INTERVIEW : John Fleck’s Radical Shtick

The orange gargoyles on the porch overhang of John Fleck’s Echo Park cottage smirk as a visitor passes beneath their gaze.

“Come in,” booms an unseen voice resonant with operatic timbre, the sound emanating from the inner sanctum, through the portal of the heavy wooden door set artfully ajar. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Strewn in Garbo-like repose across a couch in a murky corner of the living room, the performance artist-actor vamps. A plaster cherub, perched high above the gothic candelabra on the fireplace mantle, surveys the scene.

Fleck meets the press dressed in striped bermudas over royal blue long underwear. He has, after all, become mildly well known as one of the four infamous performance artists denied fellowships earlier this year by the National Endowment for the Arts. He has since gotten the hang of the “media thing.”

“Actually, I hope to exert more confidence than last time we talked,” says Fleck, seated at his kitchen table, munching almonds because he’s “trying to be a vegetarian.” Outside the kitchen on the back porch, a miniature U.S. flag rises out of the pot of an unsuspecting succulent.

“I’ve had more experience,” he continues candidly. “For awhile there, I felt like Liz Taylor, like this media celebrity. I kind of felt, ‘Oh, I never have to do anything, they just keep writing about me.’ They were talking about all this old stuff that happened years ago. Lotsa press. Yeow!

“I’ll never forget that day when the whole NEA thing happened,” Fleck continues. “I’d just finished a show at an AIDS hospice. I was burned out. I get home and there were 25 messages from this newspaper, that newspaper. I hadn’t even heard the news. A day later, we were all Federal Expressed our rejection letters.”

Dozens of newspaper articles followed. Vanity Fair did a page on Fleck and his fellow forbidden artists--Karen Finley, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller. “At first it was a lot of fun,” he recalls. “I was very naive. I just started gabbing.” Then CNN called in August. Then Oprah. Then the hostility from people Fleck had never even met came streaming in.

Now the dust has begun to settle. And while the NEA uproar has caused Fleck a lot of grief and certainly hasn’t made him famous, there is a bit of a silver lining.

Besides a few more out-of-town bookings and mildly heightened interest in his mainstream stage and screen career, the Los Angeles Theatre Center has just commissioned Fleck and Miller to create new works. They have each received $5,000 to make new hourlong performances to be presented as companion pieces at LATC in 1991.

The reason for the commissions, according to LATC artistic director Bill Bushnell is to make up for NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer’s unwillingness to finance Fleck and Miller.

“He’s fearless and he’s outrageous,” says Bushnell, who first cast Fleck in a production he directed in 1978. “This (experience) is going a long way toward politicizing an artist that didn’t think of himself as political. He thought of himself as a clown. He didn’t realize some of the great social critics have been clowns.”

Along with his stage work, the 39-year-old Fleck has played in low- and medium-budget films from “Hard Rock Zombies” to “Howard the Duck” to “Pink Cadillac.” He’s does enough commercials to keep the residuals flowing, and he’s landed some plum television roles, such as spots on series such as “Cheers” and a part in “Sweet Bird of Youth” with Elizabeth Taylor.

On the stage he really shines--whether it’s as a crazed 90-year-old woman in Robert Cossa’s “The Granny” at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego earlier this year, or as the buff stud Matamore in “The Illusion,” an adaptation of the 17th-Century work seen last spring at LATC.

But Fleck’s notoriety, and painful lessons, have come from his work as a performance artist. Because of the NEA experience, he’s suffered the slings and arrows of misrepresentation in the press, hate mail, menacing phone calls, and, of course, emotional drain.

Most important, it has forced Fleck to rethink why he does what he does. Some people seek an activist mindset, others have it thrust upon them.

Fleck’s most notorious performance piece--partly thanks to U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms’ indignation--is “Blessed Are All the Little Fishes.” It’s the same work--as he half-jokingly admits in a self-referential monologue that makes up the final segment of the performance--that he’s been doing in one version or another for nearly five years.

In it, Fleck journeys through incarnations as a drunken human, a glamorous if forlorn merman in a bathtub, and a crazed evangelist who has to preach in order to urinate.

Lavish to the point of rococo, the performance includes a gaggle of Vegas-worthy chorus boys and an episode in which Fleck nearly smothers an innocent goldfish that is the object of his affection.

The second part of “Fishes” sees Fleck return for what many presume to be the curtain call, only to launch into a sardonic monologue about the work just seen, his life and sundry other 1990s topics.

Although popular with the critics and a cadre of loyal followers, Fleck isn’t everybody’s cup of java.

“It got tedious when he went into this long monologue about what it meant to be gay and his boyfriends,” says critic-director Charles Marowitz of “Blessed Are All the Little Fishes.” “As a series of confessional gallery (vignettes), it was unproductive.

“He’s part of a gay tradition that has constantly thrown up extravagant performers. The problem with it is, it tends to be circumscribed within gay experience. In that show, when it was the show proper, it worked on an aesthetic level. When it reverted to his personal screeds and diary, it lost me.

“It would have lost other people who were not identifying with the gay obsessions he was,” says Marowitz, former artistic director of the Open Space Theatre in London and one of the key players in the rise of Joe Orton and others. “What’s more interesting is to get a gay artist who is able to extrapolate outward, than somebody who was imploding into gay concerns. It’s not only the prevailing disease, it’s become the prevailing cliche.”

Miller, Fleck’s fellow LATC grantee, disagrees. “I think John is one of the most amazingly talented thinkers and performers I’ve seen in this racket. The sex stuff in his work is just more generally confusing than about gay identity.

“John’s work is exploring his complex identity, part of which is as a gay person and part of which is as this androgyne that he is, which is larger than a particular gay person’s experience,” continues Miller, who is co-director of Highways performance space in Santa Monica. “I’ve seen very diverse audiences be totally drawn in by John.”

Adds High Performance magazine editor Steve Durland: “What’s misidentified about Fleck is that he’s been lumped in with Tim, Holly and Karen--all of whom are extremely outspoken and extremely political. Anybody who’s familiar with the other people knows that John’s just there because they all got their grants taken away.

“The (canceling of NEA funds) has forced him to talk about his work in a way that he normally avoids, the way any artist when challenged will have to speak about their personal political convictions.”

Fleck was first forced to take a stand by the television coverage. “Oprah was the peak,” he recalls.

“She introduced me as ‘an artist who deals with homosexual issues and (who) in his last show urinated onstage and, as he was reading from a Bible, mimed vomiting into a toilet. In another show, he made love to himself dressed as a man and a woman in his underwear.’ My mouth was just dropping. ‘Thanks for the intro, Oprah, you sow.’ It was a freak show. I thought they would treat me like an important artist. You live and you learn.”

Fleck’s gripes about Oprah notwithstanding, there were worse consequences of the sudden celebrity. Fleck says he got up to 150 phone calls a day from neo-Nazis during a five-day period, with over 200 calls on the final day.

The anonymous callers began phoning at around 8 a.m. and kept it up until 2 a.m., Fleck recalls, playing a punk song that went “We’re fascist, fag-bashing skinheads.”

“It was driving us crazy,” he says, referring to himself and painter-dancer Ryan Hill, with whom he lives.

“God, I guess a lot of people are afraid of this material. I must be doing something right to get this kind of response. I feel that if I’ve got a voice, I’ve got to use it all the more.”

One of the lightning rods that has drawn so much fire--from those who’ve never even seen Fleck’s work--is the religious symbolism. If those Catholic icons seem at home in this baroque milieu, though, it’s because Fleck comes by them honestly.

The product of a Cleveland Roman Catholic upbringing--in a family with six kids and an alcoholic father--Fleck moved around every six months or so for the first 10 years of his life. “My father just always had to have a different job,” he recalls. “He’d build a house and we’d move, he’d build another and we’d move.”

Fleck makes no bones about where the dysfunctional family references in his work come from. “(My parents) fought like cats and dogs. He was an alcoholic, a real man’s man. She had a baby every couple of years to keep the family together. She had seven--one died. It wasn’t all that bad, but they would have been better off if they’d gotten divorced, but they didn’t do that back in those days.

“I found a good escape into Catholicism,” says Fleck. “My biggest prayers were, ‘Oh please God’--I said this in all earnestness--’let my father die.’ For a long time I used to pray, ‘Oh please let me be a beautiful woman.’ I used to have this fantasy of being Constance Kennedy, John Kennedy’s adopted daughter. Then David Bowie came along and I got out of all this stuff and just dyed my hair orange and wore my platforms and didn’t have to pray anymore. I was beeeyouteeful. “

Fleck came to California in 1973 to attend acting school, although he’d never acted prior to that. He was a member of the first graduating class of the Pasadena branch of the East Coast-based American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Really, though, he came to get away from his family, most of whom still live near Cleveland. Since that entry into the West Coast whirl, Fleck has done the California thing with a vengeance.

“I’ve done a lot of different therapies,” he understates. “Gestalt, psychotherapy, transactional analysis, est, Adult Children of Alcoholics, The Forum, A Course in Miracles. Neuro-linguistic programming was kind of interesting, but I couldn’t get into. I’ve done ‘em all. Right now I’m reading ‘The Drama of the Gifted Child.’ ”

Seven years ago--about the time his father died--Fleck started making performance art, taking the trek from club to club as he developed his acts. He’s created dozens of shows, from 5-minute quickies to full-length, often employing his operatic singing voice and a peculiar sense of irony and the absurd.

In “I Got the He-Be-She-Be’s” (1986), Fleck sang jazz and pop tunes while his male and female halves battled each other for domination of his body.

In “Psycho-Opera” (1987), a futuristic bank of TV monitors provided the backdrop for the tale of Leyland, who talks to characters on the monitors, demonstrating the lethal--and funny--influence of media on the American mind.

Fleck manages to keep his two careers going, even with all the hullabaloo of the past year. “Certainly Hollywood didn’t come knocking,” he says. “Most casting people were reading about it and I think I got a lot of calls out of curiosity, to see who I was.

“One time I felt a little odd on an audition for some producers and directors. They said, ‘Oh, now don’t go peeing on the floor.’ You laugh, but they went on a little too much about it.

“(The NEA controversy) sure didn’t get me any work, but I don’t think it’s necessarily been bad for me either. I was always hoping my performance artwork would generate more interest in TV and film, but it isn’t the case necessarily.”

Still, Fleck has yet to land that one breakthrough role, on the boards or the big or small screen. “He’s not going to have a career unless Nicolas Cage dies,” says Durland. “They’re both such distinctive people that there probably isn’t room for both having major careers at the same time.”

“I made my mind up to let it go,” says Fleck of a recent spate of call-backs, but no big jobs. “At least I have some power and control in my own work. I did do an episode of ‘WIOU’ recently--as a homeless person who thinks he’s a dog and barks a lot. It was another freak role, but, hey, it was a week’s work. I can always kvetch about where I think I should be, but I’m doing OK.

“This schedule thing--wondering if I’m far enough along--that’s what happens when you’re about to turn 40.”

That midlife milestone, in fact, will be the subject of his new work for LATC. Combining motifs from American folk mythology, Fleck plans to tackle both his own personal changes and the changes he sees America going through.

“I love America,” says Fleck. “But, hey, we’ve got a few problems. You have to look at the wounds. That’s the only way they’ll heal. America’s in a big state of denial now about a lot of things.”

Strong words perhaps, from someone who never thought of himself as an activist, let alone a gay political performance artist.

“I don’t only deal with homosexual behavior,” says Fleck, now much more articulate about his own intentions and beliefs than he was before the NEA controversy. “I deal with dysfunctional issues like alcoholism and cultural issues like homelessness.

“What’s the big deal, me urinating into a toilet onstage? I think we should be worrying about the 70,000 (homeless) people in the city that I live in, trying to find a pot for these folks.

“I’ve been thrust in the political limelight, into this ‘gay political artist’ stand. Now that’s part of my work and I have to deal with it. But up until (recently), I’d never really thought of it.

“I just hate these extremes: you’re good or you’re bad, you’re gay or you’re straight, you’re Democrat or Republican. There’s 360 other colors in-between.

“You’re talking to an iconoclast whose mission in his work is to turn conventions upside down. I hate stereotypes. They limit people in their life experience,” he adds, seemingly aware he might be sounding uncharacteristically strident.

“I’m a humanist that believes in the full range of human sexual expression. I call myself a trisexual. There’s hetero, there’s homo. There’s bi. Now there’s tri. I say try it, you might like it. But don’t forget to use a rubber.”

That’s the serious, but not-so-serious, Fleck talking--constantly undercutting himself. Likewise, there’s a moment in “Blessed Are All the Little Fishes”--and in several Fleck works, for that matter--when the rational Fleck gets the better of the goofy Fleck, a kind of psychological cruise control that overrides his admittedly inspired theatrical hijinks.

Like Fleck the performer, Fleck the man is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routine, with the Apollonian and the Dionysian constantly duking it out for top billing just as Fleck’s male and female halves do in “I Got The He-Be-She-Be’s.” That’s what the notorious second act monologue in “Fishes” is really all about.

It’s also what Fleck the unwitting activist is about. Forced into a political identity he never intended, he’s still uncomfortable with the part, as though he could lapse into a feather-boa aria at any moment.

“After it all happened, I said I never want to apply for a . . . grant again,” Fleck says, clearly less than nostalgic for his trial-by-fire introduction to the national public eye. “Regardless of whether I get money or not, I’ll do what I have to do, even though having a money base certainly helps you to produce and focus.

“Yeah, I’ll apply,” announces Fleck, suddenly bold and maybe even a bit surprised at his own ability to assume a rebel persona. “And I’ll always be a little footnote in NEA history.”