From Emily Colucci’s extensive review for Filthy Dreams:
“I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny.”–John Waters
As all of you faithful, filthy readers know, we, here at Filthy Dreams, have always agreed with John Waters’ view on Tennessee Williams. He was the filth elder we always dreamed of too and we’ve devoted our trashy lives to living in his image: guzzling mixed drinks, laughing at our own twisted sense of humor and trying to balance being both joyous and alarming.
Well, at ClampArt’s current exhibition of artist Mark Morrisroe’s work Hello From Bertha, we discovered we are certainly not the only ones who treat our beloved TW as a role model. Named after Williams’ one-act play, Hello From Bertha presents a wide range of Morrisroe’s varied work from his intimate black and white photographs of friends and lovers to his seminal chromogenic print “negative sandwiches” to his punk-inspired Xeroxes of Tina Turner.
A fellow avid fanatic of Tennessee Williams, Morrisroe’s exhibition also features his drag film version of “Hello From Bertha,” which details the last days of a dying prostitute, Bertha. Starring Morrisroe himself as Bertha, Steven Tashjian, otherwise known as the drag queen Tabboo!, as Goldie and artist Jack Pierson as Lena, Morrisroe’s “Hello From Bertha” is an unsettling, campy masterpiece, recalling Jack Smith’s films and Williams’ own theatrical hysterics.