Please Let Me Love You

"In my dreams, we are both Michael Jackson.  ...And we look at each other, at our mangled faces, our noses deflated, our skin stained, our hair burnt to a crisp; and we say, 'What have they done to you?'  But we speak too loudly, and at the same time, and so we cannot hear one another..."



The press copy for PLEASE LET ME LOVE YOU looked like this:

Performance artist and songwriter Dan Fishback presents PLEASE LET ME LOVE YOU: a Tragic Performance Play about pedophilia, war, language and motherhood.  Michael Jackson "loves" children. George W. Bush "loves" Arabs. Your psychotic ex "loves" you. Is "love" tantamount to extermination? Can we truly love someone without obliterating them entirely? Through the eyes of several troubled characters, including a gun-wielding Jackson clone and a pair of Iraqi lesbians, we discover a violent landscape of self-deception and ontological terror. With a cast of three actors and two musicians, Fishback exposes the sexuality of war, and the militarism of sex.

This show was born at Galapagos Art Space, as part of their Smut Erotic Reading Series.  They asked me if I had any "erotica" I'd like to read, and of course I didn't, so, taking a cue from Deb "Book The Show First, Ask Questions Later" Margolin, I said yes.  Now that I was confronted with the actual task of actually preparing something, I decided to just eroticize whatever I was thinking about that day, no matter how un-sexy it was.  As it happens, on that particular day, I was thinking about Michael Jackson and the war in Iraq.  So I wrote and performed a piece that would eventually become the central monologue of PLEASE LET ME LOVE YOU.

I originally imagined the show as an austere, ambient duet, with serene monologues underscored by my friend and omnipresent musical collaborator Dibs.  But, as I was writing, images of women kept mysteriously popping up in my notes, and I soon realized that the piece needed more voices than just my own.  So I cast my friends Megan Gaffney and Sammy Tunis in a variety of roles, from a radical right-wing housewife to an Iranian Michael Jackson fan.  The team kept growing, with Preston Spurlock on all sorts of keyboards and percussive devices, and, finally, Jason Rabinowitz as a singing, dancing, American soldier zombie.

In November 2005, we went to Philadelphia to workshop the show at Kelly Writers House, under the directorial guidance of Michael Schulman.  A few months later, as we were gearing up for the New York debut, Michael left the show to portray a monkey in the critically acclaimed Ibsen-deconstruction Heddatron.  In his absence, our former stage manager Billy Rosen took the helm for the next two productions, first for a punky, abstracted version at the Glass House Gallery in Brooklyn, and finally at Dixon Place, where we added a naturalistic twist for the 2006 HOT Queer Culture Festival.  (Dibs was replaced by photographer/guitarist Eric Lippe in this final production.)

Here are two clips from that final performance:

You can read reviews of PLEASE LET ME LOVE YOU here and here.