Almost ten years ago Lisa Buscani packed up her bags and moved to New York to become a nun–onstage, at least.
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The chasm between fringe performer and star in a commercial hit like Late Nite Catechism seems wide, but Buscani credits touring with the show in part for her newest performance work, Solid Citizen, which examines how difficult it can be to do the right thing. “I’ve been a professional Catholic for the last nine years,” Buscani says. “I don’t practice–it’s very important to point that out. But there are certain aspects of the church that I really do like. The church is like Capitol Hill. There are people on the right who are really stodgy and really conservative, and then people on the left who are extremely radical in ways that I could never think about being radical about social justice. In trying to be a good person, what are the pros and cons when you get involved?” The pieces in Solid Citizen range from “Feeding Big LaQuita,” a poem about working with abused children that appeared in her 1992 collection Jangle, to newer work about her experiences as a member of a grand jury and as a witness to the public abuse of women.
But not enough money to buy a place in New York, a situation that in part prompted Buscani’s move back to Chicago last November. “No regular person can buy a home in New York City,” she says. “And I was out on the road so much that being based in New York just didn’t make any sense costwise. And my parents are getting older, which is the same reason a lot of people have for moving back home.” A veteran of the Neo-Futurists’ Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and a 1992 National Poetry Slam champion, Buscani also found it difficult to do solo work in New York. “I was told by one venue owner, ‘We don’t really want to do solo any more. I think that genre is tapped out.’ There is solo work in New York, but it is very, very, very necessary for things to be commercial there.”
