New York City native and award winning playwright/director/performer Ain Gordon presents Radicals in Miniature, a deeply personal work conjuring seminal but forgotten figures he met while coming of age in the city’s audacious artistic and gay fringe culture of the 1970s and 80s. Radicals… is co-created with composer/percussionist Josh Quillen, who brings his own Ohio panoply of ghosts to the stage. Together, Gordon and Quillen poetically explore the influence of these undersung characters, who endured the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and propelled “alternative” culture forward, including: punk drummer David Hahn, dance reveler Elaine Shipman, club performer John Sex, disco artist Sylvester, and more.

Radicals in Miniature follows two prior collaborations from the work’s co-creators: Where (we) Live (2012) and A Gun Show (2016)—both directed by Gordon and performed by the acclaimed ensemble Sō Percussion, of which Quillen is a member. In Radicals, Gordon makes his first stage appearance since the acclaimed Off-Broadway production Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell.

Radicals in Miniature was created in collaboration with dramaturge Talvin Wilks. Lighting design is by Jennifer Tipton. Projections are by Ed Fitzgerald and Nick Ryckert.

Audience members arriving for Ain Gordon’s Radicals in Miniature at the Baryshnikov Arts Center are greeted by a stage on which twelve seemingly haphazardly-placed computer screens display small, flickering images of people and objects. Screens onstage hardly merit a passing glance in theater anymore, but in presenting this barely-perceptible slideshow before the start of the performance, Gordon and his Miniature co-creator Josh Quillen reveal this quirky and heartfelt production’s modus operandi, of small details held and buffed until they illuminate the lives of the overlooked and un-famous, particularly in the downtown NYC 1980s arts scene in which Gordon himself came of age. Gordon, the son of choreographer David Gordon and dancer Valda Setterfield, has mined the territory of the departed before, notably as a performer in Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell, for which he won an Obie (he has earned three thus far in his career). With Radicals in Miniature this seasoned and engaging performer is focused on paying tribute to some of the minor characters in his growing up, ranging from the club performer John Sex, to dancer (and Gordon’s babysitter) Elaine Shipman, to the peculiar …Read more