Morgan Bassichis: In Pursuit of Fame

In the wake of their crossover hit Can I Be Frank?, the outspoken anti-Zionist performer is poised to carry their lineage of radical politics to the main stage.

Originally published by Jewish Currents

On a balmy August morning at 8:30, Morgan Bassichis strode to the front of a midtown Manhattan church sanctuary and focused the attention of a throng of activists. “We will not comply,” they cried, hitting the first two syllables for whole beats and the last three for half. “Gaza, we are by your side!” Some 200 people seated in the pews echoed the rhythmic lines as they donned black T-shirts with the yellow-lettered slogan “Let Gaza Live,” then concealed them beneath another layer of clothing. They were preparing for a protest at the local offices of New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, who had voted, days earlier, against resolutions blocking the sale and delivery of weapons to Israel. Bassichis, a ubiquitous and galvanizing presence at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) actions over the last decade, revved up and oriented the assembly, rehearsing chants and welcoming newcomers and old-timers alike. “No matter who you are, how you got here, you’re in the right place,” Bassichis assured them. “If you’re feeling rage, grief, fear, maybe anxiety about this action, it’s all welcome. We have agency. We refuse to be silent and believe the lie that we are powerless.”

A little before noon, the protesters swarmed into the lobby of the senators’ offices, whipped off their outer layers, sat down, and unfurled bright banners demanding “Stop Starving Gaza” and “Let Aid in Now.” After about an hour, a police officer tromped through the lobby with a megaphone and the usual warning to disperse. Around three-quarters of the protesters got up and filed out to the sidewalk, where they continued chanting, while the remaining 50 stayed and were arrested. Bassichis (rhymes with masochist, they like to say) was not among them; they stood on the perimeter of the sit-in, as unobtrusive as a lissome, 6’-1’’ strikingly charismatic person could be, and then spoke with reporters outside as the arrests were being made. This was uncharacteristic: Bassichis often opts for the civil-disobedience piece of a JVP action and has developed a reputation for leading songs in jail as they and their comrades await release. That August day, though, they couldn’t risk being detained until evening; their singing was needed elsewhere.

A few hours later, Bassichis took the stage at the SoHo Playhouse downtown, and, for the second time that day, focused the attention of a crowd. They were there to perform their Off-Broadway one-person show Can I Be Frank?, a poignant and hilarious reclamation of the performance artist, comedian, and songwriter Frank Maya, who died of AIDS-related complications in August 1995 at age 45. Bassichis, 42, is also a performance artist, comedian, and songwriter and, as they recount in the show, was gobsmacked to learn serendipitously a couple of years ago about this forgotten forebear, one of the first out gay comics to be featured on TV comedy shows. They explain in the show how they “became obsessed” with learning everything about Maya, interviewing his relatives, friends, and lovers, and scrutinizing hours and hours of his taped performances, thanks to one of his ex-boyfriends, the dancer-choreographer Neil Greenberg, who had painstakingly digitized and posted them.

In Can I Be Frank?, Bassichis presents some of Maya’s material—songs, rants, comic bits—and frames it with their own, playing a version of themself as a bumbling narcissistic naif chasing the fame Maya was on the cusp of achieving when he died. The quest for stardom drives the ostensible plot, and Bassichis conscripts us into rooting for their own pursuit by stirring our sorrow and outrage over Maya’s untimely death, which is made even more painful by our knowledge that the protease inhibitors that would have saved his life (and secured his celebrity) became available later that same year. In the early part of the show, there’s a clear distinction between the two performers: When the lighting shifts and Bassichis assumes a more chest-forward posture at the mic stand, we understand that we are watching Maya’s material, even as we recognize that it is being refracted through the fawning, and jealous, eyes of a descendant who can’t help tangling themself in the mic cord. Eventually, though, the boundaries blur as Bassichis recycles the frameworks of some of Maya’s bits for their own jokes—for instance, borrowing Maya’s shtick of taking “audience questions” that are in fact hilariously unctuous queries prewritten by the performer. (One such question posits an A24 exec offering them a streaming deal with the company’s “nonbinary comics division.”) By the show’s end, the personas don’t exactly merge, but Bassichis has absorbed something of their artistic ancestor, standing tall at the mic in their own voice, thereby demonstrating a continuity that both comprises and transcends individual desire.

In a delicious irony—and maybe, foregone conclusion—Bassichis, whose following had largely overlapped with those Jews, queers, and activists who are firmly grounded in left politics, now stands at the verge of their own mainstream success. They performed Can I Be Frank? a grueling seven times a week for seven weeks (standard for Off-Broadway, but unheard of in the coupla-nights-stand world of offbeat performance art) for an audience twice the size of the one that came to see an early version of the show last summer at the intimate cabaret venue The Club at La MaMa—the very space where, some 30 years earlier, Maya premiered the material Bassichis now conjures and comments on. After more than a decade of making performances, they also worked for the first time with a director: Sam Pinkleton, who helped turn another queer and quirky downtown show, Oh, Mary!, into a runaway hit. Keen direction has helped Bassichis sharpen their own deliberately meandering, improvisatory material and keep a steady hold on the tension between the show’s affective poles of reverence and ridicule, maintaining just the right tautness to prevent it from either collapsing into sentimentality or lolloping into giddy irony. The result is a tight 70 minutes, by turns sexy, side-splitting, and in the end—to cite the late scholar-activist Douglas Crimp’s famous essay on AIDS activism, whose last lines Bassichis has set to music and sings to close the show—also mournful and militant. The reception, from audiences and critics alike, has been almost universally rapturous.

According to the conventions of an old recurrent plot, this juncture would mark the peak moment of major dramatic conflict in an artist’s life, the point at which he (it’s typically “he” in these stories) must choose between communal responsibilities and professional breakthrough, cultural continuity and assimilation, heeding one’s elders and forging a fresh path. One might particularly hear the strains of a Jewish version of this “selling out” narrative—think of the many iterations of The Jazz Singer—that sets its hero on a one-way road from home and heritage into the heart of America. Thrillingly, though, Bassichis seems to have escaped from the storyline in which these values show up as antinomies. They treat these values, instead, as mutually constitutive: It’s just a matter of which community, continuity, and elders one recognizes. At the end of Can I Be Frank?’s successful run, Bassichis is poised to bring this lineage of radical performance and politics, including the uncompromising anti-Zionism so integral to their work, to even wider audiences—if, that is, mainstage gatekeepers recognize that those audiences are not only ready, but eager, for it.

Bassichis grew up in Newton, MA, a stereotypically leafy, heavily white Jewish suburb of Boston, in a loving, liberal, heteronormative family of two social worker parents and a sister, with a comfortable house and a summer cottage on Cape Cod. They gravitated early to the spotlight, upstaging classmates by comically tripping up some stairs as a supernumerary in a grade-school production of The Hobbit, their mom, Sylvia Freed, recalled. She saw how Bassichis found their people among the theater kids at school, and when they came out in ninth grade, it was “not a revelation to us,” she deadpanned. Bassichis recounted how they “became political” through LGBTQ activities in high school, but “got radicalized” in college. Their thinking was “reoriented,” they said, by reading Black radical and feminist thinkers in a Brown University class on incarceration and political prisoners taught by the Africana studies professor Joy James (who, today, regards the student engagement in that particular class as “the height” of her 20 years of teaching). After they moved to San Francisco in 2005, their full-time organizing combined their commitment to abolitionist analysis—which understood police and prisons as sources of, not solutions for, anti-queer violence—with work for trans safety and liberation.

It was during this time that Bassichis’s activism expanded to include solidarity with Palestine. During an anti-racism workshop, another participant invited them to join an upcoming protest at the local Israeli consulate. “Oh, I don’t know enough about that, I’m not an expert,” Bassichis replied, but with her gentle encouragement, they joined; later, observing the room at a training for a civil disobedience action disrupting a celebration of Israel’s 60th anniversary, they said to themself, “So this is where the seasoned queer and feminist and trans activists are!” As Bassichis learned more about Israel and Palestine, something clicked: The protection from antisemitism that Zionism promises Jews by virtue of military might, walls, and aggression derives from the same counterproductive reasoning that offers cops and incarceration as safety for imperiled queer folks.

Soon after moving to New York in 2013, Bassichis found their way to a protest against “yet another Israeli assault,” and in the years that followed, they emerged as a magnetic member of JVP’s New York chapter, facilitating meetings and emceeing events. “Morgan has a way of grounding people in why we are meant to be there,” said JVP’s political director Beth Miller. Especially since October 7th, they have also helped plan the highly choreographed and disciplined actions the group has become broadly associated with—the massive sit-in in Congress, the takeover of Grand Central, the banner drops on the Statue of Liberty, the Jewish women elders chaining themselves to the White House. Though Bassichis, who always highlights the “invisiblized labor” of movement work, would disavow their singular importance, they have particularly stood out as a spellbinding speaker at rallies, drawing on their theater skills at holding attention and shaping vocal pitch, cadence, and silence to stirring effect; sometimes, as they exhort a crowd, it seems like their whole body is about to shatter. Their job at such events, they said, is “to feel what I’m feeling publicly,” and thereby give everyone in attendance permission to let the fury and distress pent up inside them pour out.

Movements must speak in a collective voice of certitude; as a decade-long organizer, Bassichis missed the exploratory openness and ambiguities of art—and the rush of performing. So they had come to New York to try, at last, to make it in the theater professionally. Three years in a row, they applied to an MFA playwriting program and didn’t get in. “My big plan was to try to write like Tony Kushner but that didn’t work out,” they said. Nor did their auditions—performing a monologue from Angels in America—for conventional theater. They found their people instead in New York’s multidisciplinary queer art and performance scene, and scored their first gig at the iconic Dixon Place, where they presented a solo adaptation of witchy Russian folk tales in the theater’s narrow bar space. Along with some friends, they put on street-theater performances of Caryl Churchill’s 10-minute Seven Jewish Children, written in response to Israel’s 2008–9 attack on Gaza. Soon they were playing a thriving circuit of cabaret spaces, bars, small galleries and major artworld joints, DIY rooms and burlesque clubs, where performance art often converged with stand-up comedy. At variety shows like Jibz Cameron’s Weirdo Nights or River L. Ramirez’s lineups at the Brooklyn venue Littlefield, Bassichis added their plaintive, looping songs and preposterous shaggy jokes into the program’s mix of queer excess, buffoonery, and satirical bite.

In these spaces, Bassichis developed a flighty and forgetful stage persona and vulnerable style of performance that deliberately refused the closure and confident shine of a marketable product, instead bringing to mind the queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s notion of the queer art of failure: the idea that representing an untroubled inability to live up to conventional standards of success can open the way to alternative ways of being in the world. Their “protest songs,” for example, featured on an album recorded live at St. Mark’s Church in 2017, don’t discernibly protest anything; Bassichis calls them “spells, purposefully open-ended.” Over catchy hooks they compose through an improvisatory process at the piano, Bassichis sings in a pleasant, natural voice about mundane matters that, through incantatory repetition or sharp tonal turns, come to feel monumental. “It doesn’t seem like you are going to help us out,” they repeat again and again in “It doesn’t seem like you” over a vamp of minor chords, until the music makes a peppy shift and they call out to Sylvia Rivera, Adrienne Rich (“What’s the sitch?”), and James Baldwin. The Odd Years, Bassichis’s 2020 art book of to-do lists—a second volume of lists with short essays is now in the works for Haymarket Books—creates a similar effect, drolly juxtaposing quotidian tasks with incommensurate ideals in a way that makes all expectations feel like hubris: “Study ‘The Witches of Eastwick’ for political strategy.” “Find a therapist who can work quickly.” “Fuck a bunch of Bernie bros.” “Decide gender by the end of the day today.” “Turn the police state into a delicious tahini dressing.”

Bassichis’s onstage persona elicits a spectator’s double-take—wait, what?—as they patter amiably. Incongruities of thought or scale swirl through their character’s guilelessness like chocolate through a babka. In their strangely comforting “Quarantunes,” improvised ditties posted on Instagram during the Covid lockdown, they unsettled wistful assurances with ridiculous suggestions and grandiose proposals: “If you are missing your friends, here’s some things you can do to feel closer,” goes one with Bassichis in extreme close-up, singing over staccato chords that sound like they come from an organ grinder. “You can send them daily pictures of your psoriasis to keep them updated, or videos! You can hatch a plan . . . to overthrow the American empire; it’s the biggest barrier, the biggest barrier to friendship.” An early laugh in Can I Be Frank? comes from their declaration that we are watching a work-in-progress: “This is not some sort of ‘finished, complete, perfect’ work in the antisemitic sense.”

There aren’t just Jewish references in Bassichis’s humor; the Jewishness is structural. First, their jokes interpellate spectators through a mechanism common to Jewish comedy (and that of other marginalized groups): It offers them the layered experience of getting an in-joke, taking pleasure in being in on it, and having that pleasure multiplied by the recognition that those chortling around them are in on it, too. Bassichis gives this common process new layers that unfold on dialectical repeat: a sudden guilty doubt about whether it’s okay for any of us to be laughing at all, which collapses into the thought that yes it is, because we are all on the same side here. One of their signature gestures in this respect is to embrace a community icon or ideal sincerely, only to undermine it sardonically or take it back. “Did you know that virtually all of the weapons manufacturers are run by men?” they ask in Can I Be Frank?, invoking our presumed disdain for masculinist militarism. They underline the sentiment after a little pause, when they add, with a knowing nod, “Cis.” And then, the comic undertow sweeps in: “It’s not enough to have a rainbow flag on a drone,” they say, “we need queer-owned drones.” I see a Jewish dialectics in these comic strategies: Oppositional ideas and feelings are held in a dynamic tension that is never settled. Bassichis, for their part, locates the Jewishness of their humor in its “deeply neurotic worldview.” Maybe that’s the same thing. In Can I Be Frank?, they defy Zionist accusers with a bit that goes, “I don’t hate myself because I’m Jewish. I hate myself because I’m gay.”

Bassichis uses a similar self-subverting style in their activism. As a facilitator ginning up a JVP group for an action or a meeting, Bassichis will lead sincere call-and-response chants and then toss in a few extras: “I say, ‘Get on Grindr’; you say, ‘Recruit for the action!’” The incongruousness produces levity that helps a collective face the gravity that calls them together. “Morgan is able to bring humor into grief” in a way that helps the movement “carry a burden that is unbearable,” said the Palestinian scholar and political analyst Tareq Baconi, who has gotten to know Bassichis through movement work. “I think of Morgan as one of the spirits holding us back from the brink of nihilism.”

In three shows that make up Bassichis’s Jewish Trilogy, they imagine what ritual and cultural practices might look like without Zionism. In Klezmer for Beginners (2019), co-created with cellist and curator Ethan Philbrick, they play an untutored innocent looking to the audience and to the musicians onstage for a usable past in a cosmopolitan Ashkenazi musical tradition. In Don’t Rain on My Bat Mitzvah (2021), co-created with the musician and cultural organizer Ira Khonen Temple, they give themself a new coming-of-age ceremony informed by activists and scholars who serve as “bat mitzvah tutors.” (The show’s follow-up, a book for tweens edited by Bassichis, Jay Saper, and Rachel Valinsky called Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, finds many of the same tutors offering short essays on topics like “Why do people plant trees in Israel as Bat Mitzvah gifts?” and “What do Palestinian kids do when they turn 13?” that would prompt any thoughtful adolescent to decline an invitation to a Birthright trip when it comes along a few years later.) Finally, A Crowded Field (2023) surveys the Jewish calendar, seeking to disentangle each “beautiful ancient holiday from its weaponization.” Throughout, of course, there are jokes. “I always get a little confused” about what goes where for the seder, Bassichis says in A Crowded Field. “I didn’t make any macaroons, but I have boils.” Temple likens Bassichis’s stage role to that of the badkhn, the Yiddish wedding jester or sacred clown—emcee, storyteller, insulter of the rich and powerful, religious guide, imparter of fart jokes.

In Can I Be Frank?, Bassichis’s anti-Zionist, anti-assimilationist politics are written all over their body and the way they use it—the primary medium, after all, of performance art. Maya, while bravely announcing his gayness in midtown comedy clubs and on TV, could count on his traditionally masculine good looks to assist in his crossover. As Bassichis puts it in a telling moment in Can I Be Frank?, “Frank Maya was a hot gay guy, whereas I look like I just walked out of a folktale.” Letting their long arms swing gawkily, striking the occasional swishy pose, and presenting a veritably Streisandian profile, Bassichis shamelessly calls back the fantasy image of the degenerate, sissy Juden of Europe—the image that American Jewish men had to defy in order to enter the ranks of whiteness, and that Zionism explicitly promised to eradicate and replace with land-working Muskeljuden.

As Can I Be Frank builds toward its end, the show shifts into a well-earned hortatory mode (while maintaining some disarming wisecracks that make their direct appeal only more sob-inducing). “When we are overwhelmed, or when we’re feeling alone, we can put our attention on those that are here or those who used to be here,” Bassichis says, channeling some of their speechifying-in-the-streets mojo as they launch into a litany of ways that “we can honor them.” Among a score of suggestions: “We can honor them by doing everything we can to stop it the next time the US government decides another population is utterly disposable.” Bassichis is clearly talking about the criminal response to AIDS that left Maya among the hundreds of thousands dead in the US alone. And of course they are talking about Gaza, too.

Bassichis looks to elders—both in queer movements and among Jewish anti-Zionists—to gather the strength to endure such griefs. “It’s really important for people to know that they have precedent behind them, to know that we are in an unfinished, ongoing conversation across generations,” they said. “To know that there are generations who’ve weathered similar and overlapping difficulties will give us greater courage and wisdom than we have on our own.” In their own life, Bassichis has become a devoted friend to many of their activist inspirations—among them, Stonewall riot veteran and trans activist Miss Major; the late “people’s bubbie” Shatzi Weisberger, who became a sensation at protests with signs like “92 year old Jewish dyke for a free Palestine”; their early mentor and longtime bestie, the queer and trans liberation activist and writer Dean Spade; the artist, critic, and ACT UP trailblazer Gregg Bordowitz, a frequent collaborator; and Douglas Crimp, with whom they read the Bible in the older activist’s waning days. The same impulse motivated a series of queer lineage works that recover elements of the past and bring them into dialogue with the present. One revolved around The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, a 1977 utopian fable based on an upstate New York queer commune, Lavender Hill, where its writer Larry Mitchell and illustrator Ned Asta had made a home; Bassichis, together with their longtime friend, the performer Una Osasto and other collaborators, created a musical based on the book and then spearheaded its reissue, befriending Ned Asta and other members of the erstwile commune along the way. Osato recalls wondering, as they got to know the Lavender Hill collective, “Are we meeting our future past selves?”

In a way, that’s a question at the heart of Can I Be Frank?, which might be understood as Bassichis’s latest project in this series; indeed, the question is embedded in its very title. Can Bassichis be Frank Maya? And what would that mean? Act bravely in the face of communal devastation? Bag a special on Comedy Central? Impersonate him on stage? Maybe just being frank—honest, forthright—about desiring all of those things. In the end, the show demonstrates that being Frank is most importantly a matter of incorporating the history and lessons of our radical forebears into our own lives. In doing so, the show offers a new plot, an alternative to the old narrative about the individual artist abandoning their communal commitments to seek their personal fortune. In this new storyline, they can bring their radical inheritance along—and the audience, too.

Can I Be Frank?, then, is fueled by an organizer’s faith. Bassichis provides the communal space for progressives to let down their pieties, embrace contradictions, and dissolve into laughter—not to escape the psychic (and often material) grip of the world’s horrors, but to keep those horrors from squeezing out all the joy, complexity, and energy needed to fight another day. At the same time, through the emotionally complex activity of watching Can I Be Frank?, more mainstream spectators are subsumed into Bassichis’s project, too. We experience the mourning and militancy of the AIDS pandemic that took Frank Maya and carry it into the current moment.

In one Frank Maya joke Bassichis retells in Can I Be Frank?, Maya comes out to his father, who assures him that he and Maya’s mother will spare no expense to find a cure; Maya responds, “Dad, you know the only cure for being gay is fame.” Later in the show, Bassichis claims, with trademark amazement, that they only got the joke once it was explained by Neil Greenberg: “In those years, if you were gay and you got famous, you would go into the closet!” The bit hangs in the atmosphere following their own crossover hit of a commercial run: Only a year or two ago, one might have surmised that fame was the only cure for anti-Zionism as institutions from the 92nd Street Y to the State of Florida, and too many more to name, rejected artists who openly expressed solidarity with Palestine. But as poll after poll has indicated, the political ground is shifting. Actors Hannah Einbinder and Javier Bardem called for a “free Palestine” at last week’s Emmy Awards; several thousand Hollywood workers pledged a week earlier not to work with Israeli companies “implicated in genocide,” and Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is leading in polls of every New York City demographic group, including Jews, and even seems to be pushing Andrew Cuomo to backpedal on his longstanding support for Netanyahu. While all of them have faced predictable vitriolic responses, none is backing down.

For their part, Bassichis made political use of their platform without disturbance, from within the company or without. Can I Be Frank?’s producers at Mike and Carlee Productions, which also produced Oh, Mary!, were well aware of Bassichis’s views and spoke of them admiringly (producer Mike Lavoie told me he appreciated “Morgan’s case for humanity, a political case, but also a spiritual one”). The show was consistently sold out—and had to add some performances “by popular demand” in the run’s last two weeks. After many performances, Bassichis greeted well-wishers at the stage door wearing a “Let Gaza Live” T-shirt, and the sales of swag at a little table on the sidewalk outside the theater benefited the Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led aid initiative for Gaza. Meanwhile, Bassichis’s press tour showed in microscopic detail what an eruption of anti-Zionist voices into mainstream media might look like: Interviewed on the National Public Radio culture program All of It, Bassichis referred twice to “genocide” in Gaza and shouted out the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement; the show’s host can be heard quickly changing the subject each time, but nothing has been edited out of the archived audio or transcript.

If potential investors in a future version of the show do shy away from being associated with a principled anti-Zionist, Bassichis plans to take it in stride. They will happily throw themselves back into working to elect Mamdani mayor of New York, they told me, canvassing and organizing as they had done during the primary. I fortuitously caught Mamdani on the street one late August day and asked what Bassichis brings to his campaign. “Morgan is a light,” he said, as he walked on.