BY IT’S VERY TITLE- The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures-we know that Tony Kushner, wunderkind extraordinaire, is presenting a play dense with ideas and extravagant language. Kushner does not shy away from these charges, which have also been applied to his outsize masterpiece Angels in America.
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PART OF a spate of gay-themed plays on the boards in New York this season, two from Off-Broadway present contrasting approaches to the recent history of same-sex male love. The Temperamentals by Jon Marans dramatizes early activism: the creation in Los Angeles of the Mattachine Society by Communist organizer Harry Hay and his then lover, costume designer Rudi Gernreich, and a small circle of friends. The story unfolds in the early 1950’s with America moving from the war years into the McCarthy Era. The Pride, on the other hand, a first play by Alexi Kaye Campbell, is a British import that views the gay present through the lens of the past. It features two different male couples in London in 1958 and 2008; each pair must come to terms with the personal price of gay relations. In 1958, the context is one of social repression; in 2008, one of sexual and social liberation.
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ONE THING that becomes entirely clear as you read Herbert Keyser’s latest book, Geniuses of the American Musical Theatre: The Composers and Lyricists, is that the author is a font of knowledge about song on stage. As his bio tells us, the book is based on the lectures Keyser delivers to passengers on cruise ships. Even if the author is conspicuously heterosexual (his bio lists a loving wife, six children, and ten grandchildren), there’s something innately gay about a book on the topic of musical theatre.
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Reviews of Truman Capote? Enfant Terrible, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong, Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage, and Shuck by Daniel Allen Cox.
MoreTHE IDEA that madness brings you closer to God and to the creative spirit seems a holdover from the 1970’s, arguably our last “romantic” era. Today, the idea and the era are both quite dead. I’m reminded of this fact by the current revival of Peter Shaffer’s Equus, which pits Apollonian and Dionysian forces against each other
MoreFOUR FROTHY VIGNETTES, perhaps more properly defined as character studies, are strung together in this new comedy by Paul Rudnick, which I saw in a preview performance in New York. While AIDS and 9/11 are sometimes hovering on the periphery, sometimes presented in startling parallels, the author of Jeffrey (1993) and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998) keeps the tone light and the jokes rapid-fire.
MoreTHERE’S A SCENE in Alan Ball’s All That I Will Ever Be, as staged by director Serge Seiden last March at Washington’s Studio Theatre, that’s rather startling. When the lights come up, we see a hustler pounding his client’s ass so hard that the chair on which the young man lies spread-eagled keeps sliding across the stage in fits and starts till it stops, with his orgasm, just at the edge of the platform.
More“I WANT to kill myself sometimes when I think I’m the only person in the world and the part of me that feels that way is trapped inside this body that only bumps into other bodies without ever connecting with the only person in the world trapped inside of them,” Johnny agonizes in Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1987). “We gotta connect. We just have to. Or we die.”
MoreDAME EDNA EVERAGE is the only Tony Award-winning star who quizzes the audience and insults what they wear. Galumphing about the stage in a sensationally outré gown, purple hair and rhinestone-winged glasses, she razzes latecomers and asks them to identify themselves.
MoreWHAT BRINGS AUDIENCES to the theater is “the expectation that the miracle of communication will take place,” explains a protester to the board of a city arts complex in “Hidden Agendas,” a one-act play that Terrence McNally wrote in 1994 in response to government-inspired attempts to censor an exhibition of the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. “Words, sounds, gestures, feelings, thoughts! The things that connect us and make us human. The hope for that connection!” The purpose of theater, McNally says in a subsequent interview, is to “find out” and explore “what connects us” as human beings.
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