Morgan Bassichis in Can I Be Frank? (Photo: Emilio Madrid)

Near the start of the show, Can I Be Frank?, queer, nonbinary performer Morgan Bassichis calls to stage manager Gloria in the booth to make notes and changes to the show.

They say what we are watching is a work-in-progress and they are belatedly scrambling to give the audience more context for a Frank Maya monologue they are performing about Liberace.

But the shambolic fumbling is scripted. As for the needed context, I guess I needed a lot more.

Can I Be Frank? is a one-person show written and performed by Bassichis, also using using some material from the late comedian Frank Maya.  I was not familiar with the work of Bassichis or the inspiration for this piece Maya.

But I was curious about Maya who was an out, gay performance artist and comedian in the 80s and 90s. He  appeared on network television with his own comedy special—remarkable for that time. He passed away from AIDS in 1995.

The familiar retort on social media is “open the schools” because it so often feels like folks today do not have a sense of history or even curiosity to learn anything that is 15-minutes-old or older.

So I too was excited to be educated about Maya and learn about this gay pioneer that I somehow had missed. But rather than a biography or homage to Maya, the show is baffling in approach and structure. The material dodges and weaves, eventually slipping away from Bassichis and director Sam Pinkleton.

Front and center is Bassichis whose stage persona is that of a desperate gay comedian looking for fame and a streaming special. This self-obsessed character turns this chance encounter learning about Maya into an opportunity for them, in their own mind, to win a Tony award.

It’s a joke, but it is an uphill battle to be led by this attention-pulling narrator when there is some serious stuff at its core. Not that this can never work, but I experienced some tonal whiplash. This could also be a consequence of taste. I never warmed to Bassichis’s self-indulgent neediness schitck when others around me seemed to enjoy it.

We are supposed to see Bassichis and Maya as cut from the same comedic cloth—but not knowing the work of either of them we are just dropped into that conceptual ocean fending for ourselves to see these parallels. Even when Bassichis outright says there are parallels, I wasn’t feeling them.

When the material shifts into Maya’s work, the lighting carefully changes and we get a sense of this step backwards in time and hearing a new voice on stage. Bassichis has re-created Maya’s original backdrop (recreation by Eli Woods Harrison) and Maya’s music (recreation by Natasha Jean Jacobs). Maya’s routines remain quite relevant (maybe Liberace rage aside).

There is no doubt Bassichis has done a lot research about Maya and his life, connecting with Maya’s friends and boyfriends. We hear this in dribs and drabs, but the resulting portrait is disjointed. It ends more about Bassichis’s efforts than Maya’s story. Fine, I guess.

But the show’s political aims get buried under Bassichis’s faux narcissism for far too long. And the switcheroo is is inartful. I get that it’s supposed to be a dramatic turn, but it did not feel earned.

There is a windup of rightous outrage that is meant to lead us from honoring a history of men lost too soon to AIDS to connect to a rage we should feel about our government today. These are generation defining moments, but the show does not build towards this.

Instead, there is more of a sudden catapult of political ideas that just get launched towards us at the end. Rage about AIDS, our government, and the violence all around us. It wants to be a meaningful call to action, but how did we get here?

How does Maya fit into this? Bassichis tries to make a big point of Maya making gay dating jokes in the era of AIDS and ACT UP activism. And that this is some act of creative selfishness—a touchstone that Bassichis shares with Maya. But we have not really heard much about Maya’s political thoughts to know what his intentions were at the time. And is this selfishness or subversion or just comedy?

Gloria, I think we are again missing context.