Dan Fishback looks back at his childhood and the AIDS epidemic in multidisciplinary THIRTYNOTHING at Dixon Place
Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Pl. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
Fridays & Saturdays, September 30 – October 22, $15-$20, 7:30 or 9:30
212-219-0736
www.dixonplace.org
A few years ago, we caught Dan Fishback’s outrageously funny You Will Experience Silence at Dixon Place, one of the truly great works about Chanukah. Fishback, who has also presented such shows as The Material World, Absentia Dementia, Waiting for Barbara, and Please Let Me Love You, which take on politics, celebrity, religion, gay culture, and other themes, is staging the solo performance project thirtynothing at Dixon Place on Fridays & Saturdays through October 22. Directed by Stephen Brackett, thirtynothing pulls together stories from Fishback’s childhood along with tales from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, weaving in work by such seminal artists as Mark Morrisroe and David Wojnarowicz. In conjunction with thirtynothing, Dixon Place will be holding special Sunday conversations ($5 suggested donation, 5:00) on the cultural legacy of AIDS, beginning October 2 with “The Queer Generation Gap” (with Ira Sachs, Jack “Mother Flawless Sabrina” Doroshow, and Carlos Motta) and continuing October 9 with “The Gentrification Age” (with Sarah Schulman), October 16 with “The Films of Mark Morrisroe” (including screenings of Hello from Bertha, The Laziest Girl in Town, and Nymph-O-Maniac), and October 23 with “THIRTYEVERYTHING.” The talks will take place in the lounge, where Fishback has installed a site-specific piece honoring artists who died of AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s. “There is no ritualized means for my generation to mourn our predecessors who were lost to AIDS,” Fishback explains in an online program note. “As a Jew, trained from birth to mourn the obliteration of my ancestors, I feel the impulse to gather my community together, to speak of the dead, to celebrate the triumphs of the past and integrate that history into a sense of who I am. That is the impulse behind this project.”