A solo show written and performed by Morgan Bassichis, Can I Be Frank? runs scarcely more than 70 minutes at the SoHo Playhouse, where this unexpectedly resonant work opened on Monday. So let’s not tell too much except to note that the Frank mentioned in the title is Frank Maya. A New York performance artist during the 1970s and 1980s who later developed into one of the first openly gay stand-up comedians seen on network television, Frank Maya died from AIDS-related complications in 1995 at the age of 45.
Can I Be Frank? is not strictly a biography but rather an artful tribute to Maya’s bold, ranting style of stand-up comedy that involves political as well as social commentary from a gay point of view. The show’s content partly incorporates original material by Maya that was funny and valid in the 1980s and remains so today. A head-shaker of a story titled “The First Time You Go Home With Someone” is specifically gay but proves humorously universal in its rueful truths.
What gives the show its momentum and eventual power is the transformative effect Maya apparently has upon Bassichis, who initially and amusingly presents themself as a chatty, non-binary queer comedian with a dithering manner: Early on, while talking about Maya’s life and times, the gawky Bassichis eventually wraps themself up in a snaky tangle of microphone cord. By the end of the show, however, Bassichis has evolved into quite a different character whose forceful message urges the audience to honor lost artists from the recent past such as Maya by becoming militant and informed people facing up to the present.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
It is impossible to tell what influence Sam Pinkleton, the director, has had in the composition of Can I Be Frank? It is interesting to note that this work, like others Pinkleton has directed recently such as Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! and Josh Sharp’s ta-da!, regard individuals who desperately desire fame. Bassichis asserts that Maya certainly craved notoriety, and their own character expresses a similar hunger in occasional side remarks to the audience. Anyway, Pinkleton provides a technically sound bare-bones staging (Oona Curley is the production designer), while obtaining from Bassichis a natural performance that easily covers a lot of social and spiritual ground.
This review is relatively brief because as someone who lived and worked amid the New York theater and media industries during those times, it was still extremely poignant for me to hear Bassichis mention the names of people and places I knew and loved that did not survive into this century. It is vital for younger generations to realize that one significant reason our present culture is so nasty and decadent is due to the untimely loss to AIDS of multitudes of arts-makers they never knew existed, like Frank Maya, and this show is a good reminder.
Can I Be Frank? opened Aug. 4, 2025, at SoHo Playhouse and runs through Sept. 13. Tickets and information: canibefrank.nyc
