Julie Bovasso Actress, Playwright, Poet & Innovator
Julie Bovasso archive of articles and reviews:
A Gloria and Esperanza review
Tempo's second production, a review
New Group to offer Plays (NY Times 1972) read
Bovasso Territory (Wall Street Journal) read
La Mama presents 'Gloria' (NY Times 1970) read
More Press
"Sidelights""You either like Julie Bovasso's kinky kind of humor of you don't," writes Mariayn Stasio. "I like it--mostly. It's a tough, angry humor, which seems to flow from a cynical sense of disgust with the mess humanity has made of itself in the name of civilization, and whenever it's focused squarely it can be extremely potent satirical stuff." Miss Bovasso, Tom LeBar reports, tries to give the audience "a transforming or ranscending experience much as they used to get in a formal ritualistic worship service in a church." Miss Bovasso says: "Formerly the Church fulfilled people's unconscious needs. But now that formal religion has become so rational, theater must provide that experience. To do this playwrights have got to start reexamining old symbols. For symbols are the language of the unconscious." In "Gloria and Esperanza," she says, "a dwarf suddenly enters a rather mundane scene. The dwarf is an ancient symbol of the inner person."
"Beneath the flamboyant extravagances of ["The Moon Dreamers"] is a
stringent moral tract," Miss Stasio writes. Miss Bovasso's "heroine goes
into an extended swoon in which her soul struggle to return to the state
of spiritual innocence in which America once existed before its
corruption by a civilization run rampant. Layered between the mystic
ecstasies are grotesquely `funny' skits satirizing such dubious cultural
advances as trained dog acts, dime-a-dance-halls, crooners, Santa Claus,
the tango, and war. But the humor is far from camp. It is savage,
morbid, and--in its deep disgust at the contrast between the tawdriness
of man's cultural progress and the profundity of man's suffering--close
to nihilistic." Alan Bunce finds that the play "tries to take on the
universe and show it up. It's like turning the Marx Brothers loose on
choice American myths.... The sequences form a chain reaction of
effects, the stage equipment of stream-of-consciousness. It centers on
an ersatz drawing-room scene and an ailing woman whose doctor wears a
Batman-like cape.... Structurally, if such a word applies, the show is
polyphonic."
other writings
Village Voice, December 18, 1968, February 19, 1970;
Saturday Review, April 19, 1969;
National Observer, December 15, 1969;
Christian Science Monitor, Dec 19, 1969, Feb 9, 1970
Cue, December 20, 1969, February 14, 1970;
New York, December 20, 1969;
New York Times, December 21, 1969, Feb 2, 1972
New Leader, January 5, 1970;
Show Business, Jan 17, 1970, Feb 7,'70, Feb 14,'70
Variety, February 11, 1970, January 12, 1972;
New Yorker, February 14, 1970.
The Kansas City Star, September 19, 1991, p. F8.
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a clipping
Bovasso's attack on the American culture continues in "Gloria and
Esperanza," according to Brenden Gill, who calls the play "a
calculatedly incoherent phantasmagoria that always threatens to make our
flesh creep but chooses to make us laugh instead--a collision, at once
comic and murderous, between the author and the many aspects of our
society that arouse her contempt." Gill calls "Gloria and Esperanza"
"the most entertaining and amiably disconcerting new play of the season."
The Tempo Playhouse's second production
As founder of the Tempo Playhouse, Bovasso introduced the works of
Genet, Ionesco, and de Ghelderode to the United States. Julius Novick
comments on her distinct "Absurdist leanings" in "Down by the River
Where Water Lilies Are Disfigured Every Day": "Her new play owes a great
deal--too much, perhaps--to Genet," but, he adds, "Miss Bovasso has a
willful campy magination all her own." In conclusion, Novick asks: "Do
Miss Bovasso's metaphors of revolution, violence, deformity,
displacement, ambiguous sexuality, dubious sonship--do they fuse into a
cogent and affecting image of the objective or subjective worlds we
inhabit? For some people, perhaps, yes; for me, at first viewing, no,
although there is something about Miss Bovasso's thickly proliferous
imaginings that commands respect."
Jason Robart, Shelly Winters and Julie Bovasso the first OBIE award nite