Lola Pashalinski is an award-winning actor and playwright whose career spans more than 50 years with roles in stage, film, and television. She was a founding member of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. In that role, she worked with the company from its establishment in 1967 until 1980. She appeared in 17 of the company’s productions, including as Lola Lola in Corn (1973), Brunhilde in Der Ring Gott Farblonjet (1977), and Miss Cubbidge in Bluebeard (1970).
“It was a queer theater whose absurdity propagated the lowest of low comedy,” she quips with delight. “It was a display case of costume camp, a burlesque of pointed parody and a rabble of clowns and fools. A breeding ground for the likes of Lola Pashalinski. How did this lost bourgeois from Queens, this escapee from the closeted Fifties, ever get involved with the Ridiculous?”
Charles Ludlam was a particular influence on her: “Charles was a great master of theater. He would collage plays together. Anything – comic books, movie dialogue, hundreds of hundreds of sources, as well as improvisation for actors on overheard dialogue on the street. We got a very peculiar style of acting. And we loved it.”
Pashalinski’s film work includes roles in I Shot Andy Warhol, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Sweet and Lowdown, and Ironweed. Her television work spans decades, with roles in shows including The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, One Life to Live, and The Equalizer.
Pashalinski won Obie Awards for Distinguished Performance by an Actress for her performances in the Ridiculous Theatrical Company productions of Corn (1973) and Der Ring Gott Farblonjet (1977), as well as for her performance as Gertrude Stein in Gertrude & Alice: A Likeness to Loving (2000).
She and her partner Linda Chapman wrote and performed in Gertrude & Alice: A Likeness to Loving, based on the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude & Alice toured Great Britain as well as at colleges throughout the United States. Pashalinski has performed in dozens of shows nationally and Off-Broadway, and made her Broadway debut in Fortune’s Fool, which starred Frank Langella and the late Alan Bates.
Pashalinski cheerfully describes herself as a performer “born with the soul of a baggy-pants comedian,” something that began at Ridiculous. But it never kept her from taking risks as an actor, including often playing the voluptuous sexpot diving into voracious heterosexual sex .
“There was something wickedly satisfying about being the most heterosexual people on stage you had ever seen in your life. Heterosexuality should be so much fun. I pushed myself to bring out the feminine side in me in relation to a male. I could do it on stage. It wasn’t part of my real life, but it was part of me as a person. Part of an actor’s bag of tricks is that you have to bring out something from inside you that maybe you can’t find any expression for in real life.”
See the link below for a full interview and bio done by Casey Childs, Sally Plass, and the folks at Primary Stages:
Primary Stages Off Broadway Oral History Interview
Further Reading: Interviews, Photos, Scripts and Articles – click here
Special thanks to Primary Stages and Casey Childs, Sally Plath, John Yarbrough, The Entertainment Community Fund, Joan Jeffri, Jac Ford, Traci DiGesu, Justin Goldberg, and Sarah Feinmark, the Jody Parker Fund, Tulsa Community Foundation, and Sandra W. Parker Archival Fellowship, Youth Arts New York, Robert Croonquist, Linda Chapman, and Vivian Stein, Michal Gamily and Café La MaMa’s Coffeehouse Chronicles, Leandro Katz, the Pick Up Performance Company, LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project and Alyce Dissette.
