A reflection of homosexuality

Continued from Page 1 wrights, producers, directors and actors?

The theater traditionally has had more homosexuals than other profes-, sions, but there is no evidence that now they have established anything like a majority.

There is, however, obvious proof that more and more of them have come out of the closet and this, perhaps, is the secret of our quartet of coincidence.

Traditionally, plays have mirrored the age about which they are written, and so it is perhaps expectable that in the late 1970s, with homosexuality publicly discussed, the theater reflects this movement.

A few weeks ago Vincent Price appeared at Oberlin College in his oneman show about Oscar Wilde. In this show, as expected, the subject of

Wilde's affair with Lord Alfred Douglas world wars, the matter was hinted at in

was discussed.

People in this more enlightened age do not have to be raving liberals to agree that the subsequent trial, which resulted in Wilde's imprisonment for two years and most possibly his premature death, was savage and inhumane.

But it was a subject that in Victorian times was never hinted at on stage, even by the controversial Wilde himself.

An example of this was provided in Cleveland the following week when Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" was presented at the Play House. There is no a hint of anything other than conventional love in this classic comedy.

Yet showing at almost the same timne at Oberlin was a modern work about the playwright in which the matter is openly discussed. Between the

plays and movies, but only in vague ways in which the person concerned was depicted as soft, ineffectual and effeminate, the stereotype summed up by the word sissy.

It has taken the present crop of playwrights to make the point that homosexuals, like the rest of us, can be mean, as in "Streamers;" homicidal as in "Deathtrap;" funny as in "Shadow Box," or confused as in "Gemini.”

There is also a fifth local example if Dobama's "Landscape of the Body" is to be used. In that play they were exploited.

Personally I must admit I find the homosexual theme rather overworked at the moment, but then it is new and so expectable.

It will pass.