Reza Abdoh & Brenden Doyle Residence

History

Born to a wealthy family in Tehran, Iran, Reza Abdoh (1963-1995) showed an early interest in the arts that his mother supported but his father discouraged. Abdoh attended boarding school in London, where he was influenced by the works of Western literature, especially Shakespeare. In 1979, his father, financially ruined following the Iranian Revolution, moved to Los Angeles with his children. He died from a heart attack in January 1980. It has been speculated that this was brought on after learning two weeks prior that Abdoh, his eldest son, was gay.

In the 1980s, Abdoh directed plays and created his own experimental theater and video productions in Los Angeles. Early in his career – at a time when anti-Iranian sentiment was particularly high – he told people a lie that his mother was Italian, knowing that he would be more accepted in the theater world if he had European, rather than solely Middle Eastern, roots.

Abdoh moved to New York City in 1991, the same year he formed the bicoastal theater ensemble Dar A Luz. By 1993, he and his partner Brenden Doyle, an actor who sometimes performed in Abdoh’s productions, shared an apartment at 142 West 44th Street, near Times Square. Abdoh was then already known as “notorious for theater pieces that have the decibel level of rock shows and apocalyptic imagery involving graphic sexual parody and violence,” according to the New York Times. Race, class, homosexuality, and AIDS were central themes in his work.

Productions were large in scale and set in unconventional places. Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990), Abdoh’s New York debut, was a major site-based work that featured over 50 people performing on the streets of the Meatpacking District, then a gritty area with nightclubs, particularly those catering to the LGBT community, and trans sex workers on the streets. The multi-media performance The Law of Remains (1992) was staged in the abandoned ballroom of the Diplomat Hotel, 108 West 43rd Street, which was on the verge of being demolished.

After testing positive for HIV in 1988, Abdoh said that his productions “became a lot more conscious of the body, the excoriation of the body as a tool.” In addition to Father and Remains, these include Bogeyman (1991), Tight Right White (1993), and Quotations from a Ruined City (1994). As Marc Arthur notes in BOMB, “Abdoh’s performers–visibly queer and sometimes naked–were an unapologetic presence during the ‘80s and ‘90s AIDS crisis, flouting the distorted narratives of biomedical risk that were used to police and contain queer bodies.”

Abdoh’s final play was A Story of Infamy, which he started working on in his West 44th Street apartment with his brother Salar, his collaborator on Quotations. Infamy was about two men on death row, one of whom was dying of a terminal illness. Salar recalled that the library in the apartment “was filled with books treating two subjects: capital punishment and the plight of black men in America. Despite the play Tight Right White, Reza’s ferocious assault on the blight of racist America, he still was not done with the topic and meant to return to it through the back door with A Story of Infamy.”

Abdoh, at the height of his career, died of AIDS-related complications, age 32, in his West 44th Street apartment, just after the first rehearsal of Infamy, which was never produced. He was survived by Doyle. After multiple attempts to obtain a visa, Abdoh’s mother flew from Iran to visit him in the days before his death. Bidoun, a New York City-based non-profit that covers the arts and culture of the Middle East and its diasporas, noted in 2012 that Abdoh was “one of the most compelling figures in American avant-garde theater.” In 2018, MoMA PS1 held the first large-scale retrospective of his work.

Entry by Amanda Davis, project manager (July 2024).

NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.