Ask the performance artist Joey Arias about drag, and he will lean in close in a way that isn’t meant to be chummy. Then he will repeat the word back to you in a tone that suggests you should have known better than to bring it up.
Never mind that he is onstage lately in corset and stilettos in “Arias With a Twist,” the acclaimed — and trippy — musical fantasia for grown-ups that he and his puppeteer friend Basil Twist created in 2008. Or that for decades Arias has been known as a drag artist, that skill being part of how he first enchanted Twist.
“Drag?” Arias said to me at Here Arts Center in Manhattan, where the show runs through Dec. 20. “Drag?”
He takes exception to the word, at least as it applies to him, because of what its popular connotation has become — neither underground nor punk rock, as he perceived it in the ’80s and ’90s, when he developed his alter ego Justine.
“If you say drag, you think RuPaul,” he said, and the mainstream glitter-and-gowns “Drag Race” aesthetic has nothing to do with what Arias is up to. His own objective is “all about silhouette and soul.”
Arias has long taken to heart the advice of the French fashion designer Thierry Mugler, who came up with his look for “Arias With a Twist” when it made its premiere 18 years ago in the intimate downstairs theater at Here.
“He said, ‘The strongest look for you is naked,’” Arias said. “So I always try to stay as nude as possible.”
It would be a category error to inquire too closely into what the show is about, plot not being a priority, but the stark simplicity of Arias’s aesthetic is a perfect foil for Twist’s. Reviewing the piece’s first outing, the critic Ben Brantley exalted “the imaginative heights of spectacle with which Basil Twist surrounds Joey Arias.”
The puppets and scenery are where the chimerical extravagance comes in: hovering space aliens; a vine-dripping jungle; some horned red devils, very generously endowed. There are puppets of Arias, too, dressed in teeny copies of the black bikini that Mugler put him in.
As Twist observed, just stating a fact, “Joey translates well as a puppet.”
Twist, 57, is quite high-profile now, a MacArthur fellow who designed and directed the puppetry in the current West End production of “My Neighbour Totoro.” But when he first met Arias, in the early ’90s, he was a nightly clubgoer, and a sometime club performer, just back in New York after attending puppetry school in France.
“I loved drag, I loved the artifice of it, I loved the theatricality of it,” he said. “I really cut my teeth on nightclub stages, and a lot of them were drag shows. And I would do my draggy puppets.”
He remembers it as a time when “drag was kind of exploding in New York,” and he remembers Arias’s power to command a tiny room, singing live, not lip-syncing like the other drag performers he shared a bill with.
“Everything would melt away when Joey would take the microphone,” Twist said. “I was dumbstruck.”
Arias, who is coy about his age, is a generation older than Twist. When he moved to New York from Los Angeles in 1976, he had already been part of the influential improv company the Groundlings alongside fellow early members including Laraine Newman and Phil Hartman.
Twist’s artistry wowed him, especially works like “Symphonie Fantastique” (1998), performed in a giant water tank, and “Dogugaeshi” (2004), based on Japanese puppetry. Still, when Arias would tell Twist that he wanted to be in his shows, Twist didn’t see a place for him. He took the enthusiasm more as metaphor anyway.
“He would say, ‘Oh, I want to jump into your shows,’ like ‘I want to jump into a cartoon,’ or ‘I wish I could jump into the TV set,’” Twist recalled. “My shows were all so different, but they were puppet-focused and I didn’t use actors in my work. But I adored Joey and I knew what he meant, that he really did want to live in my world.”
When Twist finally saw the potential in that, Arias was briefly back in town from Las Vegas, where he had a long-term gig as the Mistress of Seduction in Cirque du Soleil’s “Zumanity.” For a performance at a private party, Twist enlisted his grandfather’s antique wooden musician puppets to be Arias’s backing band — and was stunned by the chemistry that Arias had with them.
In 2008, a last-minute opening appeared in the schedule at Here, where Twist runs the Dream Music Puppetry program, which commissions new works of puppetry for adults. He and Arias put together “Arias With a Twist” from scratch in about two months — a go-for-it speed that he marvels at now. The production, which he directed, featured his grandfather’s puppets as the Dream Music Orchestra.
It was a hit. They revived and expanded it, made a documentary about it. For Twist, it remains a favorite.
But there is a catch to building a puppet-world show around a singular performer rather than writing a role that any actor could step into. Without that performer, the show becomes unstageable. And Twist, who keeps the physical elements of his shows in storage, eventually wondered why he was hanging on to the considerable bulk of “Arias With a Twist,” which they hadn’t performed since 2012. He was sure they would never put it on again. His star was unable.
The trouble, Arias had already told me in a separate interview, was the alcohol and opioid addiction he had slipped into in early 2017. It started with wine, he said, and then a friend left him a bottle of pills. Soon he was “taking 30 OxyContin a day and drinking white wine 24 hours a day.” He had tried to quit on his own, he said, but four days into opioid withdrawal he was in too much pain to sustain the attempt.
His old friend the editor Kim Hastreiter, with whom he’d moved cross-country to New York during the Bicentennial, went to see him perform at Joe’s Pub and knew something was badly wrong. She assembled a large group of friends, Twist among them, to stage an intervention that December. Fearing Arias would die, they had raised the money to pay his bills for a year. They sent him to rehab. It stuck.
Yet Arias — who, for Mugler, once wore a corset with an 18-inch waist — was walking around post-rehab in a much larger body. “I was up to 300 pounds,” he said. Depressed, he first had a tummy tuck; then he went on Ozempic. Getting as slender as he is now took years.
Transformed, he says he feels great — like himself again, even if he barely eats solid foods anymore. The corset he wears with his black bikini for “Arias With a Twist”? It has a 21-inch waist.
Twist’s voice thickened with emotion as he talked about the show’s return, with its star intact.
“I’m just astounded that it’s happening,” he said. “That he is here, that he’s in amazing shape, that he’s clear and powerful as ever.”
So if it seems a little random that they didn’t hold out for a 20th-anniversary revival, well, they are seizing the day.
“It was like, we’ve got Joey,” Twist said. “It’s 18 years, let’s do it now.”
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