Florida Agenda

The year-round Caldwell Theatre Company in Boca Raton is an A-1 class act.

By Warren Day

The class shows in the challenging plays they perform, and not the endlessly-repeated comedies and classics that compose the repertory of many a theater company. The class shows in the sets, which are not only beautifully designed, but also add meaning to the characters and the story. It also shows in the theater building itself, the Count de Hoernle Theatre, one of the most effective and pleasant performing spaces in all of Florida. And usually, the class shows in the high-quality of the acting, with their casts filled with professional talent who’ve earned their Actors Equity union cards. Under the creative leadership of Clive Cholerton, it’s simply one of the best theatre companies in the Sout

Their premiere production for the 2011- 2012 season, “After the Revolution” by Amy Herzog, hits the mark on most of its high standards and speaks well for the season ahead.

First of all, the play was picked by the New York Times as one of the ten best of 2010. It deals with a situation and a theme that has an importance and an appeal outside of its own historical context. What do you do when you discover that the pride of your family, someone who you’ve emulated in your personal and professional life, turns out to have a secret that reveals a much darker side to his character? To some degree, we all need heroes in our lives, but it can be quite dicey to have a family member as one, because if anything should go wrong, the fallout can extend into so many relationships.

In “After the Revolution,” the pride of the family is the grandfather, a kind of Alger Hiss character who achieved fame in the 1950s by not naming names at the McCarthy hearings and for being a spokesperson against the witch hunts of the times that treated every person on the far left as a traitor. The play takes place in 1999, 18 months after the grandfather has died. His granddaughter Emma has just graduated from law school and started a legal defense fund to promote his ideals. Her dreams, values, and career are tied up with the heroic image of her grandfather, and then she learns he wasn’t who he seemed to be.

It’s a dilemma that’s been faced by other families, such as the televangelist who’s caught paying for the services of a male prostitute, the politician who highly embellishes his military service or family background, or the father who everyone thought was a genius businessman but instead has been running a ponzi scheme, and, of course, the lesser and more common experience of finding out at sixteen that your parents simply aren’t as perfect as you once thought they were at six.

The drama and the comedy of “After the Revolution” is in how Emma reacts to learning about her grandfather’s unsavory past, a past about to be revealed to the world in a new book. And it’s also where the play (and casting) runs into some trouble. Emma is not a sympathetic character because she suffers from the same fault of almost everyone on the far left or far right – she’s filled with self-righteousness. The fault is partly in how she’s written, and even more so in how she’s played by Jackie Rivera, who goes more for the anger than the hurt, more for the petulance than the vulnerability. You begin to feel sorrier for her family and boyfriend than you do for her. The rest of the cast find more shadings and nuance in their performances, such as Gordon McConnell as her father, Nancy Barnett as her stepmother, and particularly Howard Elfman as a kindly and wise benefactor who learned long ago that the bigger the man, the more likely, the bigger the fault.

A film review by Warren Day

A positive stereotype that both heterosexuals and homosexuals hold about gays is that they’re more creative than most and without them theater would be half what it is.

If that’s true, then why is it so hard to come up with a substantial list of great gay plays – that is, plays of lasting value that focus on the lives of gay men and lesbians? Give it a try and see if you don’t have difficulty in listing five masterpieces, much less ten, and if you remove the ones that deal with AIDS, you might have trouble naming three. Where is our “Death of a Salesman” or “Long Day’s Journey into Night?”

Even the best playwrights who were homosexual (Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, Edward Albee) produced no great work dealing openly with gays. In Tennessee Williams’ plays, the gay character is always dead before the curtain goes up  (i.e., Blanche’s husband in “Streetcar,” Brick’s football buddy Skipper in “Cat,” and Sebastian in “Suddenly Last Summer”.)

Some of the best known gay plays, the ones that originally broke the barriers, can seem quite dated today, such as “The Boys in the Band” and “Tea and Sympathy.” The exception to this is possibly “The Children’s Hour.”

And while Terrence McNally (“Love! Valour! Compassion!”) and Paul Rudnick (“Jeffrey”) may have given us some enjoyable and meaningful evenings in the theater, only a few would call their plays timeless classics.

So, almost by default, Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” obtains the distinction (and the burden) of being called “the greatest gay play ever written”.  In dramatizing the moral quandaries of the AIDS crisis in 1985, in both public and private lives, it has umpteen awards to support that claim, winning both the Pulitzer and the Tony and, as a mini-series on HBO, a slew of Emmys and Golden Globes. Harold Bloom, the go-to arbitrator of such questions, put it on his list of the greatest works of literature in the western world.  For now, at least, it’s the “Hamlet” of gay plays.

And the Andrews Living Arts Studio (ADL) in Fort Lauderdale is giving you a rare chance, until September 4, to see this gay masterwork, a play not seen in south Florida for over a decade.

Granted, it’s so highly-acclaimed and that gays hold so prominent a role behind and in front of the curtain in Florida theater, why hasn’t it been staged more often?

For one reason, it’s a difficult play for a community theater to do because it’s actually two plays running seven hours total (ADL is doing only an abridged version of “Part I: Millennium Approaches”); the script is multi-layered, epic in its themes, and consistently shifts between reality and fantasy. “Angels” requires a level of acting and directing that’s hard for any company to achieve.

ADL deserves big kudos for attempting such a play. However, I cannot review intentions or ambition, only the results, and on that score it’s a very disappointing production. Anyone seeing “Angels” for the first time here would have no idea why it’s considered a great play.

The acting ranges from adequate to embarrassing, with at least three of the actors noticeably older than the characters they’re playing. That last point is not minor, since questions and struggles that occupy people 27 to 32 begin to strain acceptance when played by someone who looks at least ten years older than that.

Part of Kushner’s genius is how he uses mundane language to communicate profound meanings and humor to explore some of life’s darker moments; but in this production, the mundane stifles the profound and much of the poetry and laughter is lost in delivery.
After being assured they would be using the Broadway script, I found at least an hour had been cut, with whole scenes and characters gone, and with them some of the needed coherence and substance. Joe Pitt’s mother is now in only one brief scene, and Ethel Rosenberg is reduced to some spooky music.

The director still has some of the 11 actors play multi-roles, but he changes the careful schematic Kushner intended.  There was a good reason to have the Mormon mother play the male Rabbi, the Angel to play the nurse, and the same actor who plays Lewis’ lover be his trick in the park. That’s all changed in this production, and it’s to the detriment of the evening.

As to the larger question of why there are so few great gay plays, if you keep in mind that dramas focusing openly on gay issues and characters have only happened in the last 43 years of the 2500 year history of theater in the western world, then maybe it’s more understandable that there isn’t yet a longer list of classics.  That same period has also been a lean time in producing masterpieces on the lives of straights (hence all the revivals).

Instead, think about what a future Tennessee Williams or Oscar Wilde might write, or what they and others could’ve written if their times had been different.  If you remember that William Shakespeare wrote his most ardent love poetry to a young man, then just try and imagine the gay play we might have today if he’d been allowed his “Romeo and Romeo.”

As the angel says at the end of “Millennium Approaches,” “…the great work has (just) begun.”

What Are Best Gay Plays?

Remember this isn’t a list of the most enjoyable or personally meaningful, but simply what might be considered the best written of the plays that have their main focus on gay issues or a gay or lesbian character. In alphabetical order, my personal list would include:

• Angels in America by Tony Kushner
• Bent by Martin Sherman
• Boston Marriage by David Mamet
• Breaking the Code (about Alan Turing)
by Hugh Whitemore
• The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman
• The Dresser by Ronald Harwood
• Entertaining Mr. Sloane by Joe Orton
• Falsettos by William Finn
• Fifth of July by Langford Wilson
• Gross Indecency by Moises Kaufman
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch by John Cameron
Mitchell and Stephen Trask
• The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard
• The Killing of Sister George by Frank Marcus
• La Cage Aux Folles, the musical by Jerry
Herman and Harvey Fierstein, original play by
Jean Poiret
• The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman
• Loot by Joe Orton
• M Butterfly by David Henry Hwang
• The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer
• Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg
• Torch Song Trilogy by Harvey Fierstein

Let us hear your reactions, opinions  and suggestions by emailing AgendaReviews@aol.com

Andrews Living Arts Studio is located at 25 NW 5th Street, Fort Lauderdale 33301. Performances Thurs thru Sun at 7:30 p.m. till Sept. 4. Buy tickets for $24.95 at www.andrewslivingarts.com, or 800-838-3006. At the door, $29.95.

By WARREN DAY

All musicals, by their very nature, are improbable. When is the last time you broke into song with full orchestration just because you pronounced a sentence correctly, or because you spotted a stranger across a crowded room? Okay, maybe that latter, but you see my point.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, as presented currently at the Empire Stage Theater in Fort Lauderdale, has more improbables than a block of Broadway musicals.

First of all, does it seem like a probable idea to do a musical about an East German boy who gets a shaking surgeon when he goes for a sex change operation?  And how about staging the whole thing like a glam rock performance at some American underground club next to where his protégé is playing to a packed amphitheater? In addition, have it undergirded by a Greek myth, plus some connection to a discarded Gospel, while throwing in a male character playing a female – and a female character playing a male –  and you get a general idea of how the improbables pile up.

And the improbables extend to this particular production itself, because what sane director and producer would attempt to do a show in Fort Lauderdale that required finding a local actor who can sing and perform like a seasoned club act, play an electronic keyboard, convey emotions from A to Z, and do all of that with a German accent in full glam drag while prancing around in Joan-Crawford-fuck-me pumps? And also find four believable rock musicians, one of whom has to sing beautifully and cross-dress. It ain’t like casting “The Sunshine Boys.”

And yet, what might be the biggest improbability is to pull all of this off in a highly effective and professional manner that will engage anyone who is open to a different kind of theater experience.

Infinite Abyss Productions is responsible for this staging, as they were in 2010 for the excellent Stop Kiss” As in that play, the director Jeffrey D. Holmes demonstrates a talent for getting an exceptional and emotionally true performance from his lead actor. This presentation would fall flatter than that proverbial pancake if Joe Harter as Hedwig wasn’t multi-talented and able to deliver a multi-layered performance.

That Greek myth can be found in Plato’s Symposium and says there were three sexes originally – children of the moon (a man and woman combined), children of the earth (two women) and children of the sun (two men). Angry gods divided them, thus creating heterosexuality, and female and male homosexuality. Ever since, we’ve felt incomplete and been longing for our other half.

This kind of Greek dualism permeates this production; it’s even reflected in the graphic that producer Erynn Dalton picked for the program cover. And the fact that feelings of dual natures are felt by many people partly explains the power and the appeal of this improbable musical that’s been performed in hundreds of places around the world. We’re lucky to have a good production of it here in South Florida.

Plays 8pm Thursdays thru Saturdays until June 4th, Empire Stage, 1140 N. Flagler Drive, Fort Lauderdale. Tickets are $30 and can be purchased online at www.infinite-abyss.com or at the door (cash only).

A stage review by WARREN DAY

If you see only one gay play this year, you should make it “The First Step: Dairy of a Sex Addict,” now playing at the Empire Stage Theater in Fort Lauderdale through April 24.  Regardless of subject matter or the sexual orientation of its characters, this is one of the better local productions I’ve seen in recent years.

First billed as the southeastern premiere of a play originally produced in New York, it has been substantially reshaped to where it could be considered a world premiere. And those changes appear to have turned a favorably received play into an even stronger one.

While the main character is addicted to “quickies” (at least one a day with different people), that won’t keep other gays and straights from relating to elements of his story. Like all good plays, it’s about more than just its plot, so even if you haven’t had sex in a public restroom or an adult video store, you can still recognize something of yourself in Joe’s struggle to define what role sex (and intimacy) will play in his life.

The author is listed as Henry Covery, but seemingly that’s a pseudonym (in-ry-covery?), due to this work being based on real, and possibly litigious, experiences. And as this playful play unfolds, it feels like something that really happened.

“The First Step” is very funny, as well as inventive, gutsy and smart.  I would recommend you get your tickets right away, because as the word spreads that this comedy/drama is something special, it may not be so easy to obtain a seat in this intimate theater.

Under the superb direction of Michael Leeds, it moves at a brisk 80 minutes with no intermission. His experience doing musicals on Broadway as well as regional theaters, including one Tony nominated show, can be clearly seen in such moments as when the cast performs a rap song on the fanciful screen names people use in online chat rooms, or in a sexual addiction therapy group where the participants break into slightly altered Broadway songs to tell their stories of ho and woe.

The polished company of players delivers spot-on timing for the comedy and wounded vulnerability for the dramatic moments, giving either sparkle or subtle nuance wherever it’s appropriate. Larry Buzzeo plays Joe, who must merit both sympathy and empathy in his reckless search for self-understanding.  The rest of the cast – Katherine Amadeo, Matthew William Chizever, Joe Harter and Zach Schwartz – play his family members, tricks, partner and fellow sexual addicts on that spiraling journey. The actors seem to be having a hell-of-a-good time and that becomes contagious for the audience.

So do yourself a favor, do your friends a favor, and take “The First Step.”

The First Step plays Thursdays through Saturdays 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. at the Empire Stage Theater, 1140 N. Flagler Drive, Fort Lauderdale 33304, off of Sunrise Boulevard. Tickets are $30 and can be purchased online at www.empirestage.com, or at the door.