Original Review of Valerie Solanas’ Long Lost Play UP YOUR ASS, By Red Jordan

Arobateau, From The Spectator Magazine, circa 2000.

What follows is a review Master Author Red Jordan Arobateau did of Valorie Solana’s
long lost play Up Your Ass! Which was revived in the John Coats Theatre--on the edge of
the Tenderloin, circa 1999. This review was first printed as a Spectator Magazine-Play
Review. It was later reprinted in Red’s Journal PASSAGE, Vol. 4. Copyright © 2006 by
Red Jordan Arobateau. This book in its entirety may be found via
redjordanarobateau.com.

All material copyrighted by Red Jordan Arobateau.

I never got to suck Valerie Solana’s pussy before she died. But I did get to see Up Your
Ass, her well-titled play with all its anal, man-hating, trick-scorning, loathing
observations of mainstream society and cutting edge humor. As we enter the new
millennium, it’s good to experience another feminist outpour which exposes male-over-
female bullshit, written from an underclass point of view by a subversive female. Up
Your Ass is now playing at the George Coates Theatre, one half block from the Tenderloin
SRO hotel room where Solanas died at the age of fifty-two, eleven years ago.

You will love this play as performed by a twisted cast of both perverts and (alas) normal
women in combos of drag, transgender, and poly-personas, twelve actors faithfully
conveying Solanas’ play word for word as she typed it.

Solanas created Up Your Ass and her manifesto, SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men)
during the hotbed radical feminism of the late 1960’s. Up Your Ass was portrayed briefly
in the docudrama I Shot Andy Warhol, as a staged reading in an all-night, neon-lit
diner/hustlers’ rendezvous, performed by drag queens and trannies, with Solanas herself
as director, in the play’s first and only production until now. In the 1980’s, the infamous
Solanas attempted to murder Andy Warhol during a paranoid delusion, in which she
believed that Warhol had stolen her work, thus sealing her fate to be a slave to the
Patriarchy.

The reason I’d like to get on my knees to give Valerie a blowjob is because I identify with
her and know she needed more joy. So much of my own life was hell, being a butch dike
(now Transman) typing manuscripts in a hotel room, lonely, unpublished, not a dime to
my name, not a friend in sight, and finding johns a lot easier to get then the love of a
woman. (And this gritty scenario played out on the tableau of The Patriarchy…)

The number five bus heads off Market Street and turns diagonally through a slice of the
Tenderloin, going past cheap rent tenements, littered, piss-stinking streets, and derelicts
who sleep cocooned in blankets in doorways; a place where the homeless push their
burdens of society in shopping carts. The bus passes a former bank building, (complete
with Doric, pigeon shit-splattered columns and friezes, which has now become the police
Vice Squad Evidence Station of all things!) weaves past a row of parked squad cars, goes
by the Dorothy Day Community Center, and in the next block, there is the theatre, right
on the TL’s edge. The George Coates Theatre is housed in an attractive, well-lit building
at 110 McAllister Street, near the Civic Center Bart Station. If you go deeper into the TL,
you’ll see where Solanas lived her last days.

Towards the end of her life, Valerie worked as a prostitute. Hooking was not only an
occasional trade done in her youth, but also later in her forties; in part, to support a drug
habit, which, in turn, was probably the method she chose to self-medicate her messed-up
brain. In the current edition of SCUM, Freddie Baer states, “Prostitutes who knew her
from that time say she worked in a silver lamé dress.”

According to writer Judith Coburn, women who lived with Solanas in a feminist
commune in Washington D.C. during better times say the silver lamé dress doesn’t sound
like her style. Even in hooking, Valerie was non-traditional. I recall girls I use to
associate with on the ‘ho stroll of Oakland I ’74 pointing out a strange sex worker; an
outlaw who wore blue jeans, boots, a man’s cap, and horn-rimmed glasses, her long,
dishwater blonde hair not curled. Far from the traditional female sex symbol, she worked
apart from the others, resembling a hippie hitchhiker. Was that more like Solana’s style?

The artistic integrity of Up Your Ass is preserved by directors George Coates and Eddy
Falconer, who hold true to Solanas’ original script. The all-female cast of gender benders
and drag transvestites (including the dashingly handsome Eddy Falconer, a failed FTM)
have done an excellent job. It’s interesting to speculate whether or not many of the cast
live their actual lives in this transgressive fashion, or if they (like Lilli Taylor in I Shot
Andy Warhol, playing a cute, butch Solanas on the streets of NYC in the 1960’s) are just
actors playing another role.

Meet Mantra as Russell, the misogynist, mustached male in suit and tie, who was
formerly a tits and ass cover model for our own Spectator in 1980. Pretty/handsome Tina
Murray plays alternate female/male pats, and later exclaims vehemently at the cast party
in a nearby bar, “I always score, no matter what role I’m playing!”

The show has begun to collect a cult-like following, reminiscent of Rocky Horror,
members of which George Coates calls “ass heads.” These are people who have seen the
play more than once; four times being the record so far for some faithful ass
heads/Solanas fans… and the play is barely out of previews.

Solanas has her audience. The lyrics got even better my second time around. No small
part of the enjoyment to myself and other freaks is the attention paid to pussy, cock and
balls… and of course, turds. Scatologists will feel right at home with the parts about
cooking and dining on shit. (With chopsticks, no less!) Dirty old perves who’ve
graduated to Life Beyond Golden Showers will eat up the two shitty interludes which tie
right into the play’s title.

The show is also filled with recurrent, purposely insipid lounge music from the 1950’s, an
era which promoted a lifestyle that Valerie was rebelling against. Many of the numbers
are sung to hit tunes, which add an air of excitement and nostalgia to the work, and keep
it moving along at a good pace. The cast all sing well, using Solanas’ unique lines, such
as Mighty Fine Ass, and Why Should I dress To give Men Hard-Ons? Some hits date back
to the ‘50s; others are more current and fit right into the flow, like Sade’s Smooth
Operator, when Spade Cat (Tina Murray) makes his/her moves on the lovely Chantel
Luicer, singing You’re a Goddess. Originally, George and Eddy did not know that they
would need singers in order to follow the dead Solanas’ implied suggestion of putting her
play to music. They really lucked out when assembling the cast from the lesbo/drag king
and straight theatre community.

There’s an unknown quality about Solanas—her humor. She keeps the audience
constantly laughing. When actress Sara Moore (as Solanas) accuses drag queen
Scheherazade of being a pervert, exclaiming, “You’d jump into the sack after a piece of
pussy”, Scheherazade responds, I AM a piece of pussy!”, thus illustrating why I dearly
love Valerie; because she’s a feminist with a street life not just a polite bitch with a
college degree.

The energetic Sara Moore is Bongi Perez, Solanas’ butch lesbian alter ego. Athletic
Bongi bounds around stage belting out cutting observations, and later gives a great butt-
fuck to straight guy Russell (Mantra Plonsey) with no lube. ‘UH, UH, AH, AH!”

Panhandler/philosopher Bongi seems to embody the true essence of Solanas. Bongi’s

wry observations about straight men, married women, johns, and the empowered males
of society are au currant. Playing the role of Spade Cat, a handsome Tina Murray in drag,
complete with a Fu Manchu moustache, tips the patriarchal power balance, as he is
carried offstage by the lovely, Amazonian-built femme Ginger (Leanne Borghesi).

During the show’s brief intermission, I greet people I know in the lobby and hit the coffee
shop a few doors down to fortify myself with caffeine and carrot cake with icing.
Outside on McAllister, I notice a pretty female cop in a blue uniform, who, with a gun,
handcuffs and badge, radiates the awesome power of the state. I wonder, is she part of
the cast? A Sharon Boggs look-alike? (Sharon plays a policeman in one of her tipple
roles.) No, just a cop taking break from the Vice Squad down the street.

Act two: We’re back to eating shit again. Ginger, six feet tall in five-inch heels, her short
dress stretched over a voluptuous body, eats a turd! (Women are use to eating shit…)
She spits pieces of it out over the stage; then picks up crumbs of shit off of the stage and
eats even more of it. Beautiful Ginger sings the praises of having yellow turdletts for
diner. “For company tonight!”, she exclaims brightly. Ah, the workings of Solanas’
mind.

There’s even a murder. Susa McManus portrays average American housewife Mrs. Arthur
Hazilitt, who strangles her whining child (Rebecca Pezzullo) with his Super Glue
erection. The cast gathers around the corpse trying to decide where to leave it, crying,
“Not here! Too many turds! There’s enough dog shit around here already!”
One of the strongest characters in this play is the spirit of Solanas herself. As cameraman
Eddy Falconer slowly walks up the ramp of the oddly tilted stage, his camera’s steady eye
trained on the performers, I think of Solanas as a very real presence. The audience can
catch glimpses of her between the fast paced lines which are delivered throughout the
magical two-hour production. In the end, she even takes a bow (in the persons of Sara
Moore and Sharon Boggs) and dedicates the work, “to myself, for proofreading, editorial
comment, helpful hints, criticism, and suggestion… and an exquisite job of typing.”
While watching Up Your Ass, one can see the extent to which solanas was influenced by
her connections with Andy Warhol, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, Ultra Violet, and
other characters from the Factory where Andy turned out his first art films. Valerie spent
time in the she-male community amid queens and transsexual women who apparently
took the scrawny, haunt-eyed dike in as their friend. She was known by TL hookers
beside whom she worked. But who loved her?

Valerie claimed to be a lesbian, yet had no known female companion. Was this by her
choice? Did she prefer turning tricks with men she despised to laying with a female
lover? In a past interview, Solanas remarked, “I haven’t got time for sex of any kind.” In
one telling scene of Solanas’ play, Bongi goes up an alley to give a hand job to a trick, but
refuses the advance of a lesbian lover. Was Solanas really a dike drawn women
sensually, erotically, sexually and emotionally… or did she merely seek a feminist bond
of sisterhood in cerebral theory? Perhaps she was an abused, asexual firebrand, hating
the father who molested her, swept up in the cause of the women’s movement. She may
have been documenting her own sentiments when she wrote the following line in her
play: “I’ve tried relating to emptiness but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t relate back.”

After the show, I am able to meet with some of the cast. Karen Ripley plays the role of
the sex education teacher who is hilariously outfitted with Birkenstocks which have toilet
paper stuck to them. Ripley actually looks younger, thinner, and better then she did when
we worked a brief TV stint five years ago. How does she do it? Annie Larson, (who
plays obnoxious good ol’ boy, White Cat Sara Moore, and Mantra Plonsey are at the bar
with drinks in hand discussing their ass-fuck for tomorrow night’s performance.

Plonsey: Good ass fucking tonight.

Moore: Yeah, and I was on the bloody rag!
Plonsey: Oh, I hate doing that part!
Moore: I’ll go easy on you tomorrow night.
Plonsey: No, go ahead…c’mon do your worst!

Later, on a more serious note, Plonsey divulges inner feelings. “This play has affected all
of us. Borders are blurring because of the roles we are playing. It’s ruining our
relationships at home. The violence seen onstage is really happening in our hearts. We
can usually separate ourselves from characters we play in a production—but not this one.
We know it (abuse) happened to Valerie, and to four-fifths of us in the play. It happened
to each of us.” Writer Judith Coburn’s sources say that in later years, as Valerie’s
sickness progressed, she found it impossible to write without medication—the voices in
her head kept distracting her—and it was equally impossible to write while on meds
because of being totally tranquilized. But she was up to something in that Bristol hotel
room; what, we may never know. After Solanas’ death, her personal belongs were
released to her mother, who destroyed them… twenty years of work, gone.

Solanas’ play premiered January 12 at the George Coates Theatre in San Francisco and
will run at 8p.m. every Friday and Saturday until April 8. Tickets are $16, and are
available at the theatre half an hour before curtain. After its three month run, the show
will begin a world tour.

It’s ironic to think that if she had lived another eleven years, Valerie would have seen her
play produced. I can envision her in that silver lamé dress, wearing her famous lace-up,
knee-high boots, which would be rudely kicked up on the back of the set in front of her;
Valerie’s crazy eyes staring onto the stage as her life’s work materializes. Maybe her
ghost is still with us, wearing a pork-pie hat, haunting the wings of the George Coates
Theatre… Up Your Ass is a tribute to this sad-lived woman. It’s about coming full
circle; the artist vindicated. It’s about herstory.

Red Jordan Arobateau is a published author—Lucy & Mickey, Boys Night Out, Dirty
Pictures, Rough Trade, and a transsexual activist just by nature of his being alive. He has
also written and self-published forty novels, including Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transsexual Fuck Stories Volumes 1, 2, and 3. A catalogue of his books is available for
$4 thru Red Jordan Press.

This is the intellectual property of the author, Red Jordan Arobateau