GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

AUGUST 30, 1996

Evenings Out

Dobama's

season

gets a gay start

by Dawn Leach

Cleveland-Dobama Theatre will open this year's season with a story of a classic gay love triangle: Otto is a compulsive eater who is still in love with Serge, a handsome professional model he once dated. Serge, however, is in love with Ford, a bisexual man who has just married an attractive and intelligent woman named Amanda. Ford is torn between his loyalty to his wife and his pas-

sion for his new gay lover. The action of the story is punctuated by appearances of Otto's mother, Bea, a Jewish woman in her fifties who liberally dispenses her opinions and advice to everyone, and hopes to see her son reunited with Serge.

wild con albut appetit orod, for sex

Avante garde director Ford (Steve Bourque) and Calvin Klein model Serge (Jeff Preston) have a bite together.

The show will be the Cleveland premiere of a New York hit, The Food Chain, by Nicky Silver, author of two recent New York successes, Pterodactyls and Raised in Captivity.

"Only a gay man could write this play," said director Walter Grodzik. "The people are obviously gay, unapologetically."

Grodzik said that he took the time to find the right actors to play the parts.

"Two of the characters in the play, Serge and Ford, who play lovers, are very, very attractive, and they're well-built,” said Grodzik. "Actually that was the hardest thing to casting the roles, trying to find actors who were good actors, wonderful comics, and also had really excellent physiques; it's a very difficult threesome to come by. Usually you can get one or the other. So it took a long time to cast the show."

"[Silver is] known for his witty dialogue, hilarious situations, fast pace, inventiveness. He's a very singular, different voice in American theater," said Grodzik. "He's definitely somebody if people are going to see, they'll want to see again and again. His pieces are wonderful. I don't say it easily, he's a very good playwright.”

Grodzik, a native Clevelander, is the artistic director of the Working Theatre. He is a two-time Fulbright scholar with an MFA in directing from Wayne State University. He is known in Cleveland for his productions of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at the Cleveland Public Theatre, How to Write a Play at the Working Theatre, and Christmas on Mars. One of his Fulbrights took him to Helsinki, Finland, where he directed at the National Theater, the Helsinki City Theater, and the British Finnish Theater Company, a professional English language theater. Grodzik has spent a lot of time working with avant garde directors, including Anne Bogart and Andrei Serban. He just recently returned to Cleve-

land from Manhattan, where he was the Schubert presidential fellow in directing at Columbia University, and worked as Michael Feingold's drama critic for the Village Voice.

Grodzik didn't have theater on his mind when he returned from New York: he came back to his native city to be with his mother after the death of his father. However, at that time, Joyce Casey, Dobama's artistic director, was considering producing The Food Chain, and when she found out that Grodzik was in town, she was certain he was the best person to direct the show.

"I wasn't going to direct anything," Grodzik said, "but Joyce called me and said 'Well, I'll do this play if you direct it,' and I like the play so much I said, 'Yeah, I'll do it.'

"This is a wild, out-of-control comedy about appetite: about sex, about food, all types of appetite," said Grodzik. "It's about the mismatched relationships of our lives that we all have jumped into too quickly at one time or another, only to ask the question 'What the hell am I doing here now?'

Grodzik said that, he enjoys working with gay material.

"It's wonderful,” Grodzik said. “Like everyone else on the planet, I grew up gay in essentially a heterosexual society where all the images, all the reading material, television, film, and commercials portrayed the happy life of heterosexuals. I like the opportunity to direct stories about gay people and their lives. Although these people's lives are very different from mine, it's automatic, I'm just automatically at home. I know these people."

Grodzik said that now there are more plays with openly gay themes than ever before.

"A lot of the major American playwrights now, Nicky Silver, Harry Kondoleon, Tony Kushner who wrote Angels in America, are

all gay, their voices are clear and present in their plays. They no longer have to, like Tennessee Williams did, write plays about gay people but make heterosexual characters. Although people would argue whether Williams did that or not, he simply didn't have that freedom. Also, there's not the selfloathing, or gay people who are terribly troubled and unhappy and that whole era of American drama where there was a series of plays written about how unhappy gay people are. It's not there any more."

Part of the reason for the change is a growing demand for good plays by and about gay people.

"I know that places like Dobama depend heavily on the gay community to come out for shows like this because it puts them into their season, and it costs a significant amount to produce," Grodzik said.

Director Walter Grodzik

RIQUE WINTSTON

For fans of Walter Grodzik, this may be the last chance for a while to see his work in Cleveland. As soon as the play opens, he will be moving to Seattle to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Washington where he has a fellowship to study drama and queer theory.

The Food Chain will be presented September 12 through October 6 at Dobama Theatre, 1846 Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights. For reservations, performance schedule, or ticket information, call Dobama at 216-932-6838.

RIQUE WINTSTON