shows of Coney Island. This transhistorical approach corroborates the notion that the queering of labor as leisure predates the 1960s and inspired Vaccaro's application of “unproductivity” to combat the normalizing dilution of underground culture (93). Even as the background “scene” of this world is stitched together seamlessly, Palladini might have spent more time describing Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit (1976), Vaccaro's production of Curtis's play on which the chapter is based.
Palladini continues her methodological approach to transhistoricism by extending her queer subjects into the present and by following her chapter on Vaccaro with “Interlude II” on Penny Arcade. The author reads Arcade as an extension of midcentury performance work, demonstrating how her approach maintains the scene of foreplay as “a continuing climax” (111). This section feels especially poignant as Arcade, currently known as the den mother of downtown queer performance, is about to revive her best-known work, Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!, originally created in 1990. This revival exemplifies Palladini's concept of the potential of queer temporality to act as an ongoing queer resistance, but admittedly it is a bit surprising that Jack Halberstam, arguably the doyen of queering temporality, is mentioned only in passing (9).
Stewart and Jackie Curtis are the focus of Chapter 3, which cleverly unpacks how their unique approaches to quotidian performance, beyond the stage or screen, forwarded dual persona making. By simultaneously hovering between the theatrical world and the street, both artists successfully weaved in and out of normative culture, forging political allies through the formation of community rather than the kind of oppositional protest at the core of Gay Liberation.
A fresh investigation of Andy Warhol, arguably the most notorious figure of the underground scene in 1960s New York, inspires the final chapter. By reexamining Screen Tests (1964–6), hundreds of film shorts featuring well-known celebrities of the period (including Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, and Dennis Hopper), Palladini reevaluates the reels as harbingers of finalized films that do not and were never intended to exist. This chapter presents the trickiest example of foreplay sketched out in the book. It acutely illustrates Palladini's notion of foreplay as a gesture of queerness that exists primarily for the pleasure of its creation rather than its marketability; however, a more extended consideration of Warhol's well-documented abuse of subjects for personal financial gain, as his own celebrity status inflated, would further elucidate the complexities of Palladini's argument about art and capitalism.
By infusing a comprehensive European-style approach to theory with lively writing and a queer American irreverence toward linear structure, The Scene of Foreplay bodes well for the future of Patrick Anderson and Nicholas Ridout's Performance Works book series, which is dedicated to the material conditions of theatre and performance and which aims to foster new intersectional and interdisciplinary conversations inspired by contemporary theory.
