Up Your Ass (play)

Up Your Ass is a radical feminist play written in 1965 by Valerie Solanas[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] about a young prostitute.[9][10] The full title of the play is Up Your Ass, or, From the Cradle to the Boat, or, The Big Suck, or, Up from the Slime.[11][12] According to writer James Martin Harding, the play is "based on a plot about a woman who 'is a man-hating hustler and panhandler' and who ... ends up killing a man."[13]

Up Your Ass
Written byValerie Solanas
CharactersBongi Perez, Ginger, Mrs. Arthur Hazlitt
Date premiered2000
Place premieredGeorge Coates Performance Works
Original languageEnglish
GenreSatire, radical feminism
SettingStreet

Plot

Bongi Perez, a hustler, panhandler and lesbian prostitute, encounters various characters on the street as she goes about her day.

Rediscovery

Up Your Ass was rediscovered in 1999 and produced in 2000 by George Coates Performance Works in San Francisco. The copy Warhol had lost was found in a trunk of lighting equipment owned by Billy Name. Coates learned about the rediscovered manuscript while at an exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum marking the 30th anniversary of the shooting. Coates turned the piece into a musical with an all-female cast. Coates consulted with Solanas's sister, Judith, while writing the piece, and sought to create a "very funny satirist" out of Solanas, not just showing her as Warhol's attempted assassin.[14][15]

Up Your Ass remained unpublished until published as an ebook in 2014.[16][12][17]

Reception

The play was first performed in 2000 at the George Coates Performance Works theater in San Francisco. Coates turned the piece into a musical with an all-female cast. Coates consulted with Solanas's sister, Judith, while writing the piece, and sought to create a "very funny satirist" out of Solanas.[14][15] This version of the play was called "fundamentally flawed but farcical fun".[18]

Writer James Harding describes Up Your Ass as more a "provocation than ... a work of dramatic literature"[19] and "rather adolescent and contrived."[13]

Relation to Solanas's attempted murders

In 1967, Solanas encountered Warhol outside his studio, The Factory, and asked him to produce this play. He accepted the script for review, told Solanas it was "well typed", and promised to read it.[20] According to Factory lore, Warhol, whose films were often shut down by the police for obscenity, thought the script was so pornographic that it must have been a police trap.[21][22] Solanas contacted Warhol about the script, and was told that he had lost it. He also jokingly offered her a job at the Factory as a typist. Insulted, Solanas demanded money for the lost manuscript. Instead, Warhol paid her $25 to appear in his film I, a Man.[23]

Actress Sylvia Miles said that Solanas appeared at the Actor's Studio looking for Lee Strasberg on June 3, 1968, asking to leave her play (a partial copy of an earlier draft of Up Your Ass) for him.[24] Miles said that Solanas "had a different look, a bit tousled, like somebody whose appearance is the last thing on her mind."[25] Miles told Solanas that Strasberg would not be in until the afternoon. Miles said that she accepted a copy of the play from Solanas and then "shut the door because I knew she was trouble. I didn't know what sort of trouble, but I knew she was trouble."[26]

Breanne Fahs records that Solanas then traveled to producer Margo Feiden's (then Margo Eden) residence in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as Solanas believed that Feiden would be willing to produce her play. As related to Fahs, Solanas talked to Feiden for almost four hours, trying to convince her to produce the play and discussing her vision for a world without men. Throughout this time, Feiden repeatedly refused to produce Solanas's play. According to Feiden, Solanas then pulled out her gun, and when Feiden again refused to commit to producing the play, Solanas responded, "Yes, you will produce the play because I'll shoot Andy Warhol and that will make me famous and the play famous, and then you'll produce it." As she was leaving Feiden's residence, Solanas handed Feiden a copy of her play.[27][28]

Later that day while Warhol was on the phone, Solanas fired at him three times. Her first two shots missed, but the third went through both lungs, his spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus.[29] She then shot art critic Mario Amaya in the hip. She tried to shoot Fred Hughes, Warhol's manager, in the head, but her gun jammed.[30] Hughes asked her to leave, which she did, leaving behind a paper bag with her address book on a table.[31] Warhol was taken to Columbus–Mother Cabrini Hospital, where he underwent a successful five-hour operation.[32][33]

At her arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court she denied shooting Warhol because he wouldn't produce her play but said "it was for the opposite reason",[34] that "he has a legal claim on my works."[34]

References
  1. "Controversial Valerie Solanas Play Goes Up in NYC Premiere Feb. 7–25". Playbill. 7 February 2001.
  2. Kaplan, Michael (2 June 2018). "I could have saved Andy Warhol from being shot".
  3. Moore, Michael Scott. "A Shot at the Stage". SF Weekly.
  4. "Layers of SCUM: Uncovering Valerie Solanas". 1 April 2014.
  5. Rowe, Desireé D.; Chávez, Karma R. (2011). "Valerie Solanas and the Queer Performativity of Madness". Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. 11 (3): 274–284. doi:10.1177/1532708611409544. hdl:11603/14598.
  6. "Original Review of Valerie Solanas' Long Lost Play UP YOUR ASS, By Red Jordan Arobateau, From The Spectator Magazine, circa 2000. – Human Sexuality – Gender". Scribd.
  7. Rowe, Desireé D. (2013). "The (dis)appearance of Up Your Ass: Valerie Solanas as abject revolutionary". Rethinking History. 17 (1): 74–81. doi:10.1080/13642529.2012.750783. hdl:11603/14582.
  8. Jacobs, Leonard (14 March 2001). "Up Your Ass". Backstage.
  9. Lord, Catherine (2010). "Wonder waif meets super neuter". October. 132 (132): 135–136. doi:10.1162/octo.2010.132.1.135.
  10. Heller, Dana (2001). "Shooting Solanas: radical feminist history and the technology of failure". Feminist Studies. 27 (1): 167–189. doi:10.2307/3178456. JSTOR 3178456.
  11. Lord, Catherine (2010). "Wonder waif meets super neuter". October. 132 (132): 135–136. doi:10.1162/octo.2010.132.1.135.
  12. Fahs (2008)
  13. Harding, James Martin (2010). Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 168. ISBN 978-0-472-11718-5.
  14. Judith Coburn (2000). "Solanas Lost and Found". The Village Voice. Retrieved November 27, 2011.
  15. Carr, C. (July 22, 2003). "SCUM Goddess". The Village Voice. Retrieved August 13, 2015.
  16. Solanas, Valerie (March 31, 2014). Up Your Ass. Milano, Italy: VandA.ePublishing. ASIN B00JE6N2UG. ISBN 9788868990121.
  17. Lord, Catherine (2010). "Wonder waif meets super neuter". October. 132 (132): 135–136. doi:10.1162/octo.2010.132.1.135.
  18. Hurwitt, Robert (14 January 2000). "Fundamentally flawed, but farcical fun". SFGate.
  19. Harding, James Martin (2010). Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 169. ISBN 978-0-472-11718-5.
  20. Nickels, Thom (2005). Out in History: Collected Essays. STARbooks Press. pp. 15–16. ISBN 978-1-891855-58-0.
  21. Barron, James (June 23, 2009). A Manuscript, a Confrontation, a Shooting, New York Times, retrieved on 2009-07-06.
  22. Kaufman, Alan; Ortenberg, Neil; Rosset, Barney, eds. (2004). The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. pp. 201. ISBN 978-1-56025-550-5.
  23. Nickels, Thom (2005). Out in History: Collected Essays. STARbooks Press. pp. 15–16. ISBN 978-1-891855-58-0.
  24. Fahs, Breanne (2014). Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol). New York: The Feminist Press. Footnote 198. ISBN 978-1558618480.
  25. Fahs, Breanne (2014). Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol). p.133. New York: The Feminist Press. ISBN 978-1558618480.
  26. Fahs, Breanne (2014). Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol). p.133. New York: The Feminist Press. ISBN 978-1558618480.
  27. Fahs, Breanne (2014). Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol). New York: The Feminist Press. Footnote 198. ISBN 978-1558618480.
  28. Fahs, Breanne (2014). Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol). New York: The Feminist Press. p.134-137. ISBN 978-1558618480.
  29. Kaufman, Alan; Ortenberg, Neil; Rosset, Barney, eds. (2004). The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. pp. 201. ISBN 978-1-56025-550-5.
  30. Harding, James Martin (2010). Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-11718-5.
  31. Harding, James Martin (2010). Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-11718-5.
  32. Kaufman, Alan; Ortenberg, Neil; Rosset, Barney, eds. (2004). The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. pp. 201. ISBN 978-1-56025-550-5.
  33. Dillenberger, Jane Daggett (2001). The Religious Art of Andy Warhol. New York: Continuum. p. 31. ISBN 978-0826413345.
  34. Faso, Frank; Lee, Henry (June 5, 1968). "Actress defiant: 'I'm not sorry'". 49 (297). New York Daily News. p. 42.
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