"Our first program (true to our formula of only doing one-act plays by poets) consisted of Loves Labor, an eclogue by Frank O'Hara, Three Travellers Watch a Sunrise by Wallace Stevens (which nobody bothered to get permission for) and Murder Cake by me.

Jimmy Waring had already directed a version of Murder Cake at the Judson Poets Theatre while I was in California, and he still had most of this cast an a pretty good idea of what he wanted to do. (My plays have no plot, or stage directions--they are "word scores" for a director to do with as s/he wills.) It had to be re-blocked, of course, needed a new set, and a new "Dante" character. [...]

In Three Travellers Watch a Sunrise Alan made the mistake of both directing and acting in the same work. The play's simplicity and genius was emphasized by a set by Peter Agostini--an elegant sculpture of a tree with a hanged man in the branches. The sculpture, and the words, carried the piece in spite of forgotten lines and other disasters.

But the pièce de résistance was Loves Labor by Frank O'Hara. In contrast to the small cast in my play and in Wallace Stevens', Frank seemed to require a cast of thousands. There was a screaming queen in a tiger skin playing a shpherd, with many dancers for his sheep; Freddie Herko in a black cape was Paris; John Vaccaro, slim and monocled, with a top hat, played Metternich, and no less a personage than the "great" freak show artist and drag queen Frankie Francine portrayed Venus. Alan cast and directed the play, and he did himself proud. There were moments when twenty or more people were cavorting separately on that little stage--a great demonstration of the harmony of chaos. And Frank had given us the entire Decline of the West in less than four typewritten pages of hilarious poetry.

Of course, many folks who had come along with us this far absolutely hated Loves Labor. Jimmy Waring was one. I had long, and earnest arguments with Jimmy about the merit of Frankie Francine's performance: Frankie could never remember a line, and whenever he had to speak he'd whip open his fan with a great flourish, his wig and tiara atremble, peer shortsightedly at the spot where he'd written those particular lines, and read them in a 1930s radio voice, pausing portentously after each line to refind his place." -- Diane di Prima. Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. New York: Viking, 2001.