Before publishing his celebrated first novel, Horse Crazy, in 1987, Gary Indiana wrote and directed twelve plays for an informal company whose performers included the painter Bill Rice, composer Evan Lurie, the poet George-Therese Dickenson, writer and film actress Cookie Mueller, Warhol superstar and painter Viva, writer Victoria Pedersen, singer/actress Sharon Niesp, photographer Allen Frame, the legendary Taylor Mead, novelist Larry Mitchell, and others. Performed at the Mudd Club, Club 57, The Performing Garage, and Bill Rice's E. 3rd Street studio, Indiana's plays offered a kind of community theater for New York's underground.
This volume presents highlights of that repertoire, including Alligator Girls Go to College, The Roman Polanski Story, and Indiana's script for Michel Auder's videofilm A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, accompanied by archival performance photographs and selections from Indiana's contemporaneous journals and poems. These hilarious, incisive writings and scripts evoke a vivid and accurate portrait of writers and artists in the lower Manhattan of the 1980s—arguably America's last avant-garde—and anticipates Indiana's impressive subsequent literary career.
... this collection's thirty-five-year coverage is a strong starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the author's work.
—Rain Taxi Review of Books—Last Seen makes for both a noteworthy survey of Indiana's work and a testimony of the raw, urgent beauty of the seventies and eighties art scenes in Los Angeles and Manhattan.... Last Seen is, ultimately, an important clarion call by a charismatic and candid voice.
—Review of Contemporary Fiction—Before publishing his celebrated first novel, Horse Crazy, in 1987, Gary Indiana wrote and directed twelve plays for an informal company whose performers included the painter Bill Rice, composer Evan Lurie, the poet George-Therese Dickenson, writer and film actress Cookie Mueller, Warhol superstar and painter Viva, writer Victoria Pedersen, singer/actress Sharon Niesp, photographer Allen Frame, the legendary Taylor Mead, novelist Larry Mitchell, and others. Performed at the Mudd Club, Club 57, The Performing Garage, and Bill Rice's E. 3rd Street studio, Indiana's plays offered a kind of community theater for New York's underground.
This volume presents highlights of that repertoire, including Alligator Girls Go to College, The Roman Polanski Story, and Indiana's script for Michel Auder's videofilm A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, accompanied by archival performance photographs and selections from Indiana's contemporaneous journals and poems. These hilarious, incisive writings and scripts evoke a vivid and accurate portrait of writers and artists in the lower Manhattan of the 1980s—arguably America's last avant-garde—and anticipates Indiana's impressive subsequent literary career.
... this collection's thirty-five-year coverage is a strong starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the author's work.
—Rain Taxi Review of Books—Last Seen makes for both a noteworthy survey of Indiana's work and a testimony of the raw, urgent beauty of the seventies and eighties art scenes in Los Angeles and Manhattan.... Last Seen is, ultimately, an important clarion call by a charismatic and candid voice.
—Review of Contemporary Fiction—
