Photo by Albie Mitchell
Downtown oracle Penny Arcade is presenting a series of memoir shows called The Art of Becoming, so I spoke to her right after Episode 3 got extended at Joe’s Pub. While I had a list of questions going into the interview, Arcade has lived a storied life, so I thought it best to just let her flow for most of our time together. We talked about her origins as a performer, her childhood, and her latest show.
Hi, Penny! I’ve been a fan for more than two decades and I’m delighted to be talking to you today. Tell me about The Art of Becoming.
Well, I’ve been involved in creating new forms since 1968. I started out with The Playhouse of the Ridiculous, which was the original rock and roll, political, queer theatre that totally broke away from theatre and invented what’s now called performance. Then in the ‘70s I went to Europe and got involved in all different kinds of theatre. Then in the ‘80s I came back to New York and I was involved in the first wave of performance art, and then spoken word. In the late ‘80s I started creating my own work where I took basic elements that I had gotten from The Playhouse of the Ridiculous and experimental theatre that I grew up doing, and then created my own versions of that. I’ve written 16 full-length plays and I’ve brought that work all over the world, so I’ve influenced a lot of people—younger artists. You know, everyone’s a younger artist than me at this point.
I’m 73 and everybody’s wanted me to write my memoirs since I was 18-years-old. And then I realized I should really write my memoirs because I’m starting to forget things. I was considered the memory of my generation. People depended on me, because I had that kind of didactic [sic] memory where I would remember conversations, and I would remember who was there, etc. Which is how I got into Martin Scorsese’s film about the New York Dolls and about David Johansen, because David invited me—it was, like, two shoots at the Carlyle. The first night, he started telling the story about being at Max’s [Kansas City] in 1970 and he told this whole story about being with International Velvet, who was an early, early superstar, and that she was popping Tuinals. Afterwards I went up to him and I said, “I was sitting there.” I said, “that wasn’t International Velvet—we didn’t know International Velvet.” ‘Cause he’s the same age as me. I’m like, “we would have been 12 when she worked with [Andy] Warhol.” I said, “that was Ingrid Superstar and this film’s gonna get sued.” ‘Cause she’s an uptown lady. You know, you just can’t say somebody was popping Tuinals in a film. So, I’ve been that person. Then I was starting to realize that parts of my memory were disappearing.
The reason I was writing it was because I wanted to find out how I became who I am. Quentin Crisp once told me (in an affected accent), “Miss Arcade, everyone should write one book and that book should be about themselves.” So, I was kind of bored about writing, because I know all the stories. I know what happened. One of the main reasons I wanted to write it was I’ve been so misrepresented while I’ve been alive, beginning when I was a teenager, that I didn’t want anyone to have the last work about me. I’ve also watched what’s happened with history. I’ve watched people be reinvented. I’ve watched Marsha P. Johnson be made into a transwoman when she was never trans. She was a queen. I’ve watched Jackie Curtis, who was the most influential person in performance and gender, be completely erased. So, I know that they can’t wait ‘til you’re dead to, like, fuck with you—to use you for their own agenda. So, that was the main reason, besides wanting to know, “wow, how did I become who I am?” Because this is not who I started out as.
About three years ago, Steve [Zehentner], my long-time collaborator of 33 years, noticed that I wasn’t galloping forward with this memoir. And he said, “listen why don’t we do a show?” And I went, “yeah, and let’s make it a musical!” Because the truth is that, first of all, I’ve always been a performer. Since 1989, I’ve done autobiography. Before that, all my work was biographical—I used to become other people in the ‘80s, work you’ve never seen, but all character work.
Originally my first show of my own work was at St Mark’s Poetry Project. I mean, I was known as an experimental actress up to that point. Chris Kraus at the Poetry Project asked me to do a performance, because she said, “well, I hear that you write your own parts in other people’s plays.” And I had been doing that. People had been asking me to do that. So, I did this one night show, and Ethyl Eichelberger saw it and called up Mark Russell and said, “she’s a genius, you should book her before anybody else does.” And Mark booked me, was gonna give me two weeks, and then he met me and didn’t like me very much. He asked me about the Warhol scene. I said it was boring. So, he thought that I was, you know, didn’t think he was cool enough to know how cool the Warhol scene was, when it was really boring. I mean, I left. How cool could it be, you know? At any rate, he gave me one week and I did four shows.
So, the thing with performing and being someone who’s always spoken directly to the audience, which I started doing in 1986, is that you can sense what people are feeling in the room and you can address that. You can’t do that in a book—it’s written down. Somebody’s gonna read that and they can have their own idea of what I’m saying. I of course glommed onto Steve’s suggestion that we do it as a performance. So, it’s a nine episodic series, and I’m reinventing the memoir. And it’s super fun. It’s very hard to do. To choose these important moments that are not just important to my life, but that will be of use. I’ve always followed the Jack Smith adage of “could art ever be useful.” For me, my work being useful is very important to me, and it’s very important to the audience.
The audience has always told me that they come to see me because, through some metaphysical connection, there’s always something in my work that speaks to them that they need. And you know, I used to give my phone number out to the whole audience. Now I give my email out to the whole audience. But people would call me and say, “I need a Penny Arcade show—I’m going through shit, you need to do a show.” So, I’ve always had that very important relationship with the audience, and that’s why my audiences are so phenomenal. When you come to one of my shows, pretty much you’re gonna like everyone who’s there. Not everybody likes me, but everybody who likes my work likes me and they’re all very similar to me. So, we tend to be eclectic, open-minded, not thin-skinned, able to go up the rough side of the mountain, able to experience difficult things, and to find the laughter loophole in every tragedy, as Patti Smith once said about me.
So, I’ve done Episode 3. I decided to start with Episode 3, which is Superstar Interrupted: 1967-1974. Because now that I’ve lived my whole life, I was very curious about why I actually left New York when I was becoming famous in 1971.
I have also had that question, so I’m curious to know the answer.
Because I’m somebody who—I didn’t come to New York to be an artist. I washed up on the shores of New York. I had already a very checkered background. I’m from an immigrant Italian background and, as I point out in the show, when you’re born in the country your parents immigrate to, you’re an outsider in your own family. You’re “the other.” You’re the stranger. So, I started out there. Also, there was a lot of tragedy in my family before I was even born that I didn’t really know about. So of course like all children, you think it was you that created this emotional landscape.
And then I ran away when I was thirteen, because I was this “child Aphrodite” and everybody in that town said they had had sex with me. It was an unbelievably traumatic experience for me. And I hadn’t had sex with anybody, but rumors were stared by jealous girls who are actually now on my Facebook page, if you can believe my life. And so I ran away, and because I’m such a nice girl and creative, I managed to stay away for a month. Apparently you can’t stay away for a month without getting put into reform school. So, I ended up getting put in a reform school run by nuns, which is where I wrote my first play. Then when I can home I couldn’t fit in, and of course my mother never bothered to tell me that she never told anybody where I was. So, I just thought everybody knew everything about me. This is, like, 1966, where, you know, girls were put away; that meant you had a baby.
One night I was hanging out at this gay bar—I started hanging out in gay bars when I was 15—and a carload full of queens pulled up to my house and they were going to Provincetown, and so I went. That was about three months before my 17th birthday. Then I spent the whole summer there. Then I ended up washed up on the shores of New York. Didn’t come there to be an artist even though I always wanted to be an actress and I always wanted to be a writer. But I got unmoored from that because of my tumultuous early teen life. I was somebody who was going to college, all that stuff; I lost all that. I lost all that connection. Now I was alone in the world.
Let me ask you this. At this point you are still living your life as your government name. Susana Ventura, right? So, what is the turning point from Susana Ventura to Penny Arcade?
Well, what happened—this is all in the show, with songs, may I point out—what happened was that in Provincetown, I ended up meeting a guy named Jamie Andrews. I was almost grazed by a car [while I was] crossing the street, Commercial Street, and the car wasn’t moving because traffic wasn’t moving. I went and I draped myself in the passenger side and I said, “very tacky to be killed by a 1967 Chevy, thank you very mu-u-u-u-u-u-uch!” I’m the person, or one of the people, who invented talking like that, with “fa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-abulou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ous!” That was me and a handful of queens who I hung out with, but I was the generator of a lot of that. And Jamie was standing on the sidewalk and he was 27 and I was 16, and he went “hey, Miss Thing, who writes your material?” And I was like, “I need your elegance?” And I walked off. When I ended up in New York at the end of that summer and ended up with these junkie drag queens who I had met in Provincetown—I mean real, severe junkie drag queens—and they stole all my stuff. I had a little suitcase and they stole it. So, I ended up with all these junkies. They let you not use drugs for a while, but eventually they want you to use drugs with them. So, I was using all these drugs for about eight months, living in shooting galleries—all in the show. When I escaped—somebody got it in their head that I was a narc, and they gave me a hot shot. They tried to kill me.
No!
Yeah. I’m serious. Like, really tried to kill me. And I escaped. And I was standing in the pouring rain under the awning of the St. Marks movie theater on 2nd Avenue across from Gem Spa, and Jaimie Andrews walks by. You know, I had tracks. I was very open about everything. He was like, “you don’t look so good.” And I was like, “I did it myself,” showing him my tracks. And he said “I think you need to come and stay with me.” So, he took me in to his one-room studio apartment. He took me to The Playhouse of the Ridiculous.
And one night—I was still 17—I was coming down off LSD. I had like, you know, been with my little friends on 2ndAvenue. I came back and I was coming down off acid, and I started to get paranoid that he was gonna throw me out. I had found a book on the cover of a garbage can on the corner of 1st Avenue and 9th Street, and the protagonist’s name was Penny Kincaid. And when the alarm went off for Jamie’s market research job—Jamie would end up within three years of this story being vice president of MainMan Records managing David Bowie and turning David Bowie into a glitter glam star instead of a boring folk singer using The Playhouse of the Ridiculous style, but at this point he had a job [doing] market research—and I heard him groan. I knew it was about me and he was gonna throw me out. And I yelled, without thinking at all, “Jamie, I changed my name!” And he got up on one elbow and said, “oh really, darling, to what?” And I said, without thinking, “Penny Arcade!” And he said, “Penny Arcade? That’s fabulous! Do you want an egg?” On the days that I didn’t annoy him, he gave me breakfast. And Penny Arcade stuck. And he took me to The Playhouse of the Ridiculous. I’m the only person who named myself. Everybody in The Playhouse of the Ridiculous had nicknames that John Vaccaro gave them. Many people in the Warhol scene had names that Andy gave them, but I was the only person who named myself. It was just total survival.
The point here is that all of this is in the first episode, and I did find out why I left. I left because we went from being street kids who were totally marginalized queer kids to being totally in demand. Everybody was interested in us—not just Andy Warhol, but everybody, because we were, like, “it!” We were this renegade band of young people. But what happened at Max’s Kansas City was that it started to be understood that there was something to get. So, I was there with Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith and Iggy Pop, and none of those people were famous. Nobody was famous. And I was certainly more well-known than Patti at that point, because I was performing; Patti wasn’t. A lot of things happened. Patti and I joked that we were gonna do a band. And Danny Fields heard this and he called Steve Paul, who was a famous manager who was managing Johnny Winter and Edgar Winter and Tiny Tim and stuff. He was at Jimi Hendrix’s funeral in Seattle, and he sent me a telegram saying “don’t sign with anybody else.” And like, I just thought it was kind of a goof. But when I told Patti, I could see that she was just like “what?”
So, you can imagine what my life is like now, having already been through all that before 1971. So, what was happening at that time in 1971 was we who had been marginalized were bound to each other, but then that started to fragment. If you’re somebody who’s coming from a world like I came from where I was the outsider, I was other, not only in my family, but at school. Everybody had something to say about me, and I had no idea of how I was perceived. That I was (air quotes) “beautiful” or a sexual, you know, whatever. And you’re also queer and you know you’re queer, and you don’t know what that means. And you come to New York and you meet all these people who are just like you, and they’ve all been rejected by their families. They’ve all been rejected by the kids at school. They’ve all escaped. And now you meet these people in New York. And they’re fantastic! And then you realize that you’re all fantastic!
So, of course, the other side of being “the other” is being “the best.” Neither one of those are true, but that’s the dichotomy. That’s what happens. You go into this incredible place of being embraced and accepted, and then you watch that all fragment. And I hated it. I hated the competition. Jackie Curtis had done a play that was the first time Patti Smith performed. It was called Femme Fatale. In the end of the play, Jackie gets crucified to an IBM card, to give you an idea of how prescient this all was. And I got reviewed. My first review. And it said that I’d stolen the show. It was two sentences in Screw magazine, and Jackie went ballistic and stopped talking to me. And Jackie was my best friend. I just couldn’t believe that Jackie was rejecting me because I’d gotten a review. Jackie wrote the play, Jackie was the star of the show! It was two sentences in Screw magazine! And that just shattered me.
So, a lot was starting to happen. Patti was my best friend at that time and we were the only two working-class girls, so we had this big working-class acting out thing that we did. Patti started hanging out with Bobby Neuwirth and Kris Kristofferson, all these heterosexual guys that I could not fit in with at all, could not even be there one second. It was just not me. And Jackie stopped being my friend. I was living with Danny Goldberg, who at that time was a rock writer but went on to be a very famous person in the music business. And I was having affairs with different people. At one point I told Danny that I had slept with his best friend, Joel Goodman. And I was crying. “I slept with Joel!” He said, “don’t cry, I slept with your sister!” It was the late ‘60s, you know? And I didn’t know- I was trying to recreate a family. So Danny and I were, like, glommed together, and we were in love and we were totally psychedelicized. I wanted adventure!
On that note of comparing then and now, is there any condition of that time that you would magically gift to young artists today that they don’t have?
To live in an era where the market has not crept in is a huge gift, and it is the reason why I can keep reinventing the work I do at 73. I think that’s the main thing is, like, how to be true to yourself; how to know what that means, because everything is so much part of the market now. One of the things that’s interesting is that when I did the first work-in-progress of this show, all these arts administrators showed up who I had worked with in the ‘80s. And none of them had ever been—I mean, they’d been a little bit fans of mine—but I was never the person… I was in the late ‘60s. I was the it girl, which I didn’t understand. And that’s the point. I didn’t understand what career meant in 1971.
When I went to Amsterdam with Vaccaro in 1971, Danny Goldberg called me up and said, “if you don’t come back and follow your career, it’s gonna be tragic.” And I was like, “what’s a career?” And I wanted to have adventure, and that’s what I did. I think right now, most people want a career. A career is something that you build on outside influence and outside hopes and outside realities that are not real. So, I think all these people came to see this show because they couldn’t believe that I was still doing new work. If you look at it, I’m the only person from the ‘60s, beside Patti Smith and people who became quite famous—Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop—who are still working, you know? And even from the ‘80s. There’s almost no one who’s working full time.
Is there an archive of your work somewhere?
Yeah. Huge, yeah. There’s my Patreon. All my work is on my Patreon.
I can’t believe a university has not said “Penny Arcade, we want to-”
No! Not only haven’t they said that they want my archive, they haven’t said that they want me to teach there. And this is what’s really funny to me, because I’m the person who’s doing exactly the work I want to do exactly the way I want to do it, and having an international mainstream career. You know? But that’s the way it is. That’s the way it is, my dear. People get upset when I tell the truth about myself and I say, “well, you know, in, whatever, 47 years of making my own work, I’ve gotten 30 thousand dollars in grants.” That’s the total of grants I’ve gotten. Even Steve, my collaborator, says, “Penny, you know, you shouldn’t say that, because it makes you sound bitter.” And I’m like, “no, it’s me telling the truth to young people to know that you can actually have a real career without being one of the six people chosen by the not-for-profit industrial complex.” So, it’s a message of hope.
What is Episode 4 gonna be about?
It’s 1974-1981, so it’s The Reluctant Recluse. I came back to New York in 1974. I didn’t feel it. And I ended up going home to my mother for the first time since I was 13, for a few months. And then I ended up meeting somebody and going to Maine and living in the backwoods of Maine for seven years. And that was the making of an artist. That is what made me into an artist, was being in a completely unmapped landscape where art—I mean, there were lots of people making art, but it was way away from New York, way away from the limelight. It’s really, really interesting. It’s gonna be very intense. Super intense. I’m really excited about it.
I love the idea of the whole project. Doing each segment as a live performance rather than a book is so you and so exciting.
I’m doing the book, too. The book’s happening. The book is gonna make people crazy. Because I remember everything and because I’m honest. I mean, I’m not giving away other people’s secrets. Doing this has helped me understand more about the memoir. And also, there’s a ten-episode podcast that I’ve already sketched out that goes with the memoir, because there’s so much I can’t put in the memoir that’s historical that people will want to know more about. So, it’s very exciting. And even in Episode 3, it time-travels a tiny bit. There’s also philosophical stuff that I want to share with people. I’ve completely embraced my role as the elder of this community. My shows are a masterclass.
Penny Arcade: The Art of Becoming, Episode 3: Superstar Interrupted (1967-1973) is playing at Joe’s Pub on May 30th at 9:30pm. Tickets can be purchased at https://publictheater.org/productions/joes-pub/2024/p/penny-arcade/.
