The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  WHERE MUCH OF THE EARLY RISE OF OFF-BROADWAY HAD BEEN driven either by revivals like The Iceman Cometh or imports from Europe, Albee’s triumphs signaled to producers and investors that they could actually make money presenting new plays by young writers. Off-Broadway theaters sprang up everywhere in the early 1960s, and investors poured money into productions. Everybody from theater owners to the unions put their hands out. Ticket prices rose. Inevitably the vastly greater sums being risked made producers more cautious about the plays they put on. Off-Broadway’s shining moment as an incubator of new talent and ideas seemed to be ending almost as soon as it had begun. By 1964 Albee himself was noting how “greedy landlords, union demands, costs” were ruining it. He had decided to do something about that. With Barr and their producing partner Clinton Wilder, he’d used some of the handsome profits they were making to start the Playwrights Unit theater, in the Village South Theatre on Vandam Street. They nurtured the development of playwrights including Sam Shepard, LeRoi Jones, Lanford Wilson (Lance to his friends), Paul Foster, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and of course McNally, among others. “It seems to me that if one finds oneself with the cash it’s one’s responsibility to do a thing like that,” Albee said in a Paris Review interview in 1966. “The plays we’ve put on . . . are primarily plays that I wanted to see: other people weren’t putting them on, so we did.”

  In that interview, Albee said that “Village coffeehouses have taken over the job of putting on the furthest-out, most risky plays of young writers.” He named only one, the Caffe Cino, maybe because it was the most active, the most unusual, and the most gay. Probably for those same reasons it went down in theater lore as the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway, which isn’t precisely accurate—the movement sprang up in a few spots more or less at the same time—and its proprietor, Joe Cino, as the accidental midwife, which is closer to true.

  Cino was born in 1931 to Sicilian immigrants in Buffalo, which he, like gallerist John Myers, found not a great environment for a young gay man. When he was sixteen he fled to New York City, where he worked odd jobs while studying performing arts at the Henry Street Playhouse. His dance ambitions were hampered by his weight (his friends called him Porcino, or Little Pig). “Joe was short and he always smelled,” playwright Robert Patrick remembers. “I don’t mean he was dirty, but he had a virile, male smell. He was short and plump and got plumper. He had eyes like Hedy Lamarr. His eyes could just transfix you. And he was so kind that it almost seemed like a character flaw.” Similarly, Heide cites Cino’s “abundant, humanistic, and all-embracing hopeful attitude.” In 1958 he and a couple of friends rented the empty storefront at 31 Cornelia Street, site of the restaurant Po today, and opened the Caffe Cino.

  At the time, Cornelia Street was a little backwater of the Italian Village—the landlady at 31 rented to Cino because he was Sicilian. Tucked behind an always busy and crowded stretch of Sixth Avenue, it’s only a block long, running at an angle from West Fourth to Bleecker Street. Because it doesn’t really go anywhere it gets little traffic to this day. Still, this out-of-the-way block saw a surprising amount of activity. Auden had lived there, Broyard had opened and closed his bookstore there, Agee had worked in a studio there in the 1940s. The Phoenix Bookshop at 18 Cornelia Street printed and published works by the Beats and LeRoi Jones. New Directions, which published so many downtown writers, was in the triangular building at the West Fourth Street end of the block. Across the street from the Cino was the bar restaurant Mona’s Royal Roost, a popular gay destination. It looked like a New Orleans whorehouse inside, ruled by the portly, eponymous Mona. Since the Cino had no liquor license there was a fair amount of foot traffic back and forth.

  A short way up the block the floridly out queen Frank Thompson had an art gallery that was notorious in gay circles. “He was a little buxom and short, and I think he got premature gray hair, but his skin was always smooth,” recalls the performer Agosto Machado, who first happened on the Cino in 1959. “He looked like if he did drag he would be like Mrs. Santa Claus.” Thompson lured a constant procession of young and sometimes underage males up to his shag-carpeted apartment for drugs and sadomasochistic sex. Cino playwright Robert Patrick remembers pretty constant foot traffic between the Cino and the gallery. At the gallery “you could drop in and get laid any hour of the day or night. If there was nobody else around, Frank would do you.”

  The Cino began mainly as a hangout for Joe’s theater friends, with some small, mismatched tables and wooden chairs strewn around the narrow storefront and a big coffee machine on a counter in the back, which held pastries and snacks. Art by Joe’s friends, posters and flyers for their events, Valentine hearts, crumpled silver foil and glossies of hunky movie stars like Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter went up on the walls. Over time more and more layers were added, with twinkling Christmas lights strung everywhere, until the walls were encrusted and barnacled. Many patrons found the effect charming, an enchanted grotto; others thought the room looked diseased. For entertainment at first there was “dance” (a friend of Joe’s gyrating suggestively to records), poetry readings, and music—Tom O’Horgan, who’d later direct Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway, told jokes while playing the harp. In 1959 came readings of plays, then primitively staged performances. At first they were unauthorized productions of works by established playwrights like Williams, Genet, and Sartre, making the Cino in effect just an extremely low-budget and semi-amateur version of an Off-Broadway theater. Gradually, young writers started bringing their own new work and the Cino came into its own as an Off-Off-Broadway house.

  At first tables and chairs were simply pushed back to clear a small space on the floor. Then a low platform of wooden milk crates, eight by eight feet, became the stage. The tiny space enforced minimal sets—a ladder, a couple of chairs, a sofa, often dragged in off the street. Lights were stolen from established theaters. For power, Cino’s then lover, an electrician named Jon Torre, ran cables out to a nearby streetlamp to siphon off free juice from the city grid. Given the minimal sets, lighting designer Johnny Dodd, who had apprenticed with the Living Theatre, became adept at sculpting space and mood with light. He would go on to work with everyone from La MaMa to Robert Wilson to the New York Dolls.

  The audience, which sometimes included the Albee-Barr-Clinton trio and sometimes Tennessee Williams (whose last plays show a discernible Cino influence), clustered around the tiny performing area at their tables, the actors sometimes literally in their laps. Pretty soon the Cino was hosting a full-on schedule of fourteen performances a week, by far the most regular and busy of the Village’s coffeehouse theaters. There were no tickets; like Village folk music venues at the time, the Cino passed a hat after performances. The take was sometimes zero dollars, since in the early years, especially at late-night performances, there was no one in the audience. Without a cabaret or a theater license, with power boosted from the city, and with audiences later filling the narrow space beyond capacity once word got around, the Cino was violating numerous city codes, which meant fairly constant visits from cops and building and fire inspectors. They never shut Cino down, which his friends say was due to his innate Sicilian understanding of which pockets to line and palms to grease. Still, he was broke from the day he opened the place, working odd jobs in the days and running the café every night; toward the end he lost his apartment, slept at the café, and showered at friends’ apartments.

  But then poverty was endemic. When Edmund White arrived in the Village in 1962 he got a job as a staff writer for Time, Inc., and his first apartment on MacDougal Street between Houston and Bleecker. “My first lover was in Caffe Cino plays,” he remembers. Cino playwright Lanford Wilson “would come to our house for dinner, because he was so poor he was starving. I was one of the few in our crowd who had a job. I made a hundred dollars a week, but that was enough to buy spaghetti for people.” He remembers that during performances at the Cino “Joe Cino was always in the back making the coffee with a very loud machine, and oftentimes there were
n’t more than ten people in the audience. Like all these things that you hear about that are ‘historical,’ it was a pretty shabby little scene at the time. But life was cheaper then.”

  Not everyone participating in the shows was gay, but a gay aesthetic certainly prevailed. In a Voice review of an early Cino production, No Exit in 1960, Seymour Krim noted the “incense burning and faggots camping.” Some of the camp was playful and silly, as in the retro musical Dames at Sea, one of the Cino’s last productions and one of the few financial successes. But it could also be bizarrely surrealist, as in the work of Haralambos Monroe (“Harry”) Koutoukas. Born in 1937, he grew up in the tiny village of Endicott in western New York State. According to Agosto Machado, Koutoukas’s inspiration for moving to the Village came from a chance encounter in his teens with Minette, the legendary drag performer and author of the pamphlet Recollections of a Part-Time Lady. As Machado tells it, Koutoukas’s family, Greek immigrants, ran a roadhouse in Endicott, a combination motel and diner. “It’s not the place the average person would go to, because it’s sort of a drinking place and single women did not go. And they had entertainment on weekends to attract some customers. They would advertise at the diner, ‘This weekend we’re having female impersonators.’ ” Koutoukas’s parents would tell him to avoid the women staying at the motel, which only made him curious. “He knew there was something different about these women. They were very nice and friendly, but if you saw them in the morning, they looked a little slept-in.” One of the ladies he met in the motel in his teens was Minette, on one of the tank-town road trips she describes in her book. “She said, ‘Oh New York City, there’s no place like it in the world. Get away to the big city. Because this burg, if you’re gonna spend your life here, what is there?’ ” When he graduated high school, Koutoukas followed Minette’s advice and moved straight to Greenwich Village. It’s just one example, Machado says, of Minette acting as “the fairy godmother” to the Village.

  Koutoukas studied under Piscator but despised mainstream theater and expressed his singular vision Off-Off-Broadway. On the surface his scripts and productions could seem a rummage sale of classical theater, surrealism, jokes, puns, high-flown verse, glitter and glam, but a fine if not quite balanced intelligence knit it all together. His Medea in the Laundromat, performed at the Cino, was an adaptation from the ancient Greek where the tragedy was played straight but Medea was played in drag, and the setting was a Laundromat while the language was a warped classical-sounding verse: “Must you always gather like maggots / At tragedy’s door— / Or do you free yourself from guilt / By coming here to bleach your clothes.” Another of his plays was called Awful People Are Coming Over So We Must Be Pretending to Be Hard at Work and Hope They Will Go Away. A loose-knit but faithful sort of repertory company formed around him, which he called the School for Gargoyles. Machado was a Gargoyle, along with O’Horgan, Harvey Fierstein (who performed and hung out all over the Village without ever living there), and Hair writers Gerome Ragni and James Rado. Koutoukas went on to write nearly two hundred plays, mixing all styles and genres, for which the Voice gave him an Obie in a new category, Assaulting Established Tradition. He would be a presence in downtown theater for decades while being just too extreme and strange ever to emerge from the underground. In an interview he asked to be buried on a spit “so every time there’s a bad theater production I’ll turn automatically.” He died in 2010.

  The fanatically perverse director Andy Milligan, who passed through the Cino in its early years, brought a whole other kind of weirdness. As Jimmy McDonough relates in his biography The Ghastly One, Milligan was born in 1929, an army brat. He told McDonough that his mother was neurotic and overbearing (“Oh, she was sick, sick . . . She was an awful mother.”) and his father weak and suicidal. Whatever the causes, he emerged cynical, misogynist, sadistic, and gay. He left home for the navy, after which he toured the country with “two crazy lesbians” in a puppet troupe, doing marionette versions of Aladdin, Pinocchio, and, he told McDonough, “Emperor Jones—about a nigger who sets himself up as a king. In Augusta, Georgia! All puppets. Of course, nobody came.” In the early 1950s he came to New York and acted in some live television dramas before switching to fashion, designing and fabricating haute couture at his own shop, Ad Lib, first on the Upper East Side, then on West Fourth Street in the Village.

  Milligan walked around the corner and into the Cino sometime in 1960, and he began directing plays there in 1961. He was one of the first with an actual background in theater, but his most authentic addition to the Cino mix, McDonough notes, was “a certain depravity.” Milligan’s productions of Genet’s Deathwatch and The Maids, an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s One Arm, and other one-acts put Antonin Artaud’s then fashionable ideas about a “theater of cruelty” into serious practice. Milligan brought his own predilections for sadistic sex to his fast, loud, and violent shows, as much S&M exhibitions as theater. Audiences gaped in mesmerized shock or fled in revulsion as his actors and actresses assaulted one another with a brutality that looked real because it often was. Milligan found a kindred spirit in Frank Thompson up the street. Thompson and Milligan staged many drug-fueled S&M scenes with young males both in public at the Cino and in private at Thompson’s apartment. One of their young victims overdosed on heroin one night; Thompson found his corpse the next day while waiting for a visit from Walter Chrysler Jr., the millionaire scion of the automobile family and a heavyweight art collector. Thompson hid the dead body until Chrysler left and managed to evade prosecution.

  Extremely argumentative and abusive to friends and colleagues alike, Milligan soon fell out with Cino. No one could decide if Milligan’s productions were so psychotic and awful they were good or just plain awful. Playwright Paul Foster, who “stumbled into” the Cino around then, recalls that as a director Milligan “could hold your attention. There was something about it that drew you in. It wasn’t a lack of talent, but it was talent that was all fucked up. It totally disregarded what the audience might think of this. He had so many contradicting psychological problems that I couldn’t sort it out. I was twenty-two, twenty-three at the time, and this was a new animal form for me.”

  Not long after Foster met him, “Andy said, ‘I want to start a theater myself.’ Cino rolled his eyes, like lots of luck, kid.” Milligan enlisted Foster and a few other innocent Cino figures as investors. “We chipped in two thousand bucks apiece. I borrowed the two thousand from my brother. Andy said, ‘Great, now we have a theater.’ ” He rented “the old Russian Bear restaurant on Second Avenue just south of Fourteenth. It was full of rats. They never cleaned it. So first we killed all the rats.” Milligan’s first and last production there was George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession. A New York Times reviewer wrote that police should cordon off the street “so nobody goes in there by misadventure. That’s how bad it was. Andy’s response was, ‘Oh, what do they know?’ ”

  Milligan and Foster helped Ellen Stewart start La MaMa in 1961, but he soon fell out with her as well. He moved on to film, cranking out no-budget grindhouse horror movies in the 1960s and ’70s, such as The Ghastly Ones, Bloodthirsty Butchers, Gutter Trash, and The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! Each is a perfectly ugly storm of apparent insanity and maybe willful incompetence, motivated by what seems to be a malignant contempt for anyone who might be stupid enough to watch it. John Waters is a fan; on the other hand, Stephen King summed them up as “the work of morons with cameras.” Milligan died of AIDS in 1991 in Los Angeles and was buried in an unmarked grave.

  Less depraved young playwrights used the Cino as a rare venue in the city where they could try out new work. Among them were future stars Sam Shepard, John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation), Tom Eyen (Dreamgirls), and Lanford Wilson (The Hot l Baltimore). Wilson had come to New York from the Midwest specifically to be a playwright, but like Koutoukas he had hated everything he saw on Broadway. He dove right into the Cino, eventually having nine plays produced there. The most notable was T
he Madness of Lady Bright in 1964. Where Cino productions had always flaunted the gay aesthetic, Madness came all the way out as an extended monologue by an aging drag queen. This was four years before The Boys in the Band presented openly gay characters to Off-Broadway audiences. Madness ran a remarkable two hundred performances and encouraged other Cino playwrights to start creating openly gay characters. Both Heide and Patrick insist, though, that they were not making “gay theater” the way that was soon to be construed. They had no gay political or social agenda. “We didn’t think of ourselves as writing gay theater,” Patrick said. “We were just writing the life around us. We were more interested in the fact that it was experimental theater than that it was gay.” In States of Desire, his 1980 insider’s guide to gay culture, Edmund White says that he and his friends would have considered labels like “gay writer” or “gay artist” “limiting, irrelevant, even humiliating.”

  The Cino stage was open to first timers who had never written and sometimes never even thought of writing for the theater until they caught the bug there. “Joe was a very special person,” Heide recalls. “The doors were always open. And he himself was open—perhaps too open in the end. Joe would say, ‘Oh just do it. Here’s a date.’ So you just did it.”