Up Your Ass is a radical feminist play written in 1965 by Valerie Solanas about a young prostitute. The full title of the play is Up Your Ass, or, From the Cradle to the Boat, or, The Big Suck, or, Up from the Slime. According to writer James Martin Harding, the play is "based on a plot about a woman who 'is a man-hating hustler and panhandler' and who ... ends up killing a man."
Plot
Bongi Perez, a hustler, panhandler and lesbian prostitute, encounters various characters on the street as she goes about her day.
Rediscovery
Up Your Ass was rediscovered in 1999 and produced in 2000 by George Coates Performance Works in San Francisco. The copy Warhol had lost was found in a trunk of lighting equipment owned by Billy Name. Coates learned about the rediscovered manuscript while at an exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum marking the 30th anniversary of the shooting. Coates turned the piece into a musical with an all-female cast. Coates consulted with Solanas's sister, Judith, while writing the piece, and sought to create a "very funny satirist" out of Solanas, not just showing her as Warhol's attempted assassin. Up Your Ass remained unpublished until published as an ebook in 2014.
Reception
The play was first performed in 2000 at the George Coates Performance Works theater in San Francisco. Coates turned the piece into a musical with an all-female cast. Coates consulted with Solanas's sister, Judith, while writing the piece, and sought to create a "very funny satirist" out of Solanas. This version of the play was called "fundamentally flawed but farcical fun". Writer James Harding describes Up Your Ass as more a "provocation than ... a work of dramatic literature" and "rather adolescent and contrived."
Relation to Solanas's attempted murders
In 1967, Solanas encountered Warhol outside his studio, The Factory, and asked him to produce this play. He accepted the script for review, told Solanas it was "well typed", and promised to read it. According to Factory lore, Warhol, whose films were often shut down by the police for obscenity, thought the script was so pornographic that it must have been a police trap. Solanas contacted Warhol about the script, and was told that he had lost it. He also jokingly offered her a job at the Factory as a typist. Insulted, Solanas demanded money for the lost manuscript. Instead, Warhol paid her $25 to appear in his film I, a Man. Actress Sylvia Miles said that Solanas appeared at the Actor's Studio looking for Lee Strasberg on June 3, 1968, asking to leave her play for him. Miles said that Solanas "had a different look, a bit tousled, like somebody whose appearance is the last thing on her mind." Miles told Solanas that Strasberg would not be in until the afternoon. Miles said that she accepted a copy of the play from Solanas and then "shut the door because I knew she was trouble. I didn't know what sort of trouble, but I knew she was trouble." Breanne Fahs records that Solanas then traveled to producer Margo Feiden's residence in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as Solanas believed that Feiden would be willing to produce her play. As related to Fahs, Solanas talked to Feiden for almost four hours, trying to convince her to produce the play and discussing her vision for a world without men. Throughout this time, Feiden repeatedly refused to produce Solanas's play. According to Feiden, Solanas then pulled out her gun, and when Feiden again refused to commit to producing the play, Solanas responded, "Yes, you will produce the play because I'll shoot Andy Warhol and that will make me famous and the play famous, and then you'll produce it." As she was leaving Feiden's residence, Solanas handed Feiden a copy of her play. Later that day while Warhol was on the phone, Solanas fired at him three times. Her first two shots missed, but the third went through both lungs, his spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus. She then shot art criticMario Amaya in the hip. She tried to shoot Fred Hughes, Warhol's manager, in the head, but her gun jammed. Hughes asked her to leave, which she did, leaving behind a paper bag with her address book on a table. Warhol was taken to Columbus–Mother Cabrini Hospital, where he underwent a successful five-hour operation. At her arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court she denied shooting Warhol because he wouldn't produce her play but said "it was for the opposite reason", that "he has a legal claim on my works."
