What's Underground About Marshmallows?

Ron Vawter was an actor and performance artist who was a founding member of Manhattan's Wooster Group performance company. Before dying of AIDS in 1994, he also played small parts in mainstream films such as sex, lies, and videotape, and Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. In this production, directed by Jill Godmillow and produced by Jonathan Demme, which preserves a 1993 performance, Vawter plays Jack Smith (who died of AIDS in the late '80s), a flamboyant, paranoid actor-director of underground gay films, notably Flaming Creatures. Appearing here in harem dress, reclining on a couch, picking at his costume and fiddling with a stage light, Vawter rambles on about "B" movies and his petty feuds with other avant-garde filmmakers while, in a parody of scholarly lectures, seemingly random slides are projected behind the actor during the performance. The director occasionally cuts in shots of members of the audience, looking bemused or perplexed, which are both valid responses seeing that Vawter's turn lacks the needed rhythms and variations required to build a satisfying theatrical experience. Re-released as part of a 5 title collection of films from Jill Godmillow (the others include Vawter as gay-baiter, Communist hunter, and closet homosexual Roy Cohn in Roy Cohn/Jack Smith; Godmillow's acclaimed feature film on Gertrude and Alice B. Toklas Waiting for the Moon; the quasi-documentary Far From Poland and The Popovich Brothers of South Chicago), What's Underground About Marshmallows? is the most recent, but may well be the least effective of the titles. Not recommended. Aud: C, P. (S. Rees)