FAGGOT/TERRORIST
Text composed by Adam M. Kassim; Inspired by the work of David Wojnarowicz
Target Margin Theatre | 232 52nd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11220
September 18 - October 5, 2025
In the chiaroscuro of Target Margin Theater’s ever-provocative Degenerate Lab series—a program devoted to artists' engagements with the historical and conceptual echoes of “Degenerate Art”—FAGGOT/TERRORIST, a fierce and uncompromising new work, strides onto the stage.
FAGGOT/TERRORIST emerges as a searing, hallucinatory fantasia—part confessional, part incantation—that dares to collide identity, temporality, sexuality, mortality, and the human yearning for transcendence in one volatile, luminous crucible. Drawing urgent inspiration from the visceral, defiant legacy of queer artist David Wojnarowicz, this new work does not so much unfold as it erupts, slicing through the numbing banalities of our curated, anesthetized daily existence. What remains is a raw, guttural confrontation with both the impossible and the divine—a performance that refuses to look away, even as it demands the same courage of its audience.
Let us not mince words. The title alone seizes the throat and does not let go. It is both epithet and invocation, both wound and war cry. In an era where comparisons to the rise of fascism in 20th-century Europe no longer seem hyperbolic but eerily apt, the very idea of "degenerate art" is not simply archival—it is freshly urgent. This production asks, in no uncertain terms, what it means to make art under threat, in defiance, and within the scars of collective memory.
The structure of FAGGOT/TERRORIST is prismatic—fragmented yet intentional, nonlinear but thematically cohesive. Three performers—Calvin Osorio, M. Can Yasar, and Ali Arian Molaei, each marked (anointed actually) with a literal red target upon their forehead (a gesture at once chilling and clarifying)—move through a series of titled chapters, each announced via the wonderfully anachronistic medium of the overhead projector. (One finds themselves delighted by this analogue relic; it conjures a classroom, yes, but also a séance—a summoning of things past.)
In one tableau, the trio sits noshing at a kitchen table, parsing the Book of Job—our collective shorthand for suffering, testing, and divine silence. In another, they trade stories of their sexual awakenings—narratives rendered with such guileless candor and bodily memory (the smiles, the cringe, the blushing delight) that one senses, intuitively, their truth. Elsewhere, they conduct ritualistic ablutions and offer irreverent praise to queer saints: Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, and Yukio Mishima presiding among them like heretic popes of the deviant sublime.
The spirit of Wojnarowicz—scabrous, tender, furious—permeates the evening. One can’t easily claim scholarly authority on his oeuvre, but his fingerprints are evident in the assemblage: the mannequin heads (eerily deployed), the blunt-force rage, the poetic nihilism. Quotations from his essays flicker through monologues and scenes—though over time, the absence of attribution begins to blur their impact. The text becomes a palimpsest: layered, yes, but sometimes unreadable. And yet, what an arresting, necessary chaos this is.
The performers do not merely resurrect history—they exhume it, dissect it, and dance with its bones. They quote witheringly from the public lies and lethal cowardice of officials during the AIDS crisis, offer barbed satire on the contemporary vogue of land acknowledgments, and present a searing (and necessary) indictment of the global complicity in the ongoing Palestinian genocide. The Palestinian land acknowledgment, in particular, does not soothe; it cuts—and in doing so, clarifies the hollowness of ritual unmoored from responsibility.
But it is not all rage and requiem. There is also grace here, and playfulness. The performers drift between roles—friends, prophets, lovers, avatars of pain and defiance. The form allows for reverie and rupture, joy and elegy. In invoking Job, the production reminds us that queer life, like that ancient tale, is not merely about suffering—but endurance, and the stubborn insistence on meaning.
Still, the show is not without its excesses. At times, the collage-like structure becomes disorienting; one loses track of temporal threads, of who is speaking and when. The poetic density occasionally verges on vagueness. And the choice to forgo a curtain call—while dramaturgically coherent with the ethos of ongoing labor—felt unnecessarily withholding. These performers deserved the applause that so clearly hung in the air.
Because this is not one of those pieces where the audience sits in reverent, baffled silence, unsure whether to clap. FAGGOT/TERRORIST is a piece to clap for, to shout for, to carry with you like a shard in the gut. It is theater not merely as reflection, but as call to action. Not tidy, not polite—thank God—but urgent, ragged, and alive.
Faggot/Terrorist played its last performance on October 5. For info on Target Margin’s programming, visit https://www.targetmargin.org/
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on October 12, 2025. All rights reserved.