#250709 ~ Footnoting the NYT
Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for July 09, 2025.
WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my emphatically intermittent newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…
This Week's #TheatreCliquery:
This installment of #TheatreClique breaks from convention to introduce a possibly recurring feature, The More You Know… But for this week’s opener, and for reasons that might soon become apparent, I lift the music video for a song that takes me right back to NYC Gay Pride 1992. …and if clicking the image below routes to an error message, try clicking here.
EDITOR’S NOTE: whenever possible, whenever linking to paywalled pieces, I try to “gift” the article to #TheatreClique readers. In other words, clicking out to articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal should neither present hassle nor burn through your current allotment of free views. Here’s hoping more outlets — hello LATimes! hi NewYorkMagazine! yo NewYorker!— adopt similar technologies for subscribers soon...
The More You Know:
Wherein I offer unsolicited autobiographical/historical “context” to contemporary events...
The other day, as I was scanning a routine “shows to see” survey in The New York Times, my brain hiccuped a bit on the highlighted section below…
So. As a professional historian who occasionally moonlights as an autobiographical storyteller, I feel compelled to note that the Hot! Festival was not created by El Covan, not exactly...
I know because I was there.
In early 1992, I cold-called the offices of Three Dollar Bill Theater — I think their number was listed in the back of TheatreWeek — to offer my services as a volunteer. I had quit my full-time day job to take on more shifts at my part-time overnight job so as to, ostensibly, make myself more available for theatremaking. And a batch of random Monday morning phone calls was my first step. I didn’t expect anyone to pick up at Three Dollar Bill Theater, let alone for the Artistic Director to answer my call. But that’s what Mark Owen did. After hearing my clumsy pitch, Mark asked to meet for lunch, where he recognized me as having been an actor in a show his friend had directed, and, soon (maybe that same day), I signed on to help. 3$Bill — that was how our very cool logo spelled it; it was the ‘90s, after all — was effectively a one-person organization at the time, with Mark having finally and formally taken over the company (founded in 1989) some months prior. A playwright and director himself, Mark was particularly glad to bring me on board because he was deep into curating and producing a new summer festival of queer performance, which was set to happen that July in venues all over lower Manhattan but mostly at Dixon Place in its then-new digs on Bowery. So that summer, I was named an “Artistic Associate” with the company as I stepped in as 3$Bill’s on-site producer for nearly every Hot! Festival performance at Dixon Place that Mark couldn’t be present for (and for many that he could). The festival proved an enormous success, with sold-out performances nearly every night, providing me a front-row, first-name-basis encounter with queer performance makers of all sorts, many of whom had traveled from great distances to present their work in NYC (including some with whom I remain friends to this day).
As summer gave way to fall, and flush off the unexpected success of 1992’s Hot! Festival, 3$Bill and Dixon Place decided to make it semi-exclusive for 1993, with almost all of the festival’s offerings happening at Dixon Place. But somewhere in the lead up to July 1993, things got squicky. The challenges of co-production, especially when one producing partner is more reputationally established and manages the venue, are many. And, in this case, it was all of that plus a not unusual mix of curatorial disagreements and board concerns and conflicts over decision-making authority — all of which led to a somehow irresolvable conflict over who had legal claim on the Hot! Festival name which culminated with Mark/3$Bill ultimately stepping away from the festival altogether after July 1993. The following year, the 1994 Hot! Festival continued as a Dixon Place production, where it continues today. Mark and $3Bill persisted for a few more years but, without the tentpole event originally conceived as the company’s annual promotional and financial anchor, the company struggled to rediscover momentum and 3$Bill ultimately closed around 1996 or so.
This story still just makes me sad. Yes, some scrappy theatre organizations survive and some don’t. But these were my first two artistic homes that were somehow no longer speaking and I felt caught in the between. (In addition to my ongoing work as Artistic Associate at 3$Bill, I regularly tended bar and worked the door at Dixon Place for the eleven months between between the 1992 and 1993 Hot! Festival.) I can now see that my discombobulation following this “creative divorce” was a big part of why I left NYC within the year. The experience even sparked my (serious but thankfully fleeting) plan to attend law school, where I fully expected to focus on artistic contracts and intellectual property. Instead, I became a performance historian. Which is probably why, even all these decades later, I bristle when I see the story of the Hot! Festival’s sustained success that erases (however inadvertently) Mark Owen’s vision and 3$Bill’s labor from the public record…
All of which might also explain why I feel weirdly compelled to speak up, if only to offer this minor autobiographical/historical correction: Mark Owen’s inceptive vision, in tandem with the collective labor of 3$Bill Theater and El Covan’s nimble production model, created the first Hot! Festival in 1992, the success of which launched the festival as an enduring hub for queer performance at Dixon Place for the next several decades. Sure, it’s the kind of tiny detail that might only ever appear in a footnote but, perhaps because I lived it, it seems worth footnoting The New York Times, even if only to do it here.
As they say, the more you know…
