[In the following excerpt, Siegle discusses the multiple identities found in Bogosian's Drinking in America.]

… Known most widely for writing and starring in Oliver Stone's film Talk Radio, Eric Bogosian is more direct and probably more acerbic in his responses than [Spalding] Gray, as his comments in the introduction to Drinking in America （1987） indicate. Bogosian remembers how, “numb with boredom, I would walk out of a half-baked theatrical production of Hedda Gabler and find all the drama I could stomach on the street.” Although he wanted to be an actor, he did not want a role in a soap opera or “in a play that the New York critics would eat for breakfast. I wanted to have fun now and make work that excited me now.” For a while, the Kitchen, a mecca for performance art in the seventies, works such as Einstein on the Beach, and the semiotic and minimalist activities inspired by Susan Sontag and Barthes all served to rescue him from the dullness of straight traditional theater and show him some directions for his work.

Partly because of neglect （he chafed, it seems, to be reviewed only in the Soho Weekly News） and partly because the energy and immediacy of the street were still somehow missing from his work on stage, Bogosian was ready for something else. He wanted an art that was “about the way we of the mass-media generation react and act on what we see.” He found it in the art of Michael Zwack, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Longo:

What was their stuff like? Ironic in the extreme and dependent on letting the pictures—which had a superficial quality that gave them instant impact—tell the story. These artists shared the belief that in our age of mass media we are saturated by imagery, and this familiar imagery, if framed, set off, edited or piled up, can reveal deeper currents flowing within us. In other words, they were slam dancing with pictures.

What emerged in Bogosian's own practice was an aggressive gallery of characters “each going ‘all the way’ into his world.” He uses adjectives such as “repulsive, unnerving, pathetic, or melodramatic” to describe the individuals, the noun “collage” to suggest the total impression we get of our social reality, and a distinctly postmodern theory to underwrite his theory of acting:

Even more interesting is how you figure out how to act like a cowboy. I've never met one in my life. I must have learned how to act like a cowboy from John Wayne, an actor.

Everybody does this, not just actors. Truck drivers act out the stereotypical truck driver. We've all seen them do it. Doctors play-act at being doctors. Yuppies play at being Yuppies. Punks, punks. Lovers, lovers. And so on.

Bogosian wishes to explode the “rhetoric” of Being in the age of consumerism and the media, to set the “styles” of class and profession interacting with the rhetoric of economic roles until “society's learned rules” could be exposed, put up for grabs. He wears one costume on stage, switching characters “like you were turning channels: first this guy, then that guy. Fragments. Chunks of personality.” Those chunks are the learned roles, the actor's models, internalized along with the rules. He draws on the way rock stars “played to the audience,” but in order to make them “laugh at violence and prejudice, then feel embarrassed for the laughter.”

Bogosian's dialogues are collected in Drinking in America, a volume that includes the title show as well as earlier material, such as FunHouse （much of which is included in the Alive from Off Center! film）, Men Inside, and Voices of America, some material going back to 1981. Perhaps the best way to think of how these pieces work is to pursue Bogosian's comment on the 1981 Men Inside as “an attempt to sort out all these people inside me.” Whereas Gray emphasizes the narrative or fictive basis of identity, Bogosian stresses the multiple （and incompatible） identities lurking in our internal galleries. Bogosian is almost belligerent about canceling the distance between the privileged member of the audience and the characters he assembles—they are inside everyman.

Perhaps the archetypal Bogosian sketch, then, is “Honey, I'm Home!” as bitter an inversion of American dreaming as we are likely to find. A drunk in the gutter accosts Mr. Commuter without getting a response—each represents what the other most needs to repress to preserve equanimity, for they are psychological opposites in the class warfare between those who can and do comply and those who do not. So it is no wonder that only one can speak at a time on Bogosian's stage. In the sketch “Fried-Egg Deal,” another casualty in the same situation explains the state of things: “You know what I mean, fried-egg deal? （flips his hand） They flip you this way, they flip you that way … just like a fried egg, you never know which side you're ending up on.” One of the powerless, he salutes with mixed irony and genuineness the commuter who “beat 'em,” but he also reminds his successful Other that “if I wasn't where I was … you couldn't be where you was … 'cause, you know, 'cause （illustrating with his hands flipping） you can't have a top without a bottom.” This is a fast take on the exploitation necessary in a wealthy consumer society.

In “Honey, I'm Home!” the speaker begins with a drunken rendering of “God Bless America” that degenerates to “blah, blah, blah” and coughing right after the “guide her,” as if the most apparent quality of his American reality was the lack of divine guidance. What he asks the commuter first is for a hand up off the street, a transparently symbolic request. But the speaker feels the need to justify his claim on a community, citing his Korean service record and Kennedy's “ask not” address. Without conviction, however: “Remember that one? JFK said that. … They blew his brains out!” Bogosian's bite is like that, direct and undisguised. “Hey buddy, what do you say? Am I invisible or something? What, am I talking to the fire hydrant here? You! Mister! The guy with the New York Times under his arm, how about it?” Of course, he is invisible to his yuppie Other, whom he imagines needing to rush home and “skim the pool” or drive his wife to an Amnesty International meeting. The “you” is also the “hypocrite lecteur,” who, like the silent commuter, goes home to “asparagus tips” and the suburban salutation of the sketch's title.

Bogosian's sketches are full of characters such as these, or the speaker in “The Pacer” who know he's not “gettin' it” and wonders who does:

You're either winnin' or you're losin', you're either sinkin' or you're swimmin' … and I'm sinkin', see! I'm in a little lifeboat with no oars and I'm sinkin' in the ocean … （indicates with posture） I'm on a little piece of ice, just gettin' smaller and smaller and smaller day by day by day, goin' into the water … and that water's polluted, it's dirty, it's disgusting … and I can't swim! I can't swim!

In performance Bogosian convinces, his body shrinking as his character loses the very ground from under him, knowing he lacks what it takes to swim the Reaganomic seas. To the extent the speaker knows that “it's just gettin' harder and harder, every day, day in, day out,” and that those who get it are those who make it harder, he understands the radical subtext of Bogosian's work, which makes up in impact what it lacks in subtle analysis. Even the burned-out yuppie passed over for promotion can feel “Held Down” at work and, by his lover, held up to the impossible ideal of “a superman and a superstud, … a real cowboy,” as if the system's demands create casualties at every niche of the class ladder.

Hence the procession of emptied beings on Bogosian's stage, characters whose impact upon us comes partly from the kindred part within us and partly from their clattering registration of capitalist radiation. The tile salesman talks a mad streak and hires a hooker to battle loneliness on the road; the junkie feels “life is a monkey on my back” and is content to leave his Other to “ride aroun' in your car, swim in your warm swimming pool. Watch the fire” as long as he can have his “taste”; the speaker “In the Dark” dresses in a “black cocoon” doubled by his darkened apartment, “where no one can find me, no one can hurt me, no one can touch me … I don't have to think, I don't have to feel … and the best part is … I don't have to see,” an obvious cultural dropout who blacks out all interaction to escape the costs of any real interchange.

The central importance of that withdrawal from interaction explains why the monologue works so well for Bogosian's writing: he can assault his audience as the “Mister!” responsible for the unimaginableness of dialogue in a world pushed so close to the edge of endurance. In Bogosian's world, class divisions are absolute and economic relations are the only interactions. This class of characters can not only speak what the privileged class does not often hear, but, isolated in monologue, it can also make clear how “invisible,” as one of them expresses it, they are to the suburban psyche. Moreover, casualties declaring themselves bring to the monologue a voice that undoes the kind of social relation （the passive nonintervention of entertainment） typical of the form. As Bogosian says in a People （!） magazine blurb, “I'm not going to get up in front of 2,000 people and talk about my doodoo and my weewee and my psychiatrist and what it's like to take LSD” （17 August 1987, 99-100）.

Monologue also lends itself to Bogosian's equally adept desublimations of the class his victims envy, hate, and disdain. In addition to his victims, a number of characters are pushers. The insurance salesman narrates enough disaster scenarios during his suppertime call to push his victim into a purchase, knowing life is enough of a “fried-egg deal” that insecurity will reward him. The M. C. at a rock concert can push his audience into a self-destructive frenzy—“Are you ready to be FREE tonight? Break all the boundaries tonight? Are you wasted? Are you wrecked? Are you … FUCKED UP! Ya! I know I am.” No wonder the “band that wants to get inside your head” is Cerebral Hemorrhage, for this commodity serves as a social insurance that adolescent energy with nowhere creative to go vents itself in a moneymaking way.

These more privileged members of Bogosian's gallery play social apocalypse for profit. Others of this class display the mechanisms of normalization that can maintain so disastrous an order. The Hispanic deejay pushing the “College of Cashier Education,” the success merchant “Looking Out for Number One,” the preacher in “Starving Children” asking for “just eighteen bucks” so that his listeners do not have to feel guilty ignoring the next beggar, “The Specialist” who in corporate workshop style tutors tomorrow's torturers, and the evangelist who reads “The Law” of God as burning abortion clinics, shooting “black urban barbarians,” and nuking “some country filled with nothing but bearded, terrorist heathen” are all characters who open up the hood on the engine that motors “Mister!” home each evening.

It may be safe to say that … Bogosian's character sketches slam into an audience's passivity, disrupting its expectation of Debordian “spectacle” and imposing upon it an awareness that corrodes the suburban roles and surfaces of what the Situationniste Internationale calls “our alienated social life.” To place alongside Gray's and Bogosian's work that of Peter Cherches is to define three contemporary versions of performances as texts. Performance work closer to dance, or to theater, or to music is still of course to be found, but for our purposes it will suffice to see a bit of what these three do with the performance dimension of writing and its tendency to reinforce the social and the collective force of storytelling. …