John Fleck
Mother’s Day is fast approaching and the timing could not be more appropriate for the world premiere of performing artist John Fleck’s latest solo piece Mad Women, which he has created, written and performs under Ric Montejano’s direction.
An incendiary storyteller by nature, and certainly no stranger to artistic controversy, it isn’t wholly surprising that Fleck has chosen motherhood as his topic du jour. After all, whose mother hasn’t been a source of turmoil and angst at some point or another? Fleck also incorporates another maternal figure in his life into the show, the ultimate celebrity mother herself: Judy Garland.
According to Fleck, it all started with some bootleg tapes. “I found all of these tapes of Judy Garland’s last concert in LA at the Coconut Grove, which isn’t a performance that her fans are really familiar with. In a year, she’s going to be dead from a drug overdose. I also have recordings of these rants and raves of hers. In the last year of her life, somebody gave her a microphone because she desperately needed money and they asked her to record her thoughts so they could write a book. The poor dear, she didn’t even know how to use a tape recorder. So she’s trying to figure that out and she gets so wasted she just starts ranting and raving. I compiled these tapes in a loving way and I dramatize the situation.”
Think Looped, the play about Tallulah Bankhead.
The other “mad woman” referenced in the show’s title is John Fleck’s own mother Josephine whose category of madness cuts a bit deeper than booze and pills. “Seven years ago, my mother was in the midst of suffering from Alzheimer’s. One day I sat there with a camera and asked her questions. She didn’t know that camera was on or she wouldn’t talk. So in that sense these tapes are bootleg copies as well. In the tapes, she recalls this incident revolving around Meet Me in St. Louis, a movie Judy Garland was in. From that I recreated this drama me and my Ma had involving my father.”
John Fleck
For Fleck, who openly addresses homosexuality in his solo pieces, this is a story about discovery and survival. “I almost feel like Judy Garland is this goddess type figure. Like the all-consuming, life-giving goddess and her ridiculously divine son Joey Luft and how these mythical features guide Josephine Fleck and her son Johnny on this kind of odyssey.
“It’s a journey, an adventure of survival, and the discovery of existential self. It’s about discovering what it means to be a man but not in the typical sense of the word. It’s an interesting take on how young sons who don’t necessarily fit the WWII-vet dad mold find out what it means to be a man. With the nurturing of his mother and this goddess-figure Judy Garland, Johnny Fleck navigates his way towards becoming his own man.”
As previously mentioned, John Fleck’s work has a history of being controversial, or as Fleck likes to put it, “I’m a footnote in art history books.” In 1990, Fleck’s work garnered national attention when, along with three other performance artists, he became part of what was known as the “NEA 4.”
Labeled “too dirty to be funded” by some political pundits, Fleck and his NEA 4 cohorts spearheaded a national campaign against artistic repression and won their Supreme Court case against the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1998, however, the Supreme Court, backed by the Clinton Administration, overturned part of the case and determined that the so-called “standards of decency” were constitutional. Soon after, the NEA eliminated all funding for new genre categories.
“What’s funny about the whole NEA 4 thing was that we were deemed ‘too obscene’ when I always felt we were championing moral rights, whether it was for women or gender identity, and pushing past religious and cultural limitations. It was never about obscenity for us. We were always coming from a humanist point of view.”
John Fleck
According to Fleck, the 1990s seem like forever ago in terms of what we now deem as “decent” or “acceptable.” He says, “With the advent of reality TV, it’s hard to even say what is controversial anymore. When you’ve got Kim Kardashian selling Sketchers tennis shoes while she’s releasing her porno tape, where is the line drawn?”
There was time when to be a solo artist meant you were venturing off the grid of conventional, scripted theater. A time when breaking down that fourth wall was a gesture of significant exposure and risk for both the performer as well as the audience. However, as Fleck points out, “The difference in solo performance today from what it was in the ’90s is that everybody’s got a one-person show.” Everybody wants to be a star and there is no such thing as too much information. Whether or not this can be deemed as “progress” remains to be seen.
In terms of barriers that still need to be crossed and artistic oppression that needs to be overcome, Fleck sees ending discrimination as the final frontier, a battle currently being waged by any artist dealing with the topic of sexuality and gender equality. “I’m still a believer in justice. In my work, I like to make people reflect a little bit on that. I don’t want to hit anyone over the head with it but just to look at humanity from different angles. Like Harriet Truman once said, ‘One man’s profanity is another man’s religion.’ So let’s not be too quick in these days of right and left and right and wrong to assign labels that something has to be just one way. We need to look at the whole picture.”
Production Photography by Ed Krieger
Mad Women, presented by the Katselas Theatre Company, opens May 4; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; through May 27. The performance is 50 minutes long with no intermission. Tickets: $20. Skylight Theatre Skylab, 1816 N. Vermont, Los Angeles; 702-582-8587 or katselastheatre.com.
