John Fleck’s A Snowball’s Chance in Hell (1992) was a response to the experience of being thrust into the spotlight of controversy as a result of the defunding of his previous work Blessed Are All the Little Fishes (1989) by the NEA. Fascinatingly, neither of these works has ever been performed in New York City. For this program, Fleck hosts a screening of documentation of these notorious works and discusses plans for a potential future premiere of A Snowball’s Chance in Hell in New York City.

Blessed Are All the Little Fishes reveals Fleck’s attempts to grapple with the two biggest factors in his childhood: alcoholism and Catholicism. “It’s the story of this man’s binge, which is also society’s binge—man at his lowest point of alienation,” says Fleck, who, in the course of the show, dresses as a mermaid, urinates on stage, hacks up a dead goldfish, talks about bisexuality, and makes a toilet bowl into an altar by pasting a photo of Christ onto the lid. For his drunken character, Fleck says that the toilet is “the center of the universe, a place of miraculous visitation.”

Part Beckettian nightmare, part channel-surfing mindfuck, A Snowball’s Chance in Hellhumorously/feverishly addresses the existential horror of trying to sustain oneself on mediated realities while lamenting the impossibility of ever being able to escape such mediation, foreshadowing today’s anxieties around the death of privacy (e.g., social media, smart phones, airport security, internet shopping, etc.).

John Fleck is a performer, writer, and stage, television, and film actor based in Los Angeles. His past body of self scripted solo work includes: Mad Women, Johnny’s Got a Gun, Nothin’ Beats Pussy, Mud in your Eye, Dirt, me, A Snowball’s Chance in Hell, Blessed are all the Little Fishes, PsychoOpera, and I Got the He-be-she-be’s. A sampling of past performance venues includes: the ICA (London), ICA (Boston), the Public Theater, the Guggenheim Museum, Performance Space 122, LaMama Theater, Dixon Place, and Joe’s Pub (NYC), the Getty Museum, Cal Plaza, and MOCA (Los Angeles). Recent theater credits include: Tobacco Road (LaJolla Playhouse), She Stoops to Comedy(Evidence Room, LA), A Perfect Wedding (Kirk Douglas Theater, LA), Applause (Reprise,UCLA), Noises Off (Cape Playhouse, Dennis, MA), On the Jump (South Coast Rep),Small Craft Warnings, Cringe, The Berlin Circle (Evidence Room, LA), The Mystery of Irma Vep (Tiffany Theater, LA) & Tony Kushner’s adaptation of The Illusion (LATC), andThe Granny (The Old Globe, San Diego). A sampling of TV/film work includes: True Blood, Criminal Minds, Bones, Weeds, The Closer, Carnivale, StarTrek Enterprise, NYPD Blue, Murder One, Seinfeld, PBS’s Tales of the City. Feature films include: On-Line, Primary Suspect, Falling Down, and Waterworld, amongst others, which enable him financial fluidity to create his, not necessarily for-profit, performance art.

Presented in conjunction with “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.”

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