The Demon of Lenox Avenue

Our gal backstage, Magdalena “Footlights” Rojas-Park, slipped this hot little number under our door, and hoo boy, is it a doozy. So, picture this: it’s the 1920s, and a Noh mask-maker named Hidetora “Hidey” Tanaka gets himself exiled from Japan. The official story involved “aesthetic differences” with the Imperial court, but my sources—a frankly unbelievable number of pissed-off geishas—say he tried to pay his taxes with a mask carved to look exactly like the Emperor’s hemorrhoid cushion. Bounced all the way to New York with nothing but a crate of his freaky wooden faces and a serious case of the artistic blue-balls, Hidey lands smack in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance. He sees the explosion of art, music, and poetry and thinks, not “How beautiful,” but “How can I make this weirder and more about *me*?”

Ignoring the actual headliners, Hidey scoured the seediest holes and back-alley speakeasies for his troupe, which he grandly named “The Floating World Fuck-Ups.” He didn’t want talent; he wanted *vaguely functional disasters*. He found a tap-dancer who moved with the rhythm of a man falling out of a window, a blues singer who sounded like a goose being fed through a woodchipper, and a trumpet player who’d sold his soul to the Devil for the ability to play exactly three notes—all of them flat. Their debut was a marvel of avant-garde nonsense. The show, a *kyogen* piece about a servant who steals his master’s persimmons, was reframed as a drama about a dude trying to steal a pint of gin from a furious Bessie Smith. One critic—I think it was Dorothy Parker, post-lobotomy—wrote that it had “all the charm of a public execution.”

The shows were unholy. Imagine a man in a serene *Koomote* mask, meant to represent a beautiful young woman, screaming the lyrics to “St. James Infirmary Blues” while a chorus line of flappers attempted a slow, deliberate Noh walk and repeatedly tripped over their own beads. The music was a six-car pile-up of a shamisen, a stride piano, and a trombone that had clearly been wronged in a past life. It was, by all accounts, unwatchable. Which is precisely why all the rich white folks from downtown flocked to it. They’d sit there in their tuxedos, chain-smoking and whispering, “Oh, it’s so *primal*, so *raw*.” This, of course, drove Hidey absolutely fucking insane.

He had a brief, sweaty affair with some colossal banking heiress—a Habsburg or a Rockefeller, who gives a shit—who was bizarrely turned on by his constant, pretentious whining about the purity of his vision. After she successfully licked every single one of his masks (don’t ask), she agreed to fund his masterpiece: a twelve-hour, experimental Noh-Jazz adaptation of *Moby Dick*. It featured a ten-foot-tall wooden mask of Ahab with an erection for a nose, a chorus of singers gargling saltwater, and a whale represented by an enormous, quivering blancmange. The production was so catastrophically bad that it didn’t just close on opening night; it physically collapsed the stage, the theatre, and the bank account of his mistress, who promptly left him for a Finnish knife-thrower.

Defeated, Hidey Tanaka spent the rest of his days carving novelty pornographic chess sets in a basement in Queens. Did his glorious failure change the face of American theatre? Absolutely not. But holy Christ, for one baffling season, you could go to Harlem and watch something so profoundly wrong it looped all the way back around to being a masterpiece. Probably.