The Dope Elf
Written and Directed by Asher Hartman
Performed by Gawdafful National Theater

October 1 – 3, 2021, three performances at The Lab
June 14, 2021, premiere of six films and an essay, below
September 14 – October 20, 2019, eleven performances at Yale Union, Portland

The Dope Elf
Essay by Asher Hartman

Where to put one’s unholy rage? One’s unfunny? Where flows a complex truth, sweet and repugnant, socially unacceptable, wicked, onanistic, and wrong? At the moment, writing for performance feels like a secretive, self-destructive act wherein things that shouldn’t and must be said are illegibly scrawled in the ether, immediately disavowed by the hand that wrote them.

Disavowal might be a theme for the times and for these films. These short pieces serve as edges, eerily lit bathroom corners against which bad thoughts swirl and slap. Unconscious feeling is the material welling up, rushing past the body’s control. If we haven’t noticed, the underworld has been in charge in white America for a while, its indecent thoughts and bald emotions having been repressed by cultural demands to lean into denial of personal and historic violence, while maintaining a fragile self-concept of oneself and the nation as “good.” 

Derived from theater, these six films emerge from an already forgotten era when theater and filmmaking stopped—that is, during the ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic. It’s clear that the virus, the invisible mascot of our war against Earth, appeared alongside a reluctant, semi-awakening in the national consciousness to the crushing racial violence that we continue to mete out against people who are not “white,” an awakening accompanied by reflexive denial from those who may have the most to lose by the naming of that violence. 

Enter art. The question for an American theater company always seems to be: do we reinscribe the national myth of our innate goodness and ability to overcome our deeply human flaws even against all hope, or do we look closely at psyches that normalize graphic violence, that penalize “fuzzy” or “feminine” emotions like compassion and joy, at minds that repress or sexualize seething antipathies? My theater and performance practice tends toward the latter.

My company, Gawdafful National Theater, was on its way to The Lab in San Francisco to join our sprawling set of artist-made sculptural sleeping stations that had already arrived at the gallery when the pandemic shut the city down. We had just returned from Yale Union in Portland, having performed three of our six plays called “The Dope Elf,” a series about occult white supremacy. Occult here has its double meaning, referring to the racism and white supremacy hidden to those who enact it, and to a certain kind of malefic magic. As its title suggests, the world of “The Dope Elf” is occupied by elves, fairies, trolls, and demigods beloved in European-American pop culture. The white supremacy reenacted in the play is the type that white people don’t notice and other people suffer, the type that flickers between our vowels, in our sexual proclivities, and in the quest for power born of perceived blood loss. This is the white and male supremacy that I and my theater company attempt to face, inadequately.

Whiteness as toxin in “The Dope Elf” is evident in its title, a hybrid of appropriated slang and drug fantasy, cradled in an identification with Norse gods and with British and European folklore that intersects with political violence. It’s no secret that Nazi ideologies appropriated imagery from the Norse pantheon or that British magicians had interest in empire. But the characters in these plays, and the subsequent films, don’t carry hammers or wands. They are normal human/non-humans affected by American illnesses of self-glorification and self-injury, disassociation, pathological and justified fears, and unwillingness to come emotionally clean.

 The origins of the word “elf” itself have to do with light, lightness, white light, whiteness. Far from their Keebler brethren, true elves are pernicious tricksters who will most definitely fuck with you . Elves are known to cause mayhem and to delight in it: to steal babies, kill maids and farmers, and to dance in the blood. In the world of the play, you cannot bargain with them. They are sensitive, like white folk, who sometimes find it hard to hear our glee-inflected crimes recited.

These “creature features,” pandemic-driven monologues and occasional dialogues in our six films, circulate around elf-people with multiple identities. John and Alfred, partners played by Philip Littell and Michael Bonnabel in their films “23 Years, 5A, John” and “Alfred” are also known as the murderous Dog and Pig. They are divorced, living apart, after years of trying to make their post-Stonewall relationship work, in poverty, but no longer on the streets. Gingy, the agoraphobic troll, played by Zut Lorz, is the laconic bestie of The Dope Elf. In “The Zygote Project,” she plans a hermetic return to pre-birth where there is an infinitesimal chance of living in a world without the “blanks” (read: blancs, whites, elves). Two brothers, Os, a god, and Hep, a magician, played by Paul Outlaw and Joe Seely, morph into alters of themselves, Paul and Joe, in “That Chick Judy '' on a long weekend of domestic mayhem in the high desert. Jasmine Orpilla enters this series as Chet in “Balance.” Chet is the slayer who must set the world right by vanquishing The Dope Elf herself.

The Dope Elf, also called Elf, morphs. Jacqueline Wright’s first rendition of Elf was of a tough, wild, indomitable, curious, lonely outcast, unconscious of her rage and its effect on the town she blew into, a force more than a spirit. When the pandemic halted production, her character underwent several shifts, some of which are evidenced in her film, “It Had All Happened, Through This, This…?” In the writing, I began to think more deliberately about “the feminine” and what it means to be broken in this aspect of the psyche. It seems clear that our brokenness is tied to the misconceptions we have of ourselves as non-animals, to our fear of birth, death, defecation, and vulnerable feeling. The title of The Dope Elf’s film is a reference to Courbet’s “L’Origine du Monde.” Elf opens her muscular mouth, trained to project, and mesmerizingly asserts that “it had all happened through this, this singular orifice.” It’s the mouth, stand in for vagina and uterus, conveyer of speech and sound, of pleasure, that produces sex, life, and generation. Themes of eating, swallowing whole, images of ova and knives, and the pleasurable pain of cutting and harvesting run through many of the films.

In “That Chick Judy,” those two brothers, Os and Hep—loosely based on Osiris, and on the god Set and my bonfire-loving neighbor, respectively—love, hate, toy with, antagonize, and attempt to psychically maim, if not seduce and kill one another. The film is sometimes tensely racialized and filially eroticized: Os, played by Paul Outlaw, is a queer African American actor and real-life friend of Joe Seely, a white, straight cis male actor and mask maker, who plays Hep. The two wreak fictional havoc on a distinctly feminine home decorated with touches of cultural signifiers from the Philippines that tie directly to the slayer Chet, as played by Jasmine Orpilla—performer, composer, and pre-colonial martial arts practitioner of Filipino descent—who will slay Elf in future episodes of our ongoing saga. In her film, “Balance,” Orpilla appears in masks made by actor Joe Seely, rehearsing a murder, deftly wielding blades and swallowing white eggs, cosmic symbols of ova and the turtle mother she has also destroyed.

My experience growing up as a woman in the 1970s informs the film rendition of the character of Elf, a human/non-human damaged by and eliciting the scoptophilic urge. One of the dangers of theater and film is that people, actors, become representative of ideas. That trouble is inherent in the forms, and so it’s incumbent on me, the author, to suggest that the feminine does not only reside in the body of this actor and character, but in all the characters. They all wish to evacuate, trounce, liberate, rob, avenge, reduce to slime, the mangled fetal feminine in the psyche, forbidden to live. True, Elf is played by and written for a white woman, utilized as a tool, advocate, and shield for white supremacy and for patriarchy.  But the character is also someone deranged by the brutal misogyny enacted on the feminine, even by people with feminist, queer, or progressive political affiliations. Her body has become a rage bag, a danger to self and others, trying to live as best it can with or without the being who may have occupied it at birth. To be clear, her position as victim does not disentangle her from her position as perpetrator. The roles are intimately knotted.

Like many, maybe most, I’ve had the definite sense that there is no one inside me. At times, I couldn’t figure out what the hand at the end of my arm was or what face looked back at me in the mirror. I could never figure out whether this feeling of emptiness was a product of my own self-hatred and narcissism or part of living in a culture that punishes the feminine. (The first sentence I remember hearing on television was “No grown woman needs two slices of bread on her sandwich.”) Or was this interior distortion in fact natural to someone growing up in an era of massive denial of the robbery, murder and attempted erasure of people who are not legible as white. (See, Education, childhood “Dick and Jane,” the gaslighting primer on humanity that to my grade school memory includes none but the graphic outlines of a white girl and a white boy and a white dog read, in my case, to a class of racially diverse students by an African American teacher.) Then again, could this dissociation be a protective reaction to the whirling physical and psychological violence of my family and era, or the striking mental differences of family members, including myself, that bore no explanation? (I’ve been told several times by psychics that I’m a “walk-in” and I believe it.) My sense is that this common feeling of evacuation is a collage of factors including the knowledge that we are not valuable in­­­­ American capitalism unless we have the fame, wealth, race, youth, education, body, and beauty that are passports to existence.

My desire to understand my own psychic structure led me to emulate the classic 1960s psych films that anyone can now watch online, wherein famous and lesser-known patients are observed by scientific authorities whose salacious curiosity around difference of affect and behavior arouses the viewer and patient alike. Watching these old films evokes thoughts of cultural violence, of MK Ultra and PsyOps, of drug use and misuse, of fear of the female, the “non-white,” and the homosexual, of threat to whiteness by race, by bomb, by serial killer, by incursion of new social norms, by an amnesia that informs the present. We’re also watching mid-century visual media, the third eye that continues to shape, if not malform, our social and political relations.

In some of Gawdafful’s films in this series, I, the white director, appear as the raspy authoritative voice, the happy warden to the actors caught on video in their homes, in mock surveillance. They are fireflies in a jar. In a turn of epidemiological fate, neither the actors nor the characters can really leave their home-jars. These films illustrate and mark out the current Covid-19 pandemic in stages. In the beginning, film equipment had to be sterilized, passed to isolated actors through minimal contact. The actors then underwent a grueling process of acting, crewing, filming their own shoot under the anxious, panoptic Zoom eyes of two tiny directors on an iPhone, Chu-Hsuan Chang, the lighting director, and me. Three films were shot by the actor performing to no one (“Alfred,” “Balance,” and “The Zygote Project”); Two films were made in rigorous Covid pods (“That Chick Judy” and “It Had All Happened through This, This…?”). One film, “23 Years, 5A, John,” was shot at the beginning of the vaccine rollout, where only the actor and photographer, Ian Byers-Gamber, were fully vaxxed and allowed to be in the room together.

Confinement, monologue, the labor of the elaborate selfie, the wiping and spraying away of disease fairies in a near panicked quest to be known inside a national mood of psychological upheaval, of revolution, grief, and economic despair, run through each piece where no hope is proffered, and things are not okay. The characters in these films are victims and perpetrators. Their hatred and self-hatred are closely knit. Their desire for power is linked with perceived and real powerlessness. They hide inside a sense of powerlessness as camouflage or use it to attack or melt away. 

 I ask myself why I make artworks that, although meant to be entertaining, contain such poisonous matter. Do they reinscribe, retraumatize, repulse? Yes. And, yes, they are autobiographical. They are culled from aspects of my own violent nature and from witnessing and experiencing normalized violence. 

Thus, I would answer the question of why make violent films in a violent culture just as I answer when asked why a production about white supremacy has so many white people in it, or why a play about misogyny has so many men in it. I would say it’s our job to look at ourselves. Are our truths, dirty and gnarled, so offensive that we can’t look? If we can’t, why do we make projections called films or cathartic rituals called theater? 

In these artistic endeavors, Life is embodied and presented as effigy, as plaything, as emetic. Embodied art forms are inherently dangerous, because they incite and foment emotion so that we can lose our shit, mop it up, and carry on. At their best, these art forms make us confront ideas and feelings we know but can’t speak. They are jagged incisions into our being, records of our existence, ugly and transformative.

Special thanks to Dena Beard, Candice Lin, Hope Svenson, Mark Allen and Emily Joyce, Tim Reid, Chelsea Rector, Roz Naimi, Nic Gaby, Neha Choksi, Mathew Timmons, Sofia Benito, Aubree Lynn, Nina Caussa, Trulee Hall, Brian Getnick, Patrick Ballard, Faddah Steve Yuetsu Wolf, Kristina Faragher, Michael Goldwater, Anthony Russell, Nikii Henry, Bryatt Bryant. Janet Sarbanes, Curt LeMieux, Miljohn Ruperto, Tracey Alexander, Josh Baer, José Luis Blondet, Emily Mast, Aram Moshayedi, Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Julia Johnson, David Fenster,  Laura Copelin, Edgar Fabián Friás, John Beer, Roz Crews, Srijohn Chowdhury, Adam Linder, Emily Lacy, Carmina Escobar, Patrick Kennelly, Michael Underdown, Douglas Green, Nicholas Hurwitz and Andrew Waddell, Amanda Horowitz, BW Grant Barnes, Coleman Stevenson, the Hartman, Nilson, and Napoli families, and everyone who volunteered or donated to “The Dope Elf.”

Very special thanks to Josephine Guidry.

These films are presented in loving memory of Haruko Tanaka, Mark Rucker, Doran George, Randy Paulos, Mario Gardner, and Simone Gad.

“The Dope Elf” was commissioned by The Lab with support from Yale Union, The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Pomona College Faculty Research Grant, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the FCA Covid-19 Bridge Fund.

Asher Hartman is a transgender writer, director, and maker of live performances. His works, which combine strategies of theater and performance art, grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis.  He is the founder and chief beneficiary of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of artist-actors for whom he has written since 2010. He was, is, and will forever be, half of the performative duo Krystal Krunch (with Haruko Tanaka), who taught intuition-building to artists, activists, and interested others. Recent theatrical works include “The Dope Elf,” Yale Union, Portland, Oregon (2019), “Lost Privilege Company'' in Archive Fever: Lost Words, Buried Voices as part of USC’s Visions and Voices series and Pieter Performance Space (2018); “Sorry, Atlantis, Or Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge'' at Machine Project, LA (2017); “Mr. Akita,'' performed at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, (2017), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2017) and the Tang Museum, New York (2015); and “The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance,'' LACMA (2016).

Gawdafful National Theater is a loose cabal of highly trained, strongly gifted actor-artists-insects committed to making complex, poetic, crass, and finely crafted theater. Through the rarified magic of "gawdafful" (high class god-awful), we risk confounding, disorienting, and piquing audiences while insisting on intellectual rigor, exploration, and emotional depth. Gawdafful is devoted to the beautiful, the ugly, the out of line, the old and awkward in theater and its traditions, while inviting in ideas from performance and intuitive practices. We are interdisciplinary, intergenerational, architecturally minded, sensual beings, with a deep love for expansive performance.

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