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Three Cheers for Robert Prichard and Surf Reality!
March 11 is the birthday of downtown impresario Robert Prichard, co-founder and bull goose looney of the much missed performance space known as Surf Reality (or, by the full title, Surf Reality’s House of Urban Savages). I’ve had cause to mention Surf close to 50 times on Travalanche and have long wanted something definitive to link those mentions to. This post aims to serve that purpose, though I’ll link you to some more reading anon. My dog in this hunt is that Surf was my artistic home base from late 1997 through 2002, and I’ll write about that too, but first an overview of the man and the club itself.
Prichard is an army brat who was born in Germany. He first gained attention in fringe independent films, mostly horror comedies by the likes of Troma and other producers. You can see him in movies like The Toxic Avenger (1984), Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986), and Alien Space Avenger (1989), usually alongside his former wife, the stunning and statuesque Playboy model Jennifer Babtist.
Rob was also an old schoolfriend of Matt Mitler’s, co-producing and appearing in the latter’s film Cracking Up (1994) which I wrote about here.
Surf was carved out of a corner of the Prichards’ Allen Street raw-space loft over what Prichard invariably describes as a “crack deli”. The neighborhood was very rough at that time. I went to see a show at a nearby, similarly pioneering, venue called House of Candles at around this time (1993) and was fairly terrified. Basically, it was the Lower East Side performance scene that built up around these two venues, along with Todo Con Nada, Collective Unconscious, The Present Company Theatorium, The Pink Pony, The Piano Store, and others that attracted hipsters, rehabilitated the neighborhood, and thereby priced themselves out, paving the way for the overpriced luxury real estate nabe it is today. But man it was cool while it lasted. For a brief time the area was its own discrete alternative theatre district, a smaller, more gonzo cousin to Times Square and the Bowery of Old. My 2003 article about that transition was one of my first for the Village Voice. It doesn’t seem to be online anymore, but here’s pictorial proof:
Initially, Surf functioned as a sort of psychedelic tv studio, and it always looked that way. It was painted floor to ceiling in blue, and there were lots of black curtains about. When video was being shot it was a studio; at other times it was more like a black box theatre. The name of the place evoked channel surfing, and later surfing the net (although, as I recall, a literal surfboard was also part of the decor, along with Christmas lights, a mannequin, and all kinds of crazy original art, posters, and so forth.) The Prichards made several improvised movies from 1993 over the next couple of years, with titles like Alien Sex Phone Psycho, Dick and Jane Drop Acidand Die, Thrill Kill Video Club, and Head Games, leading up to the aforementioned Cracking Up. At the same time, Prichard was getting a lot of free-lance work videotaping comedians at other spaces around town. It occurred to the Prichards that it would be much more efficient to open their own space and let the comedians come to THEM.
Jim Gaffigan was one of their first performer/producers! The space had several tent-pole shows that occurred weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, chief among them Faceboyz Open Mic, hosted by Faceboy (Francis Hall, brother of Jon S. Hall of King Missile); Mistress Elsa and the Bondage Theatre Players (starring Jen Prichard as the whip wielding Elsa), and Grindhouse-a-Go-Go, produced by Tom Tenney. Some of the well known people who were drawn there included Ben Stiller, Marc Maron, Lewis Black, Rick Shapiro, Jeff Ross, Judah Friedlander, Brody Stevens, Maggie Estep, Adam Felber of Real Time with Bill Maher (as part of the Irwin Smalls Trio), Eric Drysdale, Colleen Werthman, Randy and Jason Sklar, Jeff Eyres, and many others, some of whom became good friends of this correspondent. (See some tributes below)
The place had its own aesthetic, privileging a mixture of political performance art, outre character comedy of the sort that had become popular in stand-up in the late ’70s and ’80s, new vaudeville, poetry readings, and grunge — ideally all at once. There was never a satisfactory name for it. “Performance comedy” and “alternative comedy” were both tried, but the former was redundant and the latter was show bizzy in a way that Surf (at its best) was not. The place was absolutely about pure art. You could literally do anything there, the more outlandish and uncommercial the better. When hacky comedians came to the open mic night seeking the imprimatur of hipness the place bestowed they got a cold shoulder. It was also fortress-like. You had to buzz to get in, like a speakeasy. The front door was adorned with a cast-iron metal sculpture like some dystopian hide-out from “Life During Wartime”. And I used to LOVE the experience of climbing the stairs to go in — it was like climbing back into the womb. Like a rock club, the entire path to the stage was adorned with posters for old shows. After a while, one got invited into the sanctum sanctorum, the Prichards’ apartment behind the club, where you could see such treasures as Rob’s impressive portrait of Ethyl Eichelberger, whom he had known when he was a bouncer at the Pyramid Club.
By 1997, the Prichards were having so much success as the hub of all this activity, they opened a second more traditional nightclub (with partners) nearby called Baby Jupiter which was one-part restaurant and one part performance space. It reminded me quite a bit of the anti-folk club Sidewalk, over on Avenue A. It was an uneasy marriage, and you always got the sense that it was a temporary experiment. But at the time, Rob’s focus was being split so he conceived of the idea of creating a consortium of the newer producers so they could cross-promote and otherwise assist each other. And this brilliant idea absolutely worked. The members were me, with my American Vaudeville Theatre; David Jenness and his improv comedy band The Sacred Clowns; Scott Stiffler (who went on to edit for Chelsea Now, Gay City News, and Downtown Express and now runs Chelsea Community News, whose readers have NO idea how funny he is), Gilda Konrad, who hosted a variety show called Oh Hi! with her friend Mr. Towel (a green towel she used as a ventriloquist dummy), and a pair of funny ladies named Loren Kidd and Judith George, who co-hosted a show together. Loren’s boyfriend was Evan Fairbanks, who took that jaw-dropping footage on September 11. There were a couple of others in the beginning but they quickly dropped out. I still write for Scott’s website; Gilda performed at my show at QED a few months ago (I think she has folded Mr. Towel and put him in a drawer).
Prior to Surf, I had tried out my vaudeville shows on audiences at a variety of other venues. Immediately prior I had runs at cabarets like The Duplex and Rose’s Turn, and I was a bit of fish out of water at those places. There was an aspect of performing there that I liked, especially the fabled histories of the venues. But I am definitely not about a piano bar and showtunes, and at most I’d ever have but a single act on one of my bills who was, if that. Surf was perfect for me and I have been (unsuccessfully) seeking a situation like it ever since.
I have tons of pictures of me and my casts performing at Surf, but I really love this one because it shows the opposite angle — it shows what it looked like from the performance side:
The room was not just intimate, it was informal. You were close to the audience, but it wasn’t cluttered with tables and distractions like waiters coming and going and people eating meals. Booze was served, but it was unobtrusive, like at a party. Half the time, the performers drank along with the audience. So you had this room to play in. When Dave Chapelle did a set at Surf he joked that it was like someone’s rec room. When Scott Blakeman did my vaudeville show he quipped, “This is the first time I’ve done a show where the flags outnumber the audience”. (I used to fill the tiny space with American flags).
Because of the nature of the Surf space, I had permission to bring a lot of my own material to the shows. Somehow it wasn’t burdened with the baggage of “theatre”. The audience and the stage were not separate. There was no fourth wall. The assembled were not “customers” judging some “product”. You could do what you wanted. And this didn’t make shows worse, it made them better, more original, more unique, more memorable, more exciting. So I not only presented variety acts (including traditional vaudeville type ones, which practically nobody else did) but I also filled the shows with my own songs, poems, monologues, and comedy sketches. In time I also did solo shows and my own original stageplays there, like House of Trash. Later when I expanded to larger venues as one is expected to do, I felt hampered by the formal “theatrical” expectations and standards. It wasn’t spontaneous enough or free enough. Like a lot of my fellow producers in the L.E.S. scene at the time, I liked to try to make magic out of toys and garbage. It was exactly the same kind of feeling you got when you were a very small child performing for your parents and their friends.
Around the time Surf and the other LES clubs folded about 20 years ago (as I reported in my Voice piece), I was approached by an editor who had attended one of my shows to write the book that became No Applause, which sidetracked me for a couple decades!
Rob went on to produce Radical Vaudeville. Here’s the man himself on that topic:
“Radical Vaudeville was created for the first 3 Howl! festivals. I believe the first one in 2003 was at PS122. That first RV was the final destination of an East Village Safari walking tour. I had performers at all the different points of interest and also as plants. The O’Debra Twins played gauche tourists. Neal Medlyn, Br’er Brian, and Kristen Schaal were both part of East Village Safaris and Rev Jen led the tour on some occasions and other times I did. The first tour ended up at PS122 for that first Radical Vaudeville. After Howl! 3 it was a regular monthly show at Mo Pickins until Mo Pickins closed in 2007. The next iteration began in 2014 at the Kraine Theater and Gabrielle Penabaz was my co-producer and MC. We moved it to the C.O.W. Theatre in 2015.”
Also in 2015, Prichard and Tom Tenney started the still thriving Radio Free Brooklyn, where some of the old Surf crowd still host radio shows.
As for Surf, I don’t want this to sound like a strictly nostalgia trip. I don’t just miss the old days, I went them (or something like them) back. And I’ve realized through hard purchase that the experience I had been seeking all this time was something much less like the “vaudeville” experience than the TELEVISION experience, just as Surf Reality had been set up to produce. After all, I had grown up on TV variety, not vaudeville or Broadway. Television. A very anarchistic form of television. This is very much top of mind on account of my upcoming book Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, to be released by Bear Manor Media this summer.
Anyway Rob and I co-produced a vaudeville show out at Coney Island USA last spring; we have another one booked for this coming August 1, so save the date!
And for further exploration, here’s more:
Robert Prichard’s great interview with Jim Moore at Vaudevisuals.com (click through to excellent archived pages from Surf’s website circa 2001-2002. A blast from the past in more ways than one!)
Some Obits and Other Tributes
No doubt this will get added to as memories return!
For more on show business history,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and please stay tuned for the upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.
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