Last Seen Entering the Biltmore

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.