Out of Character: Rants, Raves, and Monologues from Today's Top Performance Artists

by Eric Bogosian (Editor), Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray

Presents a sampling of thirty-two monologue performances from the artists of P.S. 122, including Spaulding Gray, John Leguizamo, and Laurie Anderson

Genres: Nonfiction, Humor

319 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1996

About the author

Eric Bogosian is an American actor, playwright, monologuist, novelist, and historian. Descended from Armenian-American immigrants, he grew up in Watertown and Woburn, Massachusetts, and attended the University of Chicago and Oberlin College. His numerous plays include Talk Radio (1987) and subUrbia (1994), which were adapted to film by Oliver Stone and Richard Linklater, respectively, with Bogosian starring in the former.
Bogosian has appeared in plays, films, and television series throughout his career. His television roles include Captain Danny Ross in Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2006–2010), Lawrence Boyd on Billions (2017–2018), and Gil Eavis on Succession (since 2018). He also starred as Arno in the Safdie brothers' film Uncut Gems (2019). He has also been involved in New York City ballet production, and has written several novels as well as the historical nonfiction Operation Nemesis (2015).

Reviews

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for A Trace of Panic
By David Cale

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was pretty good, except that the formatting was a little off putting. I found the text hard to read (a lot of it was just huge chunks with no indentations and unusual punctuation that appeared sporadically throughout).

Pros:
The actual content was funny, moving, and packed an occasional emotional punch.

There were little Q&A's at the beginning of each artist's section. They were questions like: favorite performance, most terrifying performance, favorite props, favorite quotes, etc...

Cons:
Formatting was weird

Some of these pieces were probably better to see PERFORMED and not read. They didn't translate well on paper. So some of the sections fell flat for me, others were great.

Overall, I would definitely recommend reading this book. I really enjoyed it! Oh, and if you're a William Burroughs fan one of the pieces in here gives a shout-out to him that's pretty funny.