“Before he died, Quentin used to say to me: ‘Ms. Arcade, I’m going, you’re staying. I feel sorry for you,’” she said in a raspy English accent, to bursts of laughter from the audience at Joe’s. “But he also said to me, ‘Not to worry, Ms. Arcade. Time is kind to the nonconformist.’”

The film, An Englishman in New York, which was shot almost entirely in New York this past September, is a follow-up to the acclaimed 1975 TV movie The Naked Civil Servant, so named for the autobiography that catapulted the flamboyant, openly gay and sometimes controversial Crisp—he once infamously dismissed AIDS as a “fad”—to fame in 1968 at the age of 59. It picks up in the late ’70s when Crisp moved from London to the Lower East Side, where he was embraced by the arty downtown luminaries of the day, not least of all by Ms. Arcade, who became one of his closest friends toward the end of his life. Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon plays Ms. Arcade in the movie.

Ms. Arcade, whose real name is Susana Carmen Ventura, has had a long and accomplished (if under-noted) career—or, to use the word Ms. Arcade might prefer, “vocation.” She was a teenage superstar in Andy Warhol’s Factory; has written and directed 10 original performance pieces, including her landmark 1990 sex and censorship communiqué, BITCH!DYKE!FAGHAG!WHORE!, and 2002’s anti-Giuliani rant, New York Values; and she’s performed in more than 30 cities worldwide, from Rio to Sydney to Vienna. Upcoming projects include a three-week run of a revitalized BITCH!DYKE!FAGHAG!WHORE! in San Francisco, and a new full-length show called Longing Lasts Longer, which will premiere in Frankfurt on Dec. 5. Needless to say, age hasn’t slowed her down.

Still, after four decades working in New York as a full-time artist, she still doesn’t earn a living here, hence her frequent jaunts to perform in other time zones. (What sounds ideal to us is work for others, apparently!) It seems like all the local bookings are going to people 30 years her junior fresh out of art school, she said, and also noted that no mainstream publication in this city has ever published a proper profile of her. (Indeed, Ms. Arcade claims this one is the first, although several shorter articles about her have appeared in the pages of this newspaper over the years.) What gives?

“America is obsessed with potential and dismissive of accomplishment,” said Ms. Arcade, smoking an American Spirit in her Stanton Street apartment about a week before the Joe’s Pub gig. “I fought that fight for a really long time in New York, and it’s quite sad, but the truth is, there’s no work here, even though the audience really clamors to see me and other people like me. There’s no longer an artistic community. It’s been decimated by real estate interests and the suburbanization of the city. I don’t think you can say that too many times.”

WHICH ISN'T TO SAY that Ms. Arcade is contemplating packing up for a Florida condo. In fact, she’d probably tell you her best days are ahead, that getting older means getting smarter and wiser and better. “People have actually bought into the idea that you have this point of view by the time you’re 22 to 30, which is impossible,” she said, incredulously. “How can that be? Wisdom is accrued over time, and there are no shortcuts in self-development.” 

Perhaps that explains why Ms. Arcade quotes Quentin Crisp so often. “Quentin was a phenomenal role model,” she said. “When other people his age were ready to go into the nursing home, he came to New York and created a brand-new life for himself. So everything he said to me becomes of great value on a daily basis.”

She first met Crisp (real name: Denis Charles Pratt) on the corner of Second Avenue and Seventh Street one February afternoon in 1982 when he was 72 years old. A few years later, she saw him sitting by himself at a going-away party for Holly Woodlawn—the transgender actress with whom Ms. Arcade shared the screen in the 1971 Paul Morrissey-Andy Warhol film, Women in Revolt—and went over to say hello. A few weeks after that, Ms. Arcade was at the Limelight (oh the ’80s!), and once again, there was Crisp, sitting by his lonesome at the bar. She decided to strike up a conversation, and they hit it off immediately. Later that evening, Michael Musto, the Village Voice gossip columnist, stopped Ms. Arcade on her way to the ladies room and told her she was the only person he’d ever heard Crisp, known for his curt, Oscar Wilde-like one-liners, “have a real conversation with.”

“She brought something out in Quentin,” Mr. Musto said. “He really responded to her.”

After that, Penny Arcade and Quentin Crisp were inseparable. “It was each of our last big fag/fag hag relationships,” she said. They started performing together in 1992, when they began working on what would become a performance piece called The Last Will and Testament of Quentin Crisp, footage of which Ms. Arcade and one of her longtime collaborators, Steve Zehentner, are currently editing for a DVD that will be released by Christmas, Crisp’s birthday. (He would have been 100 this year.)

On Nov. 21, 1999, Crisp died in Manchester, England, at the age of 90. It was the same day An Evening With Quentin Crisp, a new one-man show that had temporarily lured him back to England, was to have opened. He and Ms. Arcade, who thought he was in no condition to travel (she said he had congestive heart failure, prostate cancer and a major hernia), had argued about his accepting the booking, a scene Richard Laxton, the director of An Englishman in New York, re-creates when John Hurt, reprising his role as Crisp, which he played in The Naked Civil Servant, tells Cynthia Nixon about an offer he’s had to tour the U.K.

“She looks absolutely devastated,” Mr. Laxton said of Ms. Nixon’s performance as Penny Arcade, “because he’s quite old and fragile and she doesn’t want him to go, and in that scene you really get a sense of how much she cares for him and how much he means to her. It’s very moving.”

As Ms. Arcade tells it, she called Crisp the day he left for England. “I want to say goodbye to you forever now in case you die in Manchester. I have been very fond of you over these many years. Would you send me a sign?” she recalled saying to him. The next night, Ms. Arcade was at a wedding reception at the loft of “dermatologist to the stars” David Colbert when, spookily enough, his enormous TV suddenly turned on, and there on the screen was an episode of Charlie Rose featuring Quentin Crisp. Two days later, Ms. Arcade returned to her apartment following Sunday brunch to find a message on her answering machine from a New York Times reporter.

“Don’t you know?” the reporter asked when Ms. Arcade, unaware that Crisp had passed, called him back. “He died last night.”

“I’ve always taken that as a concession from Quentin, who argued that death ends everything, to let me know that there is something beyond ordinary existence,” she said.

Asked how she felt about the film, which Mr. Laxton said would be screened in New York following its U.K. debut on ITV, Ms. Arcade said she’s optimistic. “It will certainly make more people curious about what it is I do,” she said.

In the meantime, she’s focused on preparing her new one-woman show, on which she’s collaborating with Mr. Zehentner and visual artist Jasmine Hirst, for its German premiere in a few weeks. Inspired by Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice, it explores “forlornness and loss and longing,” she said. One of the characters is a woman alone in a hotel room in Turkey, “losing her mind because her husband’s left her”; another’s a cabaret singer who’s “kind of a Giulietta Messina character that’s a little bit of a sad clown and a little bit of an off-kilter Marlene Dietrich.”

Like Crisp before her, Ms. Arcade said she expects to be performing until the end of her days.

“In Quentin, I could see what the possibilities for aging were,” she said, looking at a picture taped to her kitchen wall of her and Crisp from a 1993 issue of London’s Sunday Telegraph Magazine. “Also through Quentin,” she continued, “I could really understand that as you get older, things become clearer. When biology loses its stranglehold on you and sort of tosses you to the side, if you have a rigorous inquiry into what it is to be alive, you can really examine the world, you know? It’s really fun.”

jpompeo@observer.com

"stately homo of England," who died in 1999 at the age of 90, back with us

again.

"I'm ready for death," he liked to say, "but I just won't

die." And that's certainly turned out to be true. His reincarnation in Resident Alien at the New York Theater

Workshop happily continues what he drolly described as "the bad luck" of his

longevity. Brought back to miraculous, uncanny life by the British actor Bette

Bourne-who perhaps I ought to mention is a man, what with the Bette and all-the

show was conceived for the Bush Theatre in London with Crisp's full

cooperation. But, alas, he didn't live to see it.

Having vowed never to return to England after emigrating to

New York in 1981, he went back to his homeland at the end of his life to see

the brilliant Mr. Bourne impersonating him in London (while he impersonated

himself on tour in his own renowned one-man show, An Evening with Quentin Crisp ). But he died in Manchester. I know

the feeling. For I was born there. What a fate! To be Quentin Crisp and breathe

one's last in Manchester!

He loved the freedom and glamour of New York, though he

lived in extravagantly dusty squalor in a cluttered boarding-house room on East

Third Street. He treated the dump as his dressing room, the outside world as a

stage. You could see him from time to time strolling along the East Village

mean streets in full makeup, his hair bluish lavender, perhaps wearing an

elegant theatrical cloak with a rakish fedora, his flamboyant silk scarf

knotted in a Stars-and-Stripes diamante brooch. He didn't give a damn, except

about appearances. He was his own invention, and he was that near-forgotten

thing or being -a bohemian, a relic

from another age, an alien noncomformist.

The one time I met him was at a buffet table after the

première of a forgettable film that he was seeing "in order to eat." He was

unapologetically effeminate rather than fossilized campy. He possessed the

stylishness of a gentleman. He was charmingly, sweetly civil . (The memoir that made him famous was entitled The Naked Civil Servant .) He was

eccentric, good company, then and now.

Resident Alien is

directed by Mike Bradwell and written by the British dramatist Tim Fountain,

based on the life, writings and "musings" of Crisp. He had a talent to muse.

When we first meet Bette Bourne's reincarnation of him, he's watching a small

portable television between his legs in bed. "I must wean myself off Miss

Winfrey," he tells us, adding in a sly aside: "It used to be thought that you

had to have talent to achieve fame, but television has changed all that …."

The piece is set in Quentin Crisp's East Village hovel, a

memorable re-creation by designer Neil Patel, and we're unprepared for this

glimpse into decrepit domesticity. Crisp appears to exist in a slummy,

Beckettian half-life, where he endures at 90 under "mouse arrest." (A surly

neighbor drops dead mice through his letter box like greeting cards.) He's

awaiting the arrival of a couple from London, a Mr. Brown and a Mr. Black-"a

most unfortunate conjunction of names"-who will record his thoughts on "how to

be happy" in exchange for lunch. He is a man denying his own solitude, who

checks to see if the phone is on the hook as if testing his own pulse. The

phone is his lifeline. Yet he answers it guardedly. "Oh yeees ?" he says, apparently fearing the worst.

In Mr. Bourne's talented

hands, the man he surely knew could easily become a tragic figure clinging onto

the fame game. He reveals that Crisp's left hand is now paralyzed and that his

frail body suffered from eczema-"swathed," Crisp tells us typically, "in these

wretched bandages to prevent me from clawing myself until the blood gushes out

of my wounds and down the stairs with a gurgling sound." But Mr. Bourne, who

has played Lady Bracknell in The Importance

of Being Earnest (so did Quentin Crisp), is a wonderfully understated

comedy performer best known here as the creator of the queer music-hall drag

troupe, Bluelips. He's a perfect foil for Crisp's dry scattershot epigrams:

"Politics are not for people, they are for politicians."

"Never get into a narrow double bed with a wide single man."

"Never desire to be anyone's equal."

"My appearance is simply a leaflet thrust into the hands of

astonished bystanders …."

On Joan Crawford: "She was radioactive with belief in

herself."

On the proposed sainthood of Eva Peron: "A double fox stole,

ankle strap shoes and eternal life, nobody's had that before."

On fellatio: "Does anyone

want to take someone's penis into their mouth? It's so disgusting I couldn't

bear it. Ohhh! Marlene Dietrich said that you have to let them put it in,

otherwise they won't come back. Isn't that wonderful? She wanted praise, not

sex. Sex smudges your makeup."

He deflected criticism

deftly: "Someone wrote to me recently and said, 'You are a sad, lonely,

embittered old queen who isn't interested in anything that interests anyone

else,' and I thought that's right." He was a likable, lightweight sage who

offended humorless people, including gay activists. He opposed separatism: "The

trouble with gay reservations is that they breed a terrible uniformity." He was

challenging about the romantic canonization of "sordid" Oscar Wilde and his

"bad poetry" of Reading Gaol: "How can love be used in a case where the names

of dozens of young men had been read out that Mr. Wilde only met in Braille?"

He was a patriot for

himself-for the individual against the party line, for the Self against the

wind, on the long and unsafe road. In his youth-we forget now-he was a

revolutionary in his gentle fashion. When homosexuality was at last made legal

in England in the 1960's, people said it would make a great difference to him.

"I said it would make no difference to me," he responded. "No one pointed at me

and said, 'Look at him, he's illegal.' They said, 'He's effeminate.' That was

my sin."

The English, he added, don't even like effeminate women .

Resident Alien and

Bette Bourne are giving a lovely, affectionate tribute to Quentin Crisp, one of

the last individuals on earth and, we assume, in heaven.