Andy Warhol was an enigma wrapped in a mystery, a voyeur who wanted to be a superstar. Thirty-six years after his death we are still trying to suss him out. Which may be why this year we have not one but two plays about Andy Warhol being produced—one at the Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, the other at Northlight in Skokie. (And in New York, Anthony McCarten’s play, The Collaboration, about Warhol’s relationship with fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, runs through February 11 at Manhattan Theatre Club.)
Andy Warhol’s Tomato tells the story of a young Andrew Warhola, before Manhattan and before he dropped the final “a” in his last name to sound less ethnic. Andy Warhol in Iran features Andy in the 70s—the laconic, white-wigged Studio 54 Warhol, the Andy who survived the 60s, the Andy who shook things up with his Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe portraits. The Warhol who was left after the Factory and the superstars and Valerie Solanas’s assassination attempt.
For all their differences, the two plays share some striking similarities. Both are two-person plays, and both feature an encounter between Warhol and someone who is very different from Warhol.
Andy Warhol in IranThrough 2/19: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; open captions and ASL performance Fri 2/10 8 PM, open captions and audio description/touch tour Sat 2/11 2:30 PM; North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$89 ($15 students pending availability)Andy Warhol’s Tomato2/2-3/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; ASL performance Thu 2/23; McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Boulevard, 630-942-4000, btechicago.com, $42
Andy Warhol’s Tomato embellishes an apocryphal story about Warhol from his art student days at Carnegie Tech. Playwright Vince Melocchi, who grew up in Warhol’s hometown of Pittsburgh, explains, “There’s a bar up the street from where I grew up, originally called Bunovich’s, when Old Man Bunovich owned it. There was a story that went around that a young Andy Warhol used to draw on napkins for Cokes for Old Man Bunovich because he got a kick out of them. Now, this is just a story, right? But it stuck with me.”
Commissioned by the LA-based Pacific Resident Theatre to turn this bit of lore into a play, Melocchi’s script catches Warhol at an interesting moment in his life. It’s Andy before he moves to New York, but already in his short life he has endured a couple of traumatic, life-changing events—the death of his father when he was 13 as well as the illness in the 3rd grade, Sydenham’s chorea (also called St. Vitus’ dance), that kept him confined in bed, listening to the radio and reading movie magazines.
“This is a fable that conjectures what Warhol was like before he went to New York,” director Steve Scott elaborates. “It is kind of nice to get to know Andy as a kid when he was kind of just a person, a very distinctive person, but just a guy. This is Andy before the persona. But you can see from this play how the persona kind of formulated. There’s a whole scene at the end where Bones is looking at Andy’s sketchbook, and then we see the pictures that [Warhol has been] sketching and see how they became the works that we know later on: Mickey Mouse and the Campbell’s Soup cans.”
The Buffalo Theatre Ensemble production is part of an ongoing celebration of Andy Warhol at the McAninch Arts Center at the College of DuPage that culminates in a major exhibit of Warhol’s work at the Art Center: “Andy Warhol Portfolios: A Life in Pop” (June 3 to September 10).
Bryan Burke (left) and Alexander Wisnieski onstage in rehearsal for Andy Warhol’s Tomato with Buffalo Theatre Ensemble. Director Steve Scott is seated at the table on the right. Courtesy Rex Howard Photography
The actor who plays young Andy in Andy Warhol’s Tomato, Alexander Wisnieski, is also making appearances at other McAninch Arts Center events as a Warhol impersonator. Wisnieski shares many of Warhol’s features—his Slavic bone structure, his extremely pale skin. In a silver wig he is a dead ringer.
Wisnieski bubbles over when he talks about playing Andy. “I played Warhol [at COD] for his birthday party. And then there was a donor event. I did a ticket sale event before actually auditioning for the play. I’ll also be in the exhibit in a kids’ room video, which is really exciting. And then I will be there for four days after the exhibit opens.” Wisnieski will also appear as Warhol at a gala benefit on February 18 entitled “A Night at Studio 54: For the Love of Warhol.”
“I didn’t know all that when I cast him,” Scott laughs. “But he did an enormous amount of research to prepare for [his Warhol] gigs. He came in [to the audition] as prepared as I’ve ever seen an actor to play this character.”
When researching Andy Warhol it is hard not to do too much research. There is so much out there. Rob Lindley, who plays Warhol in Northlight’s show, admits to falling into the Warhol hole when preparing for the role.
“I am a research nerd,” Lindley tells me. “I do [a lot of] research for every project I do. I drove myself to Pittsburgh this summer so I could go to the Warhol Museum. Each day I was there I visited his grave site.”
Lindley admits he was motivated to do lots of research because he felt a “bit of pressure” playing Warhol: “There is certainly a challenge playing someone that was so well known. I feel like I’ve always played [fictional] characters. Well, [Warhol’s] a real character, that’s for sure. Whether he was a real person or not, it still remains to be seen. Andy himself said that his greatest work of art was himself and that he was his greatest creation. So there’s a challenge to that.”
The Andy in Andy Warhol in Iran is a very different Warhol than the callow fellow in Andy Warhol’s Tomato. This is the Warhol who once quipped, “Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” At this time he raked in the cash doing silkscreen portraits of the very wealthy.
One of his clients was the Shah of Iran. Andy Warhol in Iran was inspired by Warhol’s trip to Tehran in 1976 to take Polaroids of the Shah’s third wife, Farah, for a commissioned portrait. But the tale playwright Brent Askari tells is wholly fictional.
“In [Askari’s] play, this young kidnapper tries to kidnap Andy Warhol to bring the world’s attention to what’s going on in Iran and to turn them against the Shah,” director BJ Jones explains.
For Askari, the story is very personal: “My dad is from Iran, he’s Shiite Muslim. And my mom was an Episcopalian New England WASP. So growing up was with those two very distinct cultures, and I didn’t quite fit into either camp.
“I got a commission from a theater in Western Massachusetts called Barrington Stage Company. They were interested in something historical about Iran. I originally was thinking like, we’re going to do something with the Shah.”
But when Askari remembered Warhol’s trip to Iran, his plans changed.
“So the original idea was that it was going to be a two-person play with Andy Warhol and the Empress. But that only lasted about a day because I sort of realized as a dramatist that there was no conflict. And so that’s when I had the idea, like, oh, maybe I need somebody that has a completely different point of view, right?”
“In the play we have these two revolutionaries clashing,” Jones tells me. “One an artistic revolutionary and one social justice.”
“So my character is Farhad,” Hamid Dehghani, who plays Warhol’s would-be kidnapper, tells me. “He’s a young educated man who has been to America, who realizes the cruelty of the Shah’s regime. And so he decides to sacrifice and take immediate actions to make changes for his people and his country.”
The irony is the person Farhad decides to kidnap was about as disaffected, apolitical, and emotionally disconnected an American artist as you could find in 1976.
After he was shot in 1968 Warhol famously said, “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life.” But in a way Warhol continued living like he was watching TV for the rest of his life.
“Writing this play, I felt a mixture of pity and sympathy for Andy Warhol,” Askari reflects. “He lived this life of fame and fortune and success. But with all that he achieved, it seemed like he ended his life fairly unhappy.”
Yet he still fascinates. And that’s why his 15 minutes of fame will never run out.