Underground theater blurred sacrilege, vaudeville, and improvised chaos

Evidence

Was Smith perturbed to see ambitious work by disciples he regarded as careerists? During this period, Ludlum revived Big Hotel at the Gate, alternating with Turds in Hell, written by Ludlam and Vehr, and featuring Jeanne Phillips and Mario Montez. More focused than Whores of Babylon, the play, which at one point was intended to be a black mass, began by announcing itself as a mortal sin and rambled on for four hours. Opening night was delayed by half an hour by the absence of one of the stars, either “Crazy Arthur” Kraft, a fifty-year former child vaudevillian cast as a “hunchback, pinhead, sex maniac,” or Montez, who played his adopted mother Carla the Gypsy, perhaps prompting Smith to run down the aisle carrying an eighteen-year-old street kid, the future performance artist Penny Arcade, on stage for a bout of mock copulation. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1392