*Can I Be Frank?* May 24 2026

I saw Can I Be Frank? at the SoHo Playhouse on May 24, 2026. It’s a one-man play written and performed by Morgan Bassichis. My friend Frank (no relation) saw it twice last year. He raved about it, said it was one of the best shows he’d seen that year. I was able to get a cheap ticket ($38) and am so glad I did.

The show is based on and with original material by performance artist, comic, and singer/songwriter Frank Maya. I’d never heard of Maya, I imagine very few people have. The show’s materials describe Maya as among “the first out gay comedians on network television.” He was on the precipice of mainstream success before his death from AIDS-related complications in 1995. Maya died months before The Cocktail was released to the general public.

The show is a disarming mixture of Maya’s work, Bassichis’s riffs on it, and Bassichis doing his own wacko thing. It opens with Bassichis in stark lighting, standing in profile, speaking into a microphone, hollering about Liberace. He says only two or three lines then says something like, “OK that’s not working - - Gloria, could you please change the lights.” He says that the show is in development so anything we don’t like or don’t think works will be cut from the actual show. We all know that the show has been "in development" for almost two years!

The show is directed by Sam Pinkleton, who won the Tony last season for Oh Mary! He and Bassichis trust the material, trust the audience, and know the power of carefully chosen moments of silence. We’d be laughing, then stunned into silence, then they’d slowly turn a corner and we’d be laughing again. This is an exciting journey for an audience.

Liberace is one of the recurring motifs of the show. Maya did a performance a month after Liberace’s death and Maya called him out for not ever coming out or acknowledging that he had AIDS. Maya saw this as cowardice, that Liberace could have saved lives by stepping forward. I’ll paraphrase one of my favorite jokes in the show: “Frank Maya tore apart Liberace. For those of you who aren’t familiar, one gay man tearing apart another gay man is one of our ancestral healing practices.”

My other favorite joke is extremely graphic and not appropriate for a PG website like mine. Please contact me if you want me to share it with you.

Bassichis is a relentlessly energetic and inventive performer. I can’t imagine it being done by anyone else, it’s a genuine tour de force. He gives the impression that much of the show is improvised but Frank tells me that the script was pretty much set in the two performances he saw. It was a tight and thrilling 70 minutes and the sold-out audience was crazy for it. I can’t remember the last time I was part of an instantaneous standing ovation, which was entirely deserved. I walked out of the theater with a profound sense of contentment.