GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE August 16, 2002

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JOIN US FOR AN INFORMATIONAL PRESENTATION ON: Saturday, August 24th at 10 a.m. Archwood United Church of Christ

2800 Archwood Avenue

TATRY C

Plays on video bring theater into home

by Anthony Glassman

A wise man once wrote, "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.'

Okay, it was William Shakespeare in Hamlet. The titular prince of Denmark was trying to trip his uncle/stepfather up and get him to confess that he killed Hamlet's father. The point is, however, that plays, the theater, have been popular for thousands of years.

With the magic of the movies, however, thespians had another venue through which they could be brought to the audience. Hamlet itself has been made into more than one film, along with Othello, Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet.

On the gay side of the aisle, Torch Song Trilogy, Equus, Boys in the Band and Bent have all been given the cinematic treatment. Films do, after all, allow the story to be told on a wider scale, no longer limited to what can be built upon a stage in the theater.

Sometimes, however, the point is the intimacy of the stage. This is especially true in the case of the one-man show. A direct communication between actor and audience, the one-man show often recreates an historical character or gives the writer/actor a chance to delve deeply into his soul for the sake of the theatergoer.

Two popular shows in this genre are now available on VHS and DVD, David Schmader's Straight and The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me by David Drake.

Straight, released by StageDirect, is one man's investigative journey into the world of conversion therapy, the land of John "Candy" Paulk and Exodus International.

Schmader was working as a writer for a gay newspaper at the time that the "ex-gay" movement achieved national attention, and

he decided that it would be a great idea to do yet another exposé on the sham it is based on.

What he wound up with, however, would best be termed an evening of conversation therapy, laying bare the hypocrisies of both the "ex-gay" and gay communities.

Schmader writes with élan and wit, alternating zingy one-liners with deadly serious statements. His delivery is conversational, direct. The audience can spend an hour or so forgetting that it is an audience, instead perhaps imagining that it is his friend.

Drake, on the other hand, tends to alternate between a falsely conversational tone and a pseudo-rap rhyming rhythm that can at times be disconcerting.

The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me is Drake's journ throu the last 30-plus years of gay life, from seeing West Side Story on his sixth birthday, coincidentally the same day as the Stonewall riots, to the sudden realization that so many of the people he knew and loved are now gone, having mysteriously vanished over the years, spirited away by AIDS.

A good portion of the piece is also a paean to Drake's most lasting love, the theater. So many of the events in his life have occurred around theaters and going to plays, it's not really surprising he became

an actor.

A great deal of it is very amusing, and he is a genuinely funny man. A lot more of it is very serious, and much like Schmader, he does not suffer foels and hypocrites gladly. He does, however, like the Village People. If that seems like a complete non sequitur, as if it came out of left field, so does a lot of Larry Kramer. He bounces from time period to time period, character to character, with only one true constant: an almost manic energy harnessed only by TLA Releasing, who is distributing the video and DVD.

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