Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Outlaw.
Hi Paul, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’m originally from Manhattan. I moved to Los Angeles 25 years ago this coming September to move in together with Ray, who at that time had been my boyfriend for about eight years. Ray, who’s from Germany, was living in San Diego, where I wasn’t interested in living, so we chose LA as a “compromise” location. I’m a performer, and my work was mainly experimental theater and music. I thought I would explore more mainstream opportunities here in film and television. Still, we both were a bit skeptical about LA, which is really nothing like San Diego, New York or Berlin, where I was living when we met. But we had the great fortune to find a place that we loved on our first house-hunting trip to the city—a bungalow in Silver Lake that we could afford to buy (1998 prices!) and where we’ve been living ever since. We got married in 2013.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It took me about ten years to fully embrace Los Angeles as home. I spent the first five years or so meeting casting directors, signing with agents, auditioning—all the things that an “actor” is supposed to do. But the jobs I was going out for—and even booking—had nothing to do with my real interests as an artist and human being. During this period, I auditioned for a dance theater company (Rosanna Gamson/World Wide) that happened to be looking for a bilingual (German-English) African American performer; the company was doing the kind of work I had been doing for years and not expected to find in LA. Working with Rosanna—on and off for more than two decades now—was my entree into LA’s performance scene. I stopped pursuing mainstream gigs around 2003.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I trained as an actor at NYU Tisch, but am more comfortable describing myself as a multidisciplinary performing artist. The central themes of my artistic practice are the constructs of race and sexual identity and how violence has haunted them throughout Euro-American history. Under the banner of OutlawPlay, I’m proud to have created (or co-created) ten solo theater works and performances. Recent collaborations and projects have been presented locally by LACMA, MOCA, REDCAT, The Getty Villa, Boston Court Pasadena, ONE Archives and Los Angeles Performance Practice; nationally by The Lab (San Francisco) and Yale Union (Portland, OR); and internationally by the Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin) and GES-2/V-A-C Foundation (Moscow).
In addition, I’ve appeared at national and international festivals such as TBA/Time-Based Art Festival (Portland, OR), Queerweek 22 (Berlin), Jakarta Biennale, Madness and the Arts World Festival (Toronto), Sternzeichen II (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), Blacktino Queer Performance (Northwestern University), Out on the Edge (Boston) and the Fringe Festivals in San Francisco and New York.
In Berlin, I was the lyricist and lead vocalist for several bands, including a brief stint with the legendary post-punk constellation Die Haut. I’m a featured vocalist on SPLENDOR AND MISERY (2016), the second full-length album released on Sub Pop Records/Deathbomb Arc by noise hip-hop trio clipping.
I’ve been awarded a COLA (City of Los Angeles) Individual Artist Fellowship, two Lincoln City Fellowships, two Ucross Foundation artist residencies, and grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Center for Cultural Innovation and the Dramatists Guild Foundation, among others.
Last but not least, before I moved back to New York from Berlin, I played the title role in Pepe Danquart’s SCHWARZFAHRER, which won an Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Film and has been screened at festivals all over the world and viewed millions of times online. I occasionally get invited to schools to discuss the making of the film and my experiences as a Black man living in Berlin in the ‘80s and ’90s.
What are your plans for the future?
Even though I haven’t lived full-time in Berlin for a while, I still spend several months there every year and consider it my part-time home. When I was there last fall, the first version of a new theatrical text I’m working on was read as part of a queer performance festival at the Maxim Gorki Theater; I’m hoping to expand the bilingual script and get a production mounted in Berlin in the next few years.
But next season at REDCAT, an evening-length project that has been in development since before the start of the pandemic—BBC (BIG BLACK COCKROACH), inspired by Kafka and Greek mythology and tackling America in the 2020s—will finally have its premiere.
And there are a couple of other stage and film projects that I’m feeling too superstitious about to mention yet.
Contact Info:
- Website: outlawplay.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/outlawplay
- Other: https://linktr.ee/OutlawPlay
Image Credits
Joachim Gern, Deanna Hubartt, Vanessa Crocini, Ray Busmann, Michael Palma Photography (courtesy of Los Angeles Performance Practice)
