Obie Award-winner Ain Gordon returns with Radicals in Miniature

Please note: Fairfield University and Prep Faculty and Staff enjoy free and discounted tickets for this performance by contacting the Quick Center Box Office. Student tickets are $5, however free tickets are available by contacting Lori Jones at ljones@fairfield.edu.

Radicals in Miniature is a series of performance-odes to a group of icons from New York City’s latter 20th century “alternative” culture. In this humorous and touching new work, Ain Gordon partners with Josh Quillen to pay homage to “a panoply of ‘unfamous legends’ via alternative elegies to the under-sung.”

Ain Gordon – a three-time Obie Award-winning writer, director, and actor – grew up as the son of artists in Greenwich Village’s “alternative” culture of the 1970s and ’80s, experiencing first-hand the LGBTQ and cultural tastemakers that shaped how we reflect on those times. Gordon brings the all-but-forgotten neighborhood denizens and local legends to the fore. Included among the play’s 20 characters are punk drummer David Hahn; dance reveler Elaine Shipman; python-hugging club performer John Sex; and disco artist Sylvester. These people, however marginalized posthumously, had a profound influence on Gordon, a native New Yorker who lives there still.

Co-created by Gordon and composer-percussionist Josh Quillen, Radicals in Miniaturefeels like a podcast come to life as both artists dive into the stories of those who shaped their communities and lives. 

Ain Gordon is a Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting who appeared in the original Off-Broadway and touring productions of Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell. Gordon also wrote for NBC’s Will & Grace. Josh Quillen is a composer and performer-in-residence at Princeton University with Sō Percussion. He is also co-director of the percussion program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, and is the director of the New York University Steel Band. Quillen’s work has been featured on the Quick Center stage with both Sō Percussion and Adele Myers and Dancers.