On the phone from New York, John Cameron Mitchell is genial, funny and willing to discuss his remarkable plethora of projects, involvement with the Radical Faeries and views on current anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.
We start with Cassette Roulette, his show with singer/actress Amber Martin, coming to Cal Performances Nov. 4. In it, audience members spin the “cassette wheel,” and Mitchell and/or Martin perform whatever song it lands on. While about a third of the songs are preset, two-thirds are chosen randomly. Mitchell got the idea, he said, from watching Elvis Costello in his “Spectacular Spinning Wheel” tour.
Song possibilities include tunes from Mitchell’s cult classic, Hedwig and the Angry Inch—maybe “Tear Me Down,” “Origin of Love” or “Wig in a Box.” In 2015, he made a guest appearance as Hedwig during the revival of the show, and received a Special Tony Award for his performance. Cassette Roulette also features songs from his performances in shows such as Big River and The Secret Garden, as well as his “lockdown album,” New American Dream, alongside Martin’s spot-on tributes to divas as diverse as Bette Midler and Reba McEntire.
“I’ve been performing and DJ’ing with Amber for 17 years,” Mitchell said. “She is an avatar of ’70s divas. Her Reba is a Cubist delight.” Of her “own crazy characters,” he noted, “each one has an unfortunate crop top.”
Anything can happen during the show, he said. Once, while Martin sang “I Left My Weed in Texas and That Ain’t Cool,” an audience member offered Mitchell a joint. Which he took. And smoked. And, contrary to some performers, they both enjoy audience sing-alongs. “It’s all part of the vibe,” he said.
“I have seen hundreds of shows. This was the best cabaret show I’ve seen by far. It was unscripted, genuine, and pure genius,” wrote Isabella Babich, in Broadway World.
Segueing to other projects, past and present, Mitchell said his podcast musical, Anthem: Homunculus, was originally going to be a sort of Hedwig sequel, but instead became an imagination of “what if I had never left Junction City, Kansas.” It continues to be available “forever for free” online, he said.
One new podcast that is “90% completed” is Cancellation Island, available early next year, which suggests that, “In the future, we will all be canceled for 15 minutes.” Co-created with Michael Cavadias, and starring, among others, Holly Hunter, it’s about an island where canceled people go for rehab. One tagline asks, “In a world where all news is fake, are all stories true?”
Mitchell is also writing a new play, based on the life of Claude Cahun, a surrealist French photographer whom he described as the “Cindy Sherman of the 1920s.” The script will follow her life with her lifelong partner, Marcel Moore. Both were famous for what would have then been called androgyny, and Cahun once wrote, “The only gender that suits me is neutral.” The partners became Resistance fighters during World War II, Mitchell said.
He has been associated for years with the Radical Faeries. A loosely organized, international group co-founded in 1979 by gay icon Harry Hay, Radical Faeries was created to examine “queer consciousness through secular spirituality,” according to web research. It now includes groups such as San Francisco-based The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
Today, Mitchell said, the Faeries don’t practice “gender exclusivity,” and their energy has informed some of his work, in particular the 2006 film, Shortbus. Controversial because of its depictions of actual sex, its plot portrays a “sexually diverse” group of people who meet weekly in a Brooklyn salon. Mitchell said the famous Parisian salons of Gertrude Stein were one of his inspirations.
Asked for his views on current pushback to LGBTQ+ rights, he said, “It’s shocking. We all have queer people in our families, acknowledged or not.” Conservatives use LGBTQ+ rights as a wedge issue, he said. “George W. Bush won his second term promising to stop gay marriage.”
Yet, ever iconoclastic, Mitchell described himself as a “leftist libertarian,” speaking of the eternal quest for balance between individual rights and “community.” Referencing Peter Weiss’ modern classic, Marat/Sade, he noted, “de Sade represents absolute individual freedom, but he believed we are inherently evil,” while Marat, representing “community,” ultimately arrived at the guillotine as a solution. “We are still asking the same questions,” Mitchell said. “Does ‘freedom’ mean no Social Security?”
On the other hand, he mused, the left, with its distrust of authority, is sometimes not “pragmatic” about what it takes to achieve change.
He doesn’t believe only a trans person should play Hedwig, for example—an issue that arose during a planned Australian production of the show. “Anyone should be able to play Hedwig,” he said. “Everyone is a gender of one.”
Looking to the future, in spite of Mitchell already having worked with some of the top actors/performers in the world, there are still people whose schedules have prevented collaboration up till now. Mitchell named Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton and Meryl Streep as some of them. Don’t be surprised if they turn up in one or more of his world of projects.
The night after the Cassette Roulette performance, Nov. 5, Mitchell and Martin will host their dance party, “Mattachine,” named for Harry Hay’s pioneering gay-rights society, at Oasis nightclub in San Francisco.
John Cameron Mitchell and Amber Martin in ‘Cassette Roulette,’ 8pm, Nov. 4 at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. Part of the Cal Performances series. 510.642.9988. www.calperformances.org
