JOHN HAGAN ON John Jesurun.

Hagan, John

Chang in a Void Moon, John Jesurun's "living film serial," played at the Pyramid Club, at 101 Avenue A, every Monday night at nine-thirty and eleven for a year, starting in June 1982. It was perhaps the first of many "episodic plays" to appear in New York downtown theater, and it came about when Jesurun, lacking funds to produce his film scripts, decided to stage them instead.

The decision to offer me the role of Chang, a nefarious businessman with international connections and "diplomatic immunity in 52 countries," resulted from Jesurun's desire to double-cast the part in order to relieve the actress playing it from the weekly responsibility. The production formula rarely varied: We performed on Monday; Jesurun wrote a new script on Tuesday; we met at his apartment to read it on Wednesday and Friday. Basic staging was done at the Pyramid on Sunday, often to be modified up until the moments before the show began. The next day, the process would start again.

Each episode consisted of many short scenes (and the occasional marathon one), with repartee sometimes beginning or ending midsentence in filmlike jump cuts. Rich in description and allusions (history, geography, rock bands), Chang's demented dialogue was also highly structured, in almost musical fashion, with constant repetitions and variations - making the language as difficult to pin down as the elusive Chang himself. The scripts outrageously traversed time and space, and sheets were posted backstage during the show, reminding us not only what scene was next, but what country and century it took place in.

If the scripts brooked no spatiotemporal restraints, the real-life practicalities of space, time, and budget necessitated, and may even have fostered, a simple and rather ingenious stagecraft, based on the use of large white foamcore boards. Each episode contained a number of "cinematic" effects, the most famous of which were "aerial shots" created by placing actors on their sides, stomachs, and backs atop specially built platforms, so that the audience felt as if they were watching the action from a bird's-eye view. Between scenes, actors scrambled to new positions. "Fast and flat" was Jesurun's preferred acting style, which went well with the minimalist staging, and while there were exceptions to this method, a minimum of emotion at maximum speed could be helpful in getting through a typical script.

As I recall it from a distance, we performed amid a buzz of drink orders and conversations, in a haze of cigarette smoke from offstage and on, and with spectators cramming the entrance that separated us from the front room where drag queens danced on the bar to pulsating music.

After a year, Jesurun moved on to stage longer works in larger spaces. But sporadically since then (most recently, but not finally, in 1997), he has produced new episodes of Chang at other clubs and performance spaces around town, lending a slightly nomadic quality to a show that many will forever associate with the "cocktail lounge" on Avenue A.

John Hagan is an actor and writer based in New York.