Can I Be Frank?
Written and Performed by Morgan Bassichis; Based on and with original material by Frank Maya; Directed by Sam Pinkleton
Soho Playhouse | 15 Vandam Street, NY, NY
August 11 - September 13
Photo Credit: Sophia Helene Lawson
Frank Maya occupies a singular, if lamentably obscured, place in the pantheon of American comedy—a trailblazer whose audacity and wit were far ahead of his time, and whose cultural imprint, though once promisingly deepening, has now all but faded into the footnotes of queer performance history. In an era when being an openly gay comedian on a national stage was nothing short of revolutionary, Maya not only dared to be visible—he insisted on it, with all the flair, intelligence, and righteous defiance that such visibility demands.
By the early 1990s, Maya had ascended to a modest yet meaningful level of mainstream recognition. He appeared on MTV—then a cultural juggernaut—and was granted a half-hour Comedy Central special, a rite of passage for comics on the cusp of broader acclaim. And yet, just as his profile began to sharpen in the national consciousness, tragedy intervened. In 1995, at the age of 45, Maya’s life was claimed by AIDS-related complications. His career, like so many queer lives of that era, was curtailed just as the culture seemed poised to catch up to him.
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Frank Maya’s name elicits blank stares from today’s audiences. Despite performing regularly in major comedy venues such as Caroline’s and anchoring himself firmly within New York’s avant-garde downtown scene—La MaMa, the Kitchen, and other crucibles of experimental brilliance—Maya’s legacy remains largely unexamined. True, The New York Times did mark his passing with a proper obituary, a rare institutional nod to a queer artist of his stripe. And yet, in the sprawling, algorithm-driven archives of the internet, he is barely a whisper, an omission that speaks volumes about the cultural amnesia surrounding so many queer artists lost to the AIDS crisis.
To remember Frank Maya, then, is not merely to excavate a talent unjustly forgotten; it is to engage in an act of reparative memory. It is to honor a voice that was not only silenced too soon, but one that had barely begun to sing on the scale it deserved. So to find oneself, not merely witnessing, but experiencing Can I Be Frank? is to enter a realm where memory, performance, and raw neurosis collide in a dazzling, kaleidoscopic fugue.
At the heart of this riotously unpredictable evening is the singular Morgan Bassichis, who strides the stage like a jittery oracle, one moment breathlessly delivering tangents that teeter on collapse, the next conjuring the ghost of Frank Maya with uncanny reverence. One of Bassichis’ most disarming gifts is the unflinching ability to say aloud what most of us whisper only in the privacy of our minds (and even then, with a wince). “The brain is a mystery,” Bassichis declares with the kind of giddy surrender that only the most honest among us dare attempt. And in that admission lies the key to the evening: a celebration of the inexplicable, the uncomfortable, the hilariously fraught interiority of human experience.
Even the microphone cord, that serpentine co-star, winds itself around Bassichis’ shoulder again and again—a flailing, unintentional choreographic motif that becomes oddly endearing. The audience howled, not merely at the anecdote in question, but because we too were mid-wrestle with the cruel ergonomics of our own seats, negotiating the social physics of knee placement with our neighbors. That collective discomfort, rendered suddenly hilarious through Bassichis’ lens, becomes the show’s prevailing ethos: a night of shared awkwardness, self-aware absurdity, and riotous confession.
The show opens not with a warm-up, but a flame-thrower. Enter Frank Maya—posthumously, via Bassichis’ manic incarnation—launching into a scathing Liberace diatribe delivered at such velocity it threatens to lift off. And then, with impeccable comedic instinct, Bassichis undercuts the fire with a sheepish, “I came in way too hot.” Thus begins a tightrope walk between the incendiary and the intimate, the scripted and the unraveling, the living and the long-departed. “Obviously we’re going to be tweaking this show as we go,” they add, shrugging off perfection with the kind of self-aware candor that only heightens the emotional precision beneath the chaos.
For much of the evening, Bassichis remains at a breathless level ten—imagine a queer cabaret held hostage by an over-caffeinated prophet. The performance is a full-throttle stream-of-consciousness ride that threatens to careen off the rails but never quite does. That is, perhaps, director Sam Pinkleton’s greatest sleight of hand. Fresh from a Tony win for Oh, Mary!, Pinkleton orchestrates the show with the deceptive chaos of a maestro who knows precisely when to let the music get weird.
And then there is Frank Maya. Or rather, the Frank Maya we are only now being properly introduced to. The show’s premise, to build a theatrical vehicle “based on and with original material by Frank Maya,” is as inspired as it is necessary. A gasp-inducing poll early on reveals what is perhaps the evening’s true tragedy: no one in the audience knows who Maya is. Not one hand raised for the man who, in 1987, became the first openly gay comic to perform nationally on network television.
Bassichis resurrects him not as a relic, but as a living presence. Maya’s routines—rants, monologues, and songs—are delivered with affection, precision, and subversive joy. “Polaroid Children,” and “Boxes of You” resound with new urgency. The archival becomes electric. Even the show’s more performative flourishes—pre-written audience Q&As, a spectral letter from Lucille Ball, and a stunning (perhaps fabricated, perhaps not) letter from Frank himself to Morgan—teeter between performance and séance. Truth is elastic here, but meaning never is.
Bassichis finds firm and resonant footing in the show’s final number—an original song whose lyrics draw powerfully from the searing prose of Douglas Crimp, the influential writer, critic, and AIDS activist. Adapted from Crimp’s seminal 1987 essay “Mourning and Militancy,” the piece becomes not just a closing gesture, but a culminating thesis: a melancholic yet defiant meditation on how to navigate the impossible balance between grief and resistance in the face of what Crimp called “unspeakable violence.”
In Bassichis’s hands, Crimp’s language is neither antiquated nor confined to the historical moment in which it was written. Rather, it is given renewed urgency—an invocation that stretches across decades and geographies, vibrating with chilling resonance today. The song becomes a conduit through which the legacy of AIDS-era activism flows into the present, brushing uncomfortably—and necessarily—against our own turbulent sociopolitical terrain.
One need not listen too closely to hear the modern reverberations: the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, or the state-sanctioned cruelties of the Trump administration’s migrant detentions—both haunting examples of how institutionalized violence continues to demand from us both mourning and action, both lamentation and rage. That Bassichis channels this tension into melody is no small feat. It is, in fact, the evening’s most distilled moment of political clarity—a reminder that art, when wielded with both tenderness and precision, can still function as a tool for public reckoning, combatting the bottles of White-Out being flung at any historical record of LGBTQ accomplishment.
If there’s a moment that crystallizes the night’s intentions, it is that final rallying list—a passionately delivered litany of reasons why Frank Maya, and those like him, must be remembered. It’s not a eulogy. It’s a call to arms. The audience responded not with polite applause but with snaps, cheers, and a palpable sense of shared conviction. So, Morgan Bassichis can be as frank as he wants to be. Unflinchingly, hilariously, politically, and tenderly frank…yes, please. This is a theatrical act of memory, resistance, and joy. And it is not to be missed.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on August 11, 2025. All rights reserved.