DECEMBER 24, 1993 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 13

ENTERTAINMENT

A reflection on the year's gay theater

by Barry Daniels

If the Advocate is now calling 1993 the "Year of Visibility," it is not surprising that it has named playwright Tony Kushner Man of the Year. The event of the theater year has been the much praised Broadway production of Kushner's seven-hour epic drama, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Millennium Approaches (Part I) received the Pulitzer prize before opening in New York in April. It later won the Tony Award for best play of the year. Part II, Perestroika, after a series of delays, opened in November. Kushner has been the center of media attention ever since the announcement of the Broadway production of the play. Through all the hype, Kushner has been resolutely out. He has come to stand for a gay community that insists on being heard, seen, and accepted.

To me what is so remarkable about the phenomenon of Kushner and the play is that there is no attempt to make concessions to a mainstream heterosexual audience. "I'm here, and I'm queer. Let's talk," is the image Kushner conveys, often in startling and delightful ways. I laughed at his very sensual essay on gay sex for the straight magazine Esquire. The message is clear when we see his thoughtful face in a Gap ad, ACT UP buttons worn proudly on his Gap jacket. In one brash leap (a single bound) our new hero (SuperFag) has destroyed the closet once and for all.

Of course, this new visibility is not the work of a single person. And as we come to the end of this remarkable year, I'm using Kushner as a symbolic figure to reflect on gay theater in general as well as gay theater in Cleveland.

Traditionally in New York gay playwrights have had to use various closeted or closeting devices to ensure their plays commercial productions. Tennessee Williams is probably the most famous of this group, which includes William Inge, Edward Albee, Terrence McNally, Lanford Wilson, Albert Innaurato and Christopher Durang. McNally speaks for this group when he says he prefers to be thought of as a playwright who is gay rather than a playwright who writes gay plays.

In the 1960s a new kind of gay and queer theater began to find a home in the emerging off-off Broadway scene. John Vacarro and Charles Ludlam created a queer theater that

continues to thrive in the work of Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, that of writer and drag performer Charles Busch, and the new gay and lesbian troupe Planet Q. Queer theater is outrageous, and camp, and seems to celebrate a sensibility that refuses any simple definitions of gender. The lesbian group Split Britches and the gay collective Bloolips are also representative of queer theater at its best. Gay plays that dealt with gay life more realistically began to appear as well. Cafe Cino presented the early work of Lanford Wilson, and theaters like the Glines gave a home to writers who wanted to explore the erotics of being gay.

The queer and gay theater of the 1960s were located in the gay ghetto and appealed to coterie audiences. One could go to them and be comfortable being out and still be in the closet as far as mainstream society was concerned.

Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band1968, only a year before Stonewall-took the gay theater into the mainstream and is significant despite what one now thinks of its politics. Over the next 25 years occasional gay plays had similar cross-over successes. Such important work as Wilson's The Fifth of July, Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, and Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart immediately come to mind.

The difference that Angels in America represents for me is the difference between mere tolerance and acceptance (recognition and respect)—and this point is brilliantly made by Kushner in an essay, "What's So Great About Tolerance?" in the November American Theatre. In general before 1993, gay playwrights whose work earned mainstream success, more often than not, begged for tolerance. Kushner's work demands acceptance and, at the same time, achieves a new maturity as he insists we look at ourselves critically.

It is the spirit of recognition and respect that has contributed to a change that is very visible in New York. The traditional ghetto walls are crumbling as the closet disappears. Gay and lesbian theater is no longer clandestine. Straight audiences enjoy the Ridiculous and Planet Q. Angels in America happens to be one of the rare serious dramas on Broadway. It is attracting a very mixed audience of the kind of intelligent and sophisticated theatergoers who used to attend the latest Albee, Miller or Williams play on

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Broadway. The night I attended Perestroika, I saw gay couples hug and kiss as they arrived at the theater without fear or shame. Goggle-eyed tourists may stare and gasp at this and murmur about Sodom on the Hudson, but what I saw was a society in which being out was a norm rather than a militant position.

My own public and personal coming out coincides with this year I've been writing for the Gay People's Chronicle. In exploring the many issues that have surfaced in the gay theater this year, I've also been looking inside myself and trying to express my personal response to the ideas and issues involved.

I remain something of a stranger in Cleveland-I own homes in New York and Paris-although I'm not a stranger to Cleveland theater. And as this year ends I have to consider how Cleveland theater relates to the changes that Angels in America represents at the national level.

The first quarter of 1993 was remarkable for the kind of recognition the gay community received in Cleveland. In the theater productions by gay playwrights enjoyed successes that brought diverse audiences together. The most notable of these were Scott McPherson's Marvin's Room and McNally's The Lisbon Traviata (a “mature" gay play) at Dobama, and Paul Godfrey's Once in a While the Odd Thing Happens at the Working Theatre. There was significant representation of gay and lesbian work in the Performance Art Festival. The fall theater season has not continued to build on this spirit of optimism that surfaced so successfully in the spring. Dobama Theatre chose to open its season with a gay play, Gus and Al by Innaurato,

which reflects the self-loathing that used to make gay content acceptable to larger audiences. In 1993, this attitude seems terribly dated and reactionary. The Working Theatre production of Love's Tangled Web was true to Ludlam's sensibility, but neither the words queer nor gay were used in any of the mainstream publicity for the production. A Lion in Winter at the Play House contained a gay character who is presented in a totally homophobic way: it is a good example of the kind of images the closeted mentality perpetrates.

I have been made more aware of how closeted the gay community in Cleveland really is. It both saddens me and angers me that this attitude is reflected in our theaters. This was partly responsible for my surliness in the season preview article I put together in August after my summer in Paris. I was able to clarify my position in my response to the letter from the gay staff at the Play House. Although I in no way want to put down the steps in the right direction that have been taken by the management at Dobama Theatre, the Cleveland Public Theatre, and the Working Theatre, I want to urge all our theaters to consider what the politics of visibility means. Our theaters need to diversify their repertoires to include gay and lesbian work that reflects where we are now. Our theaters need to consider how they can create an environment that is truly gay friendly by addressing the gay and lesbian community in their public presentation of themselves, marketing, newsletters, etc. Our theaters can help create recognition and respect for difference in the community, but we have to respect ourselves as well by coming out and being out.

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