Currently playing Off-Broadway in repertory with The Village! A Disco Daydream, is another play written by Nora Burns, the celebratory and deeply poignant David’s Friend, which she also stars in. Originally conceived and performed as a one-night-only piece at Dixon Place in 2015, Burns went on to develop the show with director Adrienne Truscott, leading to an extended run at La MaMa in 2017.
This new production at SoHo Playhouse, directed and visualized by Adam Pivirotto, opens with Nora wrapped in a makeshift sarong, dancing on a speaker with carefree abandon (with beautifully loose, naturalistic choreography by Robin Carrigan) as she reminisces about the night that she first met the man who would become her best friend, David, at a Boston disco. She was already topless and after exchanging a few words and offering him a hit of poppers, he took off his shirt too and joined her on that speaker to dance the night away to Sylvester. Well, until 2am anyway, it was Boston after all.
A self-described “fag hag” from birth, Nora recalls how her nascent teenage gaydar had led her to discover Boston’s gay venues of the late 70s—like Darts, Chaps, Buddies, The 12, and Sundays at Boston-Boston—and how being on those dance floors made her feel. “I never wanted to leave. I was home”, she says of the very first night that she found her way to the 1270 club. After she met David, they were home together.
Inspired by reading magazines like Interview and After Dark, and Andrew Holleran’s novel Dancer from the Dance, Nora soon realized her dream of moving to where she “knew she belonged”, New York. It was 1979, just a few years after the city had been on the brink of bankruptcy and when Studio 54 was “still the golden coke spoon of discos”. Before long, David joined her there to share an East Village apartment, back when you could still pay a few hundred dollars a month to live in Manhattan.
Having dropped out of college for a year—because her studies were getting in the way of her partying—Nora started stripping in a network of clubs, beginning at the seediest Times Square joints, to pay her way. While David made ends meet as a rent boy. All of which is recounted with a refreshingly sex-positive tone, as are her tales of the pair going out cruising together. At one point she even sports David’s old leather gear, including a still shiny cap. Nora admits that some of her memories from back then are hazy, and her journal entries from the time explain why, with chronicles of drug and drink-fueled nights about town, including attending parties at photographer David Armstrong’s apartment where her idol Cookie Mueller would “hold court”.
On the night that I saw the show Nan Goldin was in the audience, which added another layer to my experience of watching it knowing that someone else who had been around back then, mixing in some of the same circles, was taking in this performance at the same time that I was. Ever-changing, New York might not be the city it was in that era, but even in 2024 the place is still pretty hard to beat (as Nora concurs), and it’s alway fun spotting who else is sitting in the dark with you at an Off-Broadway theatre.
As with The Village! A Disco Daydream, one of the delights of David’s Friend is hearing the names of long-gone Manhattan nightlife venues mentioned as Nora momentarily resurrects them, like The Saint, Boy Bar, Crisco, Mudd, Danceteria, and Xenon; and the rare exception that has survived the decades, Julius Bar. Along with Burns’ richly evocative words and her absorbing performance, the show’s playlist of classic songs from the era also transports us back and immerses us in New York of the late 70s and 80s. If you weren’t there, Burns offers an enticing window into what it was like to be on those dance floors night after night, and to walk those trash-strewn, cruisey Village streets—”when it was still a village and not just a brand”—with her best friend by her side.
Another vital element is the sparing but impactful use of well-curated archive photography and video that further draw us into the world that Nora conjures, enhancing her words rather than distracting from them. Steven Hammel’s effective set design places her in front of a white fringe curtain that is used as a projection surface, with the resulting fragmentation of images suggesting the intangibility of our memories.
As Burns acknowledges, it is human nature to be nostalgic for the time and place that we came of age in and the people we were with, but there was unquestionably something magical about that period in New York, especially the nightlife. Perhaps all the more magical in hindsight because that post-Stonewall sense of expanding queer freedom and sexual liberation was brutally cut short by the “tsunami” of the HIV/AIDS crisis. In a particularly moving, cathartic section of the show, Nora becomes emotional as she ponders whether now that “the PTSD” of those who survived that time “is wearing off, there is a collective sense of mourning going on”. Grief for the loss of loved ones, and a city that is almost unrecognizable, mixed with a yearning for those youthful years, is potently expressed by Nora as her infectious exuberance turns to affecting contemplation in this delicately crafted and skillfully structured piece.
Burns is an engaging storyteller, warm and inviting, making her vivid and often very funny prose conversational and her shift from more stylized moments to emotionally raw ones flow effortlessly. Pivirotto’s direction is precise and crisp, keeping things visually dynamic, but not overly busy. Essentially a one-woman show, Burns is nicely supported on stage by adult entertainer Ricky Roman, making his Off-Broadway debut as the DJ, who interacts with her as the narrative unfolds and briefly takes on various roles, including the doorman at Studio 54. Roman brings a touching sensitivity to his reading of David’s writing and brought the house down several times with his excellent comic timing.
So many narratives centre romantic love, but often the more enduring, equally significant—and in their own way intimate—relationships in our lives are with the people who accept us warts and all, who likely know us better than we know ourselves, who “speak the same language” as Burns puts it; our best friends. At its heart, this is a tenderly told love story about a special, once-in-a-lifetime friendship. David and Nora were the original, unsanitized, Will and Grace, and it sounds like they were a lot more fun to be with. They even had their own song, Roxy Music’s “Dance Away”. A visceral, pulsating time-capsule of a lost New York City, David’s Friend is also an uplifting celebration of life itself and a reminder to cherish it and those we share it with while we can.
By James Kleinmann
David’s Friend is running at SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street, New York on Thursdays at 9pm (until August 8th, 2024) and Saturdays at 9pm (until August 10th, 2024) in rep with Nora Burns’ The Village! A Disco Daydream (Wednesdays at 9pm until August 7th, 2024) and Fridays at 9pm (until August 9th, 2024). For more details and to purchase tickets head to: SoHoPlayhouse.com.
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