Anniversary Commemoration. In the mid-1980s Jack Skelley wrote Fear of Kathy Acker, a novel which appeared serially in chapbooks and magazines. Dennis Cooper named it “one of the great lost masterpieces of ’80s experimental fiction.” In 2023 Semiotext(e) published The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker. In 2024 playwright/director Siena Foster-Soltis adapted the novel for the stage, selling out three nights at Illusion Magic theater in Santa Monica, California. Produced by Conjugal Visit and co-directed by Foster-Soltis and Rory James Leech, Fear of Kathy Acker the play featured a full cast, music, dance, and was highlighted by five videos by artist Elle Reck. On the anniversary of Fear of Kathy Acker the play, here are those videos, along with photos, reviews/articles, script excerpts, program and other evidence of the cast, crew and other collaborators. Photos by Elle Reck, Gary Leonard and Emma Lee Benson.
Siena Foster-Soltis
Elle Reck web and Instagram
Jack Skelley
Death Drives (Kayla Dobbs, Viva Hassis Gentes, Olivia Fogel, and Gia Ochsebein surround Megan (Ariana Glover)
The Death Drives and video shrine – Kayla Dobbs, Viva Hassis Gentes, Olivia Fogel, Gia Ochsebein
American Theatre magazine: Who’s Afraid of ‘Kathy Acker’?
Riding a fresh wave of interest with a new generation, Jack Skelley’s 40-year-old punk rock novel about American decline has been adapted by Siena Foster-Soltis into a play.
“Everything you can think of is true,” goes a Tom Waits lyric I find equal parts inspiring and chilling. It’s a line I thought of frequently while reading my old friend Jack Skelley’s trippy picaresque Fear of Kathy Acker, a channel-surfing fusillade of sex, self-loathing, and deadpan humor he originally wrote four decades ago, when he was a poet and musician on Los Angeles’s punk and alternative literary scenes. (We met not long after, when he was my editor at the L.A. Downtown News.) Fear of Kathy Acker’s anxious romp through Skelley’s pop-culture-warped consciousness, rife with jarring juxtapositions and tonal shifts, crudity and profundity, imagined dialogue and interior monologues, is both a kind of literary stunt—trolling before it had a name—and a deeply felt pushback against the tide of Reagan-era consumerism and sellout.
Its uncanny mix of transgression and sincerity may partly account for the book’s miraculous resurgence in the past year, and its unlikely embrace by L.A.’s current alt-lit scene. Published in full for the first time last June as The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker by Semiotext(e), a small but influential West Coast press run by Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti, it has achieved niche hit status and is now in its third printing. Even more remarkably, as an article earlier this year in Paper magazine put it, this lost ’80s classic by a straight white man now in his 60s has “emerged as a symbol for a new generation of writers and artists, many of whom are young, women and queer.”
One of those women is Siena Foster-Soltis, a director and theatremaker who has turned Fear of Kathy Acker into a play with her L.A. company Conjugal Visit; it runs for three nights next week, Feb. 27-29, at Santa Monica’s Illusion Magic Lounge. Featuring a cast entirely comprising women and nonbinary folks, the play, Soltis-Foster said in a recent interview along with Skelley, is inspired as much by the book itself as by the phenomenon of its belated embrace.
“A large part of this production of Fear of Kathy Acker is both the actual scenes within the source text that happen as part of Jack’s psyche, but also the modern-day interpretation of the book and references to its relevance and currency today,” said Foster-Soltis, whose previous work with Conjugal Visit included last year’s interactive Contrition Pageant. She’s even inserted herself into the show “as a young woman who’s reading this book,” and the script makes room for “other young women’s reactions” to the source.
Some of those reactions, she admitted, involve “a level of hostility that I think is almost unavoidable when taking something that is a hetero male-centric voice and trying to merge it somehow with a young woman’s voice.” Rather than skirt that discomfort, she said she’s tried to “harness that hostility” and bring it into the play. “There’s also a weird trap there,” she continued. “It’s easy to get overly hostile, to a point where it becomes like a riot piece, or to go the other way, where you’re just completely playing into it, like, ‘We’re sexy girls doing sexy things onstage.’ There’s a line in between where it’s like: I endorse it and critique it at the same time. That’s a line we try to ride.”
Still, the mind reels at the possibilities. How will Foster-Soltis and her co-director, Rory James Leech, stage the book’s opening chapter, “Sexy Day,” for instance, with its matter-of-fact toggling between stickily explicit lingerie fantasies and banal musings about L.A. malls and Dodgers tickets? Or how about the memorable (imaginary) scene in which a giant avatar of porn star Amber Lynn fucks the skyscrapers of Downtown L.A.?
Buzzy as that material is, that’s not what chiefly drew her to Skelley’s writing, Foster-Soltis said.
“The main thing that resonated with me in The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker wasn’t the sex stuff at all,” she said. “Not that I didn’t like the sex stuff, but it was all the self-loathing and self-critique, often in a really comical way—this deep acid flashback of self-hatred, this nihilistic take on the overly consumerist, capitalist surge of the ’80s, which I think people relate to today.”
Indeed, while Skelley’s book sifted with rueful glee (or is that gleeful rue?) through the flotsam of the age of television, long before the internet and social media, and Foster-Soltis grew up with the iPhone, she found common ground in such passages as the following:
“Language exists to fuck society’s constrictions up the butt. Language is the tool of the visionary, the anarchist, the child, the artist, the saint, the lover and Bob Flanagan. Everything else which sounds like Language but is really words used to corrupt people or chop them into little bite-size pieces is not Language, but Clop. Clop is something people swallow to kill themselves. It’s a detergent washing life away. It is sets of word-images that hold people’s minds in one spot for 2.5 seconds until another set of Clop words is introduced.”
If that’s not a prophecy of social media, I’ll eat my Instagram. Skelley concludes Fear of Kathy Acker with a fearful, resigned look ahead to the millennium. I wondered how things look to him as we’re well past that and into a new century.
“I’m glad that Siena kind of fixated on the more anxious, dark passages of the novel,” Skelley told me, “even though a lot of it is very funny and a lot of it is very sexy. The book is a lot about consumer society, capitalist society, apprehending the functions of the culture—particularly electronic media, which was just basically TV at the time—and inflicting its force on the populace in very insidious ways. That really scared me. Looking on the other side of that, if anything, it’s just gotten worse, the way these societal norms, materialism, gender norms, every sort of problem that we have is filtered through media and foisted upon people. I don’t even know how young people can stand it, honestly.”
One way they withstand it, of course, is to make art about it, as Foster-Soltis and her colleagues are doing. Or, as Skelley put it at one point in Fear of Kathy Acker, quoting a beloved L.A. bard:
“Lewis MacAdams said poets will never fucking shut up. No matter how much you imprison, torture, suppress or bore them. Even here in America the vast majority of word-smiths are in the decadent service industries—in advertising and promotion and disinformation—even where most writers are employed by the Megacorporate conglomerates, even here the writers will not shut up. The more the conglomerates try to shut them up the louder they’ll shout, the more they’ll rant about.”
There’s bleak hope in that, I think. I wondered what Jack—who said that while Foster-Soltis has shown him some drafts of her “wild” script, he has been “banned from rehearsals”—thinks about the prospect of watching his book take on another life onstage. He has done public readings from it over the years (including at last year’s book release party), so it has been performed, in a sense, but never quite like this.
“I’m totally freaked out,” he said with a nervous titter. “Siena has told me that the actor playing me, Magdalene Cherry, is a Method actor and has been studying videos of my mannerisms. She kind of even looks like me in one of the photos. It’s weird.”
Maybe not as weird as the passage in Fear of Kathy Acker in which he claims that Loni and Laurie Anderson are in fact the same person, but it’s in the ballpark.
If you’re wondering about the title of the book and the play: They have about as much to do with the punk-rock postmodernist known for her appropriative techniques as Edward Albee’s most famous play has to do with Virginia Woolf. But Skelley certainly took inspiration from Acker, he said, and from women writers in general—another reason, he guesses, that his book may be resonating with women and femmes.
“I don’t pretend to understand, and I certainly did not expect the book to have, the reaction it’s gotten,” he said. “If anything, I was expecting a backlash to it, or even worse, to be ignored completely. But it comes from a love of Kathy Acker’s writing and the writing of other transgressive women. I just love women’s writing—écriture féminine, that’s the term used in French theory. Women have urges and needs too. Why can’t we just all have them?”
Indeed, with a play based on his writing, Skelley is right back where he has so often been before: just looking forward to another opening.
Rob Weinert-Kendt is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
Trailer
Los Angeles Review of Books: The Pulsing Innards of Jack Skelley
Emily Ann Zisko faces her complete fear of Jack Skelley’s “Fear of Kathy Acker,” adapted for the Santa Monica stage by Siena Foster-Soltis.
By Emily Ann Zisko March 6, 2024
A flash of red taillights: The satin stage curtain of the Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica parts, and a member of the Greek chorus in fishnets and silver booty shorts instructs the audience to keep their hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. Play ball!
Confused? Buckle up. Like its source material, the stage adaptation of Jack Skelley’s Fear of Kathy Acker is not for the easily daunted. Skelley’s novel, written in installments for an alt-lit punk mag in the 1980s, was rereleased by Semiotext(e) last year to the cult-like acclaim of young ladies and gentlethems of the alt-literati—including yours truly. On a basic level, the frenetic odyssey of sexual deviance and self-loathing follows Jack, the narrative’s hero, as he drives across Los Angeles ruminating on perverse fantasies and Dodgers tickets. More deeply, the book is a revolt against pop-consumerism wrought by the Reagan-era “greed is good” ethos that, in its 40 years of gestation, has choked out American culture.
Now, the masterful hands of writer and co-director Siena Foster-Soltis have brought Skelley’s work to the stage. The show is produced by Conjugal Visit in collaboration with Misfit Toys Collective; in it, an entirely female and nonbinary cast rearranges the pulsing innards of the book into an explosive treatise on being a woman in the arts. Over the course of the play, the struggling playwright Siena (a Frankensteinian creature of her own making) morphs into Jack, the play’s antihero. The result is a three-act metanarrative in which Siena at first doubts her artistic ability yet later gains the audacity (and privilege) only Skelley’s identity—that of a man in his sixties still enjoying a kind of micro-celebrity for the raunchy novel he completed in his twenties—can offer her.
Of course, in doing so, Siena/Jack undergoes a transformation that leaves them facing an existential void embodied by Endora, the witch-mommy repurposed from the 1960s sitcom Bewitched and expanded upon by Foster-Soltis (Endora plays a relatively minimal role in Skelley’s book). Here, Endora’s curse of discontent weaves a trap that no one—not even the voice of Dodgers baseball, Vin Scully—can avoid. Through it all, a Greek chorus of Death Drives decked out in cheap lingerie and plaster-cast nose extensions provides a vehicle for some of Foster-Soltis’s most compelling, albeit occasionally convoluted, writing.
Toward the end of the first act, by which point Siena has fully (and literally) embodied Jack in an attempt to combat her writer’s block, the protagonist attends a party where a member of the chorus tells Jack how much she loves his work and expresses her hope that he’ll read her autofiction in exchange for her admiration. The pair proceed to fuck in a corner as, inspired by their passion, a voyeur pouts; she, too, wants to do something, and so jumps up and down while screaming, “I think I’m interesting!”
Suddenly, houselights flood the audience. The music turns off, the Death Drives collapse from exhaustion, and I see myself reflected in the large, mirrored set. In this new and horrible light, I appear as a young woman in the audience—one of many—who has also asked Skelley to read her short stories, and who also believes that they are interesting. The consequent undercurrent of rage propels Foster-Soltis’s self-contemptuous satire for two more acts. Her caricature of gender, sex, relationships, and fame draws parallels between the powerlessness of a woman in her twenties and that of a man in his sixties.
I left the theater thinking about Siena’s journey. In the play, she traveled all the way through herself, into Jack, and out the other side. And what did it get her? A three-night run.
Romy Kim as Endora
Death Drives – Olivia Fogel, Viva Hassis Gentes, Kayla Dobbs, Gia Ochsebein with Magdalene Cherry as Jack Siena
Magdalene Cherry as Jack Siena and Aviana Glover as Megan
Amelia Whitney as Vin Scully
Artillery magazine: L.A. Mythmaking
In January I was chatting with Jack Skelley, the author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (FOKA) published last year through Semiotext(e). We spoke about how young writers are connecting with the older generation in the Los Angeles writing scene—it feels a lot like church, I told him. A strange connection to draw but the scene allows intergenerational writers and readers to collect around something divine, the written word. Skelley’s book is one the community has gathered around, though if you read it, you’ll hear nothing close to a sermon. Skelley’s book is no Bible, yet it has its disciples.
Siena Foster-Soltis, the San Fernando-born playwright, adapted Skelley’s novel into Fear of Kathy Acker (the play) which ran three nights at the Illusion Magic Lounge in Santa Monica, February 27–29. The play had an all-female cast with standout performances by Romy Kim playing “Endora,” and Magdalene Cherry playing “Jack.” Cherry captured the chaos of a writer falling apart from guilt and self-doubt. Laughs abounded from the sultry squad of the “Death Drive” girls, the “Greek chorus,” adorned in fishnets and Foster-Soltis’ signature grotesque masks who played foil to Jack’s pursuit of authentic writing.
The play ran 90 minutes over three acts and followed Siena, a Los Angeles-based writer absorbing the persona of Jack using his identity as proxy to navigate the journey to expression, blending exterior and interior scenes and blurring the lines of reality as the writer finds what it means to both struggle and succeed. Jack appeared in LA clubs and suburban homes battling sycophants as sirens at a reading and low self-esteem personified in the witch Endora who haunted him at every turn.
The book and play are both corralled chaos, an amalgam of wet-dream fantasies and LA mythmaking and at times were an abstraction of the real story. Jack was constantly pursuing his love Megan, played by Aviana Glover, yet was guilty of enjoying the recognition he received for his novel FOKA. Foster-Soltis integrated the references in the book to style everything from the playlist in the lobby before the show to Vin Scully, played by Amelia Whitney, narrating parts of the play like a game at Dodgers Stadium. She succeeded in creating a new object in which she included herself and her experience into the story the “real” Jack Skelley wrote in the ’80s. She placed herself next to Skelley and even though decades separate them in age, they were one for 90 minutes, side-by-side fighting the fight of being writers in Los Angeles.
The exploration of connection between 1980s subversive pervert fantasy and 2024 aspiring female writer in the digital world seems like a vast, impassable chasm, yet FOKA (the play) was a catalyst bringing two worlds together. The play was self-aware enough to understand that in adapting someone else’s work one inherently centers themself. It’s obviously something that Foster-Soltis was dealing with. Consider the quote from Vin Scully in the first act, “With hardly any real talent, incurable cynicism, unrelenting vanity and pertinacious suicidal ideation, it can be a real roll of the dice dealing with Siena [Jack].” Foster-Soltis was successfully placed within Skelley’s novel by making herself the protagonist of the play, but this was not done in a way that was appropriative but instead affectionate. She reflected on their shared struggle in art.
What the audience got was an intelligent and entertaining account of what it means to be a writer, how one tackles insecurities and the balancing act between appeasing the assumed audience and authentic vision. The play was clearly the work of a young artist and that was something to celebrate. Some see art by young writers as encumbered by the limited worldview of youth but that’s too reductive. Instead, one should view Fear of Kathy Acker (the play) as the starting locus of what could be an exciting and ambitious career of an avant-garde playwright and director.
Siena Foster-Soltis
Before curtain, Death Drives – Kayla Dobbs and Viva Hassis Gentes interact with audience
After curtain, Jack Skelley with Magdalene Cherry as Jack Siena
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p.s. Hey. This weekend the powers-that-be have given this blog the honor of being the house of an exclusive (a relative term on the internet, but still) look-see at the much ballyhooed theatrical adaptation of Jack Skelley’s classic novel ‘Fears of Kathy Acker’ as performed in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. Now we can all take a look for ourselves at what the hell that was all about. Much to watch, see, and read this weekend, and please knock yourselves out. Thanks, powers-that-be. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Good, stay the course. Of course I think your possible indie press is a far more than excellent idea. You’re figuring out the practicalities? How’s it looking? ** Steeqhen, You’re welcome, and thanks. Thought so: the university. Well, get on that dream magazine then, for sure. And I’ll read your article. Everyone, Steeqhen aka Stephen O’Brien has an essay/article called ‘The Words of a Future Expat’ newly in the public for you to read here. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, the lab work went really well, and the film is now totally finished at long last! Eric LaRocca is a new name to me. Sounds like I should take a quick test only though. I love VÅR. Obviously, since Zac’s and my first film is named after a VÅR lyric. Yes, The Supremes, I can’t explain it haha. And speak of the devil, love mouthed Elias. Actually I suspect love would love to mouth Elias for real, although I can’t speak for him. Here, right here, Between the peanuts and the cage, Between the darkness and the stage, Between the hour and the age, Love calls you by your name, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, It was a good batch, yes. Ouch, although I had a tooth extracted not so very long ago, and it was actually pretty easy, or I should say that once it was extracted it was less painful in the healing part that I imagined. I wish you at least that much luck. ** James, The American healthcare industry has always been fucked, and it’s getting more and more so. I’m sorry but a Gif containing the entire Shrek movie is not a Gif, it’s just a format thief. I’m a Gif acolyte. Silverchair’s second and especially third albums are very good. Well, that guy who you were chatting with a short while back was longing for you, as I clearly recall, so you’re not a virgin. I’ve bagged a few celebrities. It wasn’t hard, you just have to be discrete about it. Dude, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but based on that commentary you described, I strongly suspect everybody knows you’re gay. Not that I’m saying you need to confirm that with them or anything. New writing! Excellent. Go, go go! ** Thomas Moronic, No, thank you. It’s exquisite book. ** Bill, Is it tweaked to acceptability? The poster for the new Bong is not very enticing. Not a big Pattinson fan over here for one thing. ** Steve, Thanks, great, I’ll start searching soap2day. Yes, color correction is finished, end credits are in place, and the film is complete. Boy, was that a long journey. I’m so sorry about your parents. Towards the end of her life, my mom started making almost no sense, and that was … shocking, I guess is the word. ** jay, Thanks! Yes, the film is completely finished. Right, about the twink purists, although, and maybe this is a US thing, but I think Latino boys of the appropriate dimensions have always qualified as full on twinks maybe. Hope the concert was blissful. Happy to get the all-lovely signal from you. I’ll see what I can do on my end. ** P, Hi! Welcome back to the less partying world. The pool table helped a lot when my friends I were bored or too stoned to leave my room and risk letting my parents get a look at us. Bakery, nice, or I’m imagining niceness. And the free baked goods, presumably. That’s exciting that you’re writing! Yeah, just dive in and enjoy yourself and max out your imagination and your way with words. The stores sound really interesting. Obviously the Buena Vista Park one sounds epic. Maximal cheerleading from me. It doesn’t sound remotely dumb whatsoever. And you interested the discerning jay too if you didn’t see his comment. Have the best weekend. ** sasha!, Oh, hi! Wow, thank you a lot for coming in here. I guess you know how much I love your book. I was and am really blown away, and I hope its birth into the world gives you many props. Are you working on something new? I do know Pulp, and I do really like ‘This is Hardcore’. Like-minds. Lots of respect to you, and have a really weekend, whatever that would take on your end. ** HaRpEr, Oh, okay, thank you for the explanation. Yeah, I didn’t quite understand. No, no, it doesn’t sound dumb. I think I’m getting it, or its outlay at least. Sounds super interesting. Oh, ugh. From everything you’ve told me, I feel confident that your prof is an ally of you and your work and is just trying to do his ‘professor’ thing and protect you (and, yeah, probably himself too). I would just try to think as a contextual problem and not take the warning/censoring aspect too deeply. Things are really fucking conservative these days. It’s very shocking to me. When I was in college, there was a group reading by creative writing students, and one of the things I read was this ‘poem’ that was a series of descriptions of child pornography films. I meant it to be shocking and darkly funny. The audience went nuts, but in a happy rioting kind of way. But word got back to the school higher ups, and I got scolded, but that was it. If anyone did that today, they’d be expelled in a heartbeat and maybe arrested and definitely go viral on the internet. People used to see writing and art as a place to exercise the imagination as fully as one needed safely back then, and that’s absolutely not true now. Anyway, blabla, I’m sorry you have to deal with that. And you might well deal with it again, and, yes, and multiply. But, hey, look at me, like you said, I’m fine and not remotely dissuaded. ** Corey, Hey, buddy. Happy to have caught your eye twice. What we were doing yesterday was fine tuning, slightly changing the lighting or temperature or coloring of some scenes, so it didn’t feel momentous, even though it was. Congrats on the promotion! Appear onstage whoa, nice. Scary? I’ll watch the video of her work as soon as I’m out here, thank you. You sound like you’re doing very well indeed! ** Darby𓃰, Good you reposted that because, yes, it hadn’t shown up. You finished the drawing, I trust? Wow, a dog named George Miles? That’s wild. It is not a totaly uncommon name, but I admit I do wonder if the namer got it from my stuff. Huh. I envy you that burrito. I can’t wait until I get to LA and can eat actual, real burritos again. I guess ideally the gym is supposed to make you realise your body is important and to respect it? I’ve never been to gym, so I’m just wondering/guessing. The film will hopefully play in a bunch of other places. We’re working on how and where and etc. that could happen. Oh, PGL is on Amazon Prime and Kanopy and Tubi? Do you have any of those. If not, let me know, and I can send you a link to the free screener to watch it. You aren’t annoying, no worries at all. Every smoke detector I’ve lived with was already pre-installed by the owners of the apartments I was renting, so I don’t know the brands, but they’ve looked a whole lot like that one. ** Right. Make your Saturday and Sunday at least partly a ‘Fear of Kathy Acker’ weekend, why don’t you? I will see you on Monday irregardless.
Robert Ford, Trent Adkins, Lawrence Warren, ed. THING
sasha hawkins For disobeying
Thomas Moore I RUINED YOUR LIFE
Francis Whorrall-Campbell THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT HAVE BEEN DOWNLOADED
Paul Cunningham Sociocide at the 24/7
Now available in North America 