East 10th Street is a tale of the bizarre masquerading as nervous humour, where a decrepit house and its inhabitants crumble noiselessly in a one-hour monologue. Existentialist in essence, it flirts with the horror genre but only slightly – similar to a Peter Doig painting where the viewpoint shifts between unusual angles.
And ‘shift’ us is what Edgar Oliver does best. From the moment he steps on stage, he draws us in to this sinister tale of gothic proportions, albeit mellowed by his seductive New York camp drawl. In the crumbling house where Oliver lived for thirty years, his one-man show brings to life an array of eccentric characters all verging on the grotesque. The ‘cast’ includes a retired postman who mixes his vodka with milk, the ‘man upstairs’ who never visits the bathroom and defecates in suitcases and ‘the Lady Macbeth of rags’, obsessed with laundry and who carries soap bars in an enamel washbasin.
Oliver’s narrative is exquisitely voyeuristic with its quest for a repellent intimacy with his grotesque characters. Don’t be fooled by the first ‘scene’ and its humorous puns; there is no laughter to be had at the expense of the characters, the laughter is all at our expense. For as soon as we settle comfortably in the play’s rhythm, Oliver tears us mercilessly away: he becomes madly infatuated with a young actor. We stop laughing. Now we can relate. Now we wish we didn’t. Now we want to, now we don’t.
Oliver turns over in his bed to touch his lover’s shoulder, and the shoulder, the whole arm, comes loose and crumbles. His lover’s body disintegrates. It’s a dream, no it isn’t. Loneliness does that to you, Oliver seems to say. That nonchalant youth sleeping soundly, unaware of the crumbling of flesh to come, of the life to be had, of this journey.
Oliver’s play succeeds in chilling us to the bone by the evocation of loneliness in this bizarre place. This is no ‘Yacoubian Building‘ tale relocated to Greenwich Village. East 10th Street haunts the playwright and the audience alike. It’s that internal ‘haunted’ house, where humanity wrestles with the profound peculiarities of a meaningless existence that, now and then, goes wayward and crumbles.
Architect’s Home in the Ravine by Peter Doig. Oil on canvas, 1991. © Wikipedia
Edgar Oliver is an American stage and film actor, poet, performance artist and playwright. Born in Savannah, Georgia he has lived and worked in New York City since 1977. He is widely considered “a legend” of the downtown New York theatre scene. As a playwright Oliver has frequently been produced at La MaMa ETC, most notably with the 2000 production of his play The Drowning Pages starring Deborah Harry of Blondie fame. (Photo © Alice O’Malley)
