When the writer and performance artist Anthony Hudson retired his drag clown character Carla Rossi in February — after more than 15 years performing everywhere from queer bars and movie theaters to theaters and the art world’s most prestigious galleries — it was a long time coming. 

Carla Rossi was born in art school, and Hudson is now 40. He told Willamette Week at the time that he’d done everything he felt he could do as Rossi, and wanted to reinvest his creative energy into a literary career. 

But in his new book, “Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances” (Northwestern University Press, 136 pages, $26), Hudson reveals how long he wanted Rossi to retire. The collection of scripts traces Hudson’s career from the first Trump administration circa 2016, to the hazy late pandemic period when COVID restrictions locked society down again, and a return to normalcy still seemed impossibly distant. 

Hudson’s debut title is taken from “Lamp Back,” a 2022 performance art video where Rossi — a trickster clown embodying the worst of white women from Lake Oswego — hamfistedly flubs her way through a land acknowledgment statement. But instead of acknowledging the Native American tribes which originally occupied the continent, Rossi offers not land back, but a lamp back. She asks in the video, “Shouldn’t that be enough?” 

Hudson tells Street Roots that, as a Native American, he once thought land acknowledgments were a sign of positive social change until he noticed a shift before the pandemic. He first noticed them coming from Canada and Australia around 2017–18, where government atrocities against Indigenous people are more widely acknowledged than in the United States.

“At first I thought (land acknowledgments) were cool, like, ‘This is a cool way to talk about the thing we’re not talking about,’ but then I saw them get diluted,” Hudson said. “I saw them get performed by white people — not being shared, performed. It became like a ritual to self-efface and perform this faux air of sincerity and concern and the idea of racial justice, while not giving up anything and just maintaining power and letting your expensive dance piece or play or artist talk or reading happen without directly referencing the problem. 

“Now I’ve seen land acknowledgments in SCRUFF and Sniffies profiles, and on white women’s social media posts about buying houses.”

Kate Bredeson, a Reed College theater professor, encouraged Hudson to write and arrange the book. She has taught students how to analyze scripts using Hudson’s work before it was published, and edited the “Lamp Back” anthology. Hudson’s writing is sharp, snarky and satirical. Without pandering to Gen Z slang, Hudson’s voice should appeal to young readers and thespians for his ability to lay bare social absurdities and failures of the political right and left with a hefty helping of jester’s privilege. Hudson pulls from an arsenal filled with decades of pop culture references, irreverently aiming them at the status quo and firing away. 

For instance, in “Girl With a Cigarette,” a Rossi performance as Moses Soyer’s 1968 painting of the same name at Portland Art Museum, Hudson evokes women, including Aretha Franklin — who died on Aug. 16, 2018, the day of Hudson’s performance — whose art channeled the age of angst Soyer’s smoker embodies. Hudson’s “Girl With a Cigarette” wasn’t afraid to call the Obama era’s social failures and political compromises what they were. 

Meanwhile, in “Looking for Tiger Lily,” Hudson’s autobiographical Two Spirit show, he and Rossi examine Native identity and pop culture representation, starting with NBC’s live 1990 televised production of “Peter Pan,” and winding through the offensive absurdity of Disney’s “Pocahontas,” the Land-o-Lakes butter mascot, government-imposed requirements of Native tribes like blood tests to prove Indigeneity, Hudson’s memories of growing up queer in ‘90s Keizer, and a 2018 incident where Hudson was harassed after right-wing media outlets made slanderous reports about a Drag Queen Story Hour where Rossi performed.  

“It is funny to see how every piece is in conversation with the last,” Hudson said of the book. “I did not know the book did that until we put the pieces together and started editing.” 

But as he notes in “Nobody’s Going to Fund This,” a so-called “monologue in pieces” written in 2020, “Tiger Lily” took an unexpected toll on Hudson. He didn’t realize, for example, how reliving painful moments like his grandmother’s death for years in a row would impact him. The pandemic forced him to reconsider his life and career. Though he realized he wanted to retire Rossi during the pandemic, Hudson kept performing in drag until 2025. 

After falling off of a platform in Jeffrey Gibson’s Venice Biennale exhibition in 2024 dressed as Rossi-as-video game character Lara Croft, Hudson realized he’d done all he wanted to do in drag. 

“I reached a point two or three years ago where I just want to be writing, and then I kept performing,” Hudson said. “Being able to step back and have this book out, it feels like it’s the ritual, the ceremony, a little graduation, it’s a little sad. It’s ‘Saved by the Bell: The New Class, Anthony Edition.’”

“Lamp Back” features only minor deviations from Hudson’s original script. This version of “Tiger Lily,” for instance, is based on a 2018 edit Hudson made based on how he chose his words onstage after several performances, while “A Tale as Old as Time; or, If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Plunge ‘Em” is a transcript of an improvised performance that also deviated from its planned script. The biggest change is to “Girl With a Cigarette,” which includes a comparatively lengthy homage to radical feminist Valerie Solanas, who infamously shot Andy Warhol (Hudson wrote a show about Solanas, which was canceled due to the pandemic).

“I can’t talk about 1968 and not talk about my idol, Valerie Solanas,” Hudson said. “There was a very, very, very small amount of George Lucas-ing special editions that happened. I had to drop a little CGI here and there, but no AI, thank God.” 

One reference stands out like a time capsule relic: the Department of War, which Hudson references in “Girl With a Cigarette” is not the current Department of Defense (which Trump officials refer to as the “Department of War”), but the pre-WWII version, which managed what is now the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Another reference is Hudson’s declaration that painting is dead, nearly a decade before artificial intelligence shook the art world’s foundations. Still another is Hudson’s longing to witness “times of great, forward-thinking liberalism and art and freedom and subsequent collapse,” such as Weimar Germany or when the Spirit of the ‘60s gave way to Richard Nixon. 

“I was always tantalized by those moments of extreme liberalism and freewheeling progress and explosive sexuality and melding, melting identities and all these things that happen in those moments of extreme freedom and progress right before the collapse,” Hudson said. “Unfortunately, the times I’m living through lack the pop culture or the fashion or the music or anything exciting from the eras that I loved that I thought I wanted to live through. There’s nothing exciting or liberally progressive about AI and an orange man that eats McDonald’s all day. I feel like I’m living through the collapse of the freewheeling world, but the dumbest, shittiest, most Happy Meal of them all.” 

Arranging his scripts into a book allows Hudson the opportunity to see someone else embody Rossi, whether they’re a student or a celebrity. Hudson says he wants Steve Buscemi to play Rossi in “Tiger Lily” alongside Hudson’s friend, actor Kenny Ray Ramos, to take over his narrator role. Hudson also dreams of an experiential theater production of his 2021 audio play “The Carlalogues,” which (mild spoiler) ends with Cher shooting the audience. 

“Original work is still out there, and people still want to see it, but we live in an anti-social, anti-human machine that is making us all poor and sick,” Hudson said. “Figuring out ways to make this more accessible for people who are figuring out the economy around things — nonprofits and funding just aren’t going to uphold the arts moving forward. We have to figure out other ways to turn art into community experiences, make them weird and special enough that people want to come and take a chance.” 

This autumn offers two chances to hear Hudson preview “Lamp Back” for readers. He will read from and discuss the book with filmmaker Thom Hilton at Powell’s City of Books on Monday, Oct. 19 in a free appearance. He will also return to PAM on Saturday, Nov. 7 to read “Girl With a Cigarette” with “Girl With a Cigarette” as himself. 

“We just need to up the novelty and produce the weird shit we otherwise wouldn’t get to see,” Hudson said. “I just keep going back to ‘Oh, Mary!’ That play is what it is because Cole (Escola) is so brilliant and because it is so unlike what you would see on Broadway. No one would go to a show expecting to see the First Lady, the wife of Lincoln, drinking a bucket of her own puke. That is something so special that people don’t get to see, and we’re just tired and inundated with the same bullshit memes, the same dead Internet, the same bot posts — it’s all just recirculated, recycled garbage stolen from a thousand people. But seeing something that’s truly weird and experimental and community-based, I think people still want that.”

This article appears in October 14, 2026.