For International ‘Zine Month: On Some Close-to-Home Theatre ‘Zines

July is International ‘Zine Month!

The occasion has inspired a little navel gazing, for in those dim dark days before blogging was available, ‘zines were the only way many of us could self-publish with total freedom, and I myself plunged into that wonderful madness for a time. And like anything else, it has a history.

There will be some of you who already don’t know what I’m talking about. Almost by definition, a ‘zine is an underground thing, the stuff of college students, artists, musicians and their fans, and such like. You can certainly cite spiritual forbears going all the way to the dawn of the printing press, but when most of us use the term, it refers to a specific phenomenon that roughly coincided with the punk movement of the 1970s. A ‘zine is a self-published periodical, usually xeroxed (often illicitly, at day jobs), in print runs of fewer than 1,000, though often in practice fewer than 100. Initially, back in the day ‘zines had elements of physical paste-up, often using letters cut out of existing magazines to spell out headlines, making the front pages resemble kidnappers’ ransom notes. But they came in all sizes, shapes, and colors. Members of The Fugs had put out their own ‘zines since the late ’50s; V. Vale’s punk ‘zine Search and Destroy dated to the mid ’70s.

In the ’90s, there was a kind of explosion of ‘zines, because by then we had desktop publishing, word processing and graphic design programs, and yet we did not yet have blogging platforms. Blogger and LiveJournal arrived in 1999; WordPress in 2003. Prior to this, many people engaged in things like chat rooms, which was what people did prior to social media, or they sent newsletters via e-mail. Or they created ‘zines.

I produced my own one, The Herald of Freedom, from January 1996 through April 1999, around 20 issues (at least I think so, that’s the latest number I could find). I named it in honor of P.T. Barnum’s newspaper and it was designed to be the house organ of my company Mountebanks, which produced my American Vaudeville Theatre shows, as well as my original plays. Beyond Barnum (who actually served a little jail time for views he expressed in The Herald of Freedom) my other models were The Tatler, created by Richard Steele between 1709 and 1711, and The Spectactor, a collaboration between Steele and Joseph Addison between 1711 and 1712. That was the age of the one-person newspaper, with occasional guest contributors, and I also had occasional guest contributors. I was also inspired by those little arts journals put out by the Dada people and Surrealists in the early to mid 20th century.

My Herald of Freedom featured original humor, poetry, cartoons, criticism (theatre, music, museums etc), and philosophical and political scribblings, usually with a libertarian bent. Don’t judge me for it. I contend that most liberals, socialists, conservatives, and to be quite honest, libertarians, are way off base about what they think libertarianism consists of. And at any rate, my views have shifted quite far away from where they were three decades ago, when I spent a lot of head-space making common cause with John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and what have you. I clearly wanted to be provocative. “Why You Should Worship Money”. It makes me blush with shame — even if it also makes me giggle like an adolescent setting off a stink bomb. It was once fun to be bad, but only because you thought no one could get hurt. But seeds were sown in that era that sprouted into big old ugly-trees in our own. People can get hurt by the things we publicly espouse, even when it’s tongue in cheek. I was already turning away from libertarianism by September 11. I had mostly gone there in the first place because Bill Clinton’s hypocrisy and lack of principle pissed me off.

My old friend John Devore wrote for Maxim back in the day, and he expressed similar regrets in his recent book Theatre Kids. (Maxim was an unapologetically sexist publication, not unlike a real version of the fictional Big ‘Uns from Married with Children). John’s wonderful memoir also reminded me of a terrific theatre ‘zine I also contributed to at around the same time, called Off.

Off was co-edited and published by David Cote, who later went on to be theatre editor at Time Out New York, and helped me become a contributor there too. Off was not a one-person ‘zine. It had many contributors, and frankly I found it pretty exciting, to suddenly have this publication that talked about all aspects of the then-burgeoning indie theatre scene, which we then pretty much regarded as Second Wave Off Off. Starting in January 1997 I contributed a regular column to Off called “Frozen Theatre”. It was basically a museum review column in which I evaluated museum exhibitions as though they were plays. I have no idea what made me think of this, but it was coming from a populist place.

For a brief while the alt-theatre scene had an alt-theatre press to go with it. Cote also edited Propaganda, the official publication for the New York International Fringe Festival, for which I also wrote. There were a bunch of others, I can’t remember all of them. Most of them were short-lived. Showcase News was one. For a while, the brilliant Yelena Gluzman and Matvei Yankelevich put out The Emergency Gazette, and man that one really was a ‘zine! It was a literal one-sheet, the “sheet” being a single piece of legal-sized paper with content on both sides. It was usually very heady, philosophical, performance theory kind of stuff. I loved it.

I am delighted to report that unlike any of the publications I have heretofore referred, The Emergency Gazette is now digitally archived! Check it out here.

At any rate, it was a time of rapid change. For people like Devore, Cote and moi, the ‘zine writing led to gigs at major publications, which offered less freedom but (some) pecuniary recompense…for a while. I had a run of several good years at Time Out, The Village Voice, American Theatre(as an Affiliated Writing Fellow) and several other places. When that started to dry up later in the decade (the oughts) I started this blog. Most of the theatre ‘zines winked out, the void filled in large part by Martin Denton’s now defunct nytheatre.com.

Remarkably, one old theatre friend from that time and place has stuck to her guns the entire time!

Ayun Halliday of Theater of the Apes has been putting out The East Village Inky since 1998! Still going strong a quarter century later and available here.

Though I’ve only gotten to know her well in recent times, Ayun may be the person in the downtown theatre scene (of our generation) to whom I relate the most in some ways, on account of we put out similarly wide-ranging clusters of activity (i.e., we do a lot of the same kinds of stuff). Not just the ‘zines, but such things as producing variety shows and plays, performing solo pieces, writing books, free-lancing, staying in the fray while raising children, and just in general seeing mad notions all the way to the finish line, the more eccentric the better. This one goes out to you, Ayun!

And Happy International ‘Zine Month!