MAY 1976

through eight Midwestern and Southern states, performing professional children's theater with a group called the Robin Hood Players. The tour took him through Mobile, Alabama, which he regards as the most charming city he has ever seen and to which he dreams of eventually retiring.

The Playhouse Square Association's decision to produce a musical version of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland." called Alice At The Palace occasioned Tavcar's introduction to Playhouse Square

and to most Cleveland theatergoers now familiar with his work. He auditioned for general casting for the show in September, 1974, and succeeded in landing three roles: the Caterpillar, the March Hare and the unforgettable Queen of Hearts. Alice played for thirteen. profitable weeks. Tavcar was on his way. guesting in the Cleveland State presentation of Marat/Sade, as de Sade, in February of 1975. Simultaneous summer work with Playhouse Square's El Grande de CocaCola and Hunting Valley's A Litthe Night Music followed; and then, as must fall into each life, Berlin To Broadway. The revue, based on the music of Kurt Weill, was admittedly the most delicious turkey ever served at Playhouse Square. Tavcar left the Association as an employee soon after that and, until the night of April 13th, limited his theatrical engagements to guest performances with the Cleveland State drama depart-

ment.

HG: We've talked at length about how gay people regard the theater, and about how everyone general treats the question of gays' special affinity for the theater. Let's turn to the theater's reaction toward this, and theater's approach to homosexuality as a dramatic issue.

You've remarked that none of

the student acting company at Cleveland State is gay, contrary to the general average. Do you think that the CSU drama department is reacting specifically against the gay mystique in the theater and making it exceptionally difficult for gay people to survive there?

TT:

The

reason theater there is 80 straight as an institution is because Cleveland State is an urban university. Even when they try to do gay things specifically at Cleveland State very few people come, although I know there are a lot of gays there but they just don't feel they can come out because most of them still live at home. So they avoid getting involved in something as obvious as the theater. If they were away at I school they would feel more comfortable. Urban kids are more a product of their environment than suburban kids, middle class morality is more reinforced in close surroundings. I think the urban university is basically conservative.

HG: Your most recent appearances at Cleveland State have been as the Snake in the musical, Adam And Eve for which you received predictable ovations. Does this suggest an emphasis on comedy as your career path becomes more definite?

TT: My teachers have always said I should stick to comedy -my biggest successes have been in things like The Birds at Kennedy Center, which is as broadly slapstick as the ancient Greeks could write. Comedy is easy for me, but it's not a developed, refined easiness | can point to and say: I did that. My acting is actually very untechnical no beats, intentions or rhythms and for comedy you really need a mind like a metronome.

So I disagree with my teachers, I do want to narrow my long-range career down to acting, but I want to do drama -

HIGH GEAR

as a kind of antidote to comedy. Comedy is designed to get immediate responses from the audience at regular intervals. It's more secure. But with drama you don't know, you're challenged all the time to make the right assumptions about how the audience feels. I need challenge like that to develop myself properly.

This is not to speak for everyone, but I personally can't make it with Neil Simon. If you've been in one of Neil Simon's plays, you've been in them all.

HG Do you think that "gay" means "funny" to some of your teachers and producers? Could they be telling you there's nothing else for a gay actor to do but be laughed at, exploited by the media he appears in?

TT: Television and the movies especially are so anxious to be fair, as they put it, to the gay issue that we've got our hands full of trashy gay exploitation stuff. You can only compare to what the theater has done to blacks. Gay stereotypes, particularly when they're played by gay people, have no more place in the theater than openly antagonistic behavior. Michael Greer should be shot for what he did in The Gay Deceivers -that was unconscionable, a direct slap in the face by uptight movie people, and he helped them right along.

People straight and gay -don't seem to understand what they're watching. A lot of gays criticize The Boys In The Band, for instance. It isn't so bad, all the characters aren't neurotic, and it's a fine, serious play. When he reviewed the film version, Emerson Batdorf said: This film will undoubtedly appeal to a select group of people like those who enjoy good acting. He didn't squirm, he accepted its real value, which is more than I can say for some gays who should have appreciated what was going on. But in this case, they saw

something relatively good for a change and they got mad.

Instead they pay money to see The Gay Deceivers or start rumors like Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? being about gays or transvestites. It isn't. Albee's no fool. He would have made it that way if that's what he'd intended.

The theater isn't exactly innocent. Even if gays should be more careful not to get duped along with everyone else, the theater shouldn't be duping anyone in the first place. But producers expect people to forgive them because they're just in it for the money.

HG: In that sense, it seems that whenever a film or a television play or a stage play that has gay characters appears, the actors who play the gay characters make a point of emphasizing that they're not gay in their interviews.

TT: That's because most of the really commercial stuff appeals only to those special types we were talking about before --the super-straights and stage-struck gays who believe all the stories about soand-so being gay. David Frost's special about gay treatment in the theater showed a number of film clips of the stereotype gay character, and he said: This is Hollywood's blanket answer to the gay question.

The problem is that homosexuality needs explanation and patience not just exposure. It's really a very subtle thing that makes some people different from others. An audience has to work and think a little to understand it, but because it's not surface thing that you can stand back and look at without being too close to be touched, a lot people .. gay people, too are afraid of what a decent treatment might do. Blacks can be shown without any special explanation because people can stand back and see the difference between black and white. With gay and

straight it's different.

I'm dwelling on the male problem more. Female homosexuality has been treated more honestly, frankly and sensitively because it is more attractive to heterosexual audiences. I'm not saying that's right it's just an advantage. HG: What's being done to balance this exploitation thing?

TT: There is a lot that has been done and is being done, but you have to look for it. The Other Side of Silence, an acting company in New York, is a good example. It produces only gay plays by gay authors, promotes itself very professionally, and gets solid audiences of both gays and straights. New York has a number of these companies.

HG: As an author, you're doing something along those lines, aren't you?

TT: I've just completed a new play that I hope to have produced at Cleveland State in the fall. It's called Arrivals/Departures I'm terrible at titles -and is for the most part a character study of people I knew when I was younger. The principals are two prostitutes, one male and one female, who live together amid the constant arrival and departure of their clients. They are good people -although this isn't exactly suited for Shirley MacLaine -and they find themselves bridging other people's lives.

Among Tim Tavcar's other projects and appearances in the near future are performances in the play The Zoo Story, by Edward Albee, on Friday, May 21st, at 7:30 p.m., and in the comic opera Le Pauvre Matelot (The Poor Sailor), by Darius Milhaud, Saturday, May 22nd, at 7:30 p.m. -both as presentations of the Coventry Multi-Media Showcase in Cleveland Heights. The play and the opera are to be performed at

Page 11

the Unitarian Society of Cleveland on Lancashire Road.

He will also appear in a benefit production of Kurt Weill's Street Scene for and at the Cleveland Institute of Music, on June 11th, 12th, 18th and 19th. He hopes, sometime during the summer, to restage a musical version of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was written and first produced by the Chicago Center Stage Theater when he worked with them in 1969. The musical will be organized and given here in Cleveland.

HG: You make the theater sound dangerous. Is that what attracts actors, maybe gay actors especially?

TT: As far as I'm concerned, the whole social modus operandi of the gay world is a little bit on the dangerous side anyway, danger always attracts gays. You go into a bar and you pick up somebody you don't know and you take them home to your house and for all you know they could be a homicidal maniac. You never know, because you don't really care. it's almost a provocation.

The danger in the theater is intellectual, but just as deadly. The producer, the one who does the hiring, is always straight. Although he may hire a lot of gay people he always says: He's good dancer or whatever but he's a fag.

HG: Do you think that, deep underneath, the theater really hates gay people or homosexuality, that this is really just a game of cat-and-mouse, a kind of love-hate situation?

TT: How long do we have?

Written and Photographed by

Michael Madigan

Zipper Bookstore

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