Profile
Photos
Comments
Closet Doors Were Shut Tight, but Some Guys Oiled the Hinges
With Iowa, Maine and New Hampshire legalizing gay marriage this spring, and with the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots coming later this month, the notion that two grown gay men would be
uncomfortable, tentative, even scared to hold hands, seems antiquated.
Yet
such a scene, in the new play “The Temperamentals,” at the Barrow Group
Theater on West 36th Street in Manhattan through July 5, reflects this
very personal history: how gay men first began to express themselves in
public, and how they began to fight for equal rights.
Jon Marans,
the author of “The Temperamentals,” said that he wanted to tell people
— gay and straight — about the history of the gay rights movement that
preceded the Stonewall riots of 1969, but that he also hoped to tell an
engrossing story about five acerbic, complicated and initially
ambivalent pioneers. “This is a story that people should know about,”
Mr. Marans said.
The play revolves around two closeted
professionals who lived in Los Angeles in the mid-20th century, Harry
Hay, a teacher and labor advocate (played by Thomas Jay Ryan)
and Rudi Gernreich, a fashion designer (Michael Urie, of ABC’s “Ugly
Betty”). In the play they are falling in love with each other at the
same time that they are becoming increasingly frustrated with
discrimination against gay men. They and three friends go on to form
the Mattachine Society, one of the nation’s earliest gay-rights groups.
Hay,
Mr. Marans said, didn’t care that he didn’t make people comfortable.
His pride was entirely on his own terms. He was also a very difficult
person to get along with, as a lot of frustrated early leaders in the
gay-rights movement were.
“It’s a play about political animals — all of us talked over Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney, Larry Kramer, Barney Frank and what makes them fascinating or difficult or effective,” Mr. Marans said.
“But
it’s also a very personal work,” the play’s director, Jonathan
Silverstein, interjected, “about two men finding love with each other.
Jon is not afraid of going somewhere that might be a sentimental place,
a really emotional place, and I think that’s rare in new plays.” Some
who associated with Hay and other Mattachine members described
Gernreich as the love of Hay’s life.
Another new and critically
praised Off Broadway play, “Next Fall,” also has a closeted gay man as
a central character, and it too has questions of politics and identity
at its heart. “Next Fall,” at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater through July
5, is the more traditional, a family drama with familiar types who each
weigh in on a running argument about the compatibility of homosexuality
and Christian evangelicalism.
In some ways the modern gay men of
“Next Fall” are descendants of those 1950s trailblazers in “The
Temperamentals”: tightly coiled, argumentative, deeply impassioned,
capable of tremendous affection. “Next Fall” is a love story that ends
in heartbreak; “The Temperamentals” is an eye-opening history lesson.
“It’s
hard as a gay man to feel a sense of your historical place, and not
just in America, but in the world,” said Tom Beckett, who plays Chuck
Rowland, one of the Mattachine founders, and other roles in “The
Temperamentals,” including a very memorable Vincente Minnelli.
“When I first read this play, it was a piece of that history that I had
no idea about. There are so many pieces that we’re still not aware of.”
Mr.
Ryan, who plays Hay, recalled the opening documentary footage used in
the film “Milk.” It shows patrons of gay bars covering their faces with
their hands to avoid being seen or identified. “I wanted to hear their
stories,” Mr. Ryan said.
“In rehearsals we were kind of like
Mattachine meetings — we have five very strong personalities as actors,
and they really care about the play, so there have been many moments of
spirited debate,” Mr. Silverstein said. “None of us feel that this is
just another play we’re doing here.”
Perhaps the sharpest debate,
according to the writer and director as well as the cast members, was
over how effeminate the men should be.
“The amount of ‘nelly
queen’ in the play was a very hard debate emotionally for all of the
gay men involved, because we wanted to be fair to the truth of
history,” said Mr. Silverstein, who, like Mr. Marans, is gay. “How does
a gay male character play straight? How does a straight actor play gay?
It was a debate even for me. I was scared to portray it, because I
worried about getting the tone and the amount of it right. It was one
of the last pieces of the puzzle that I had to commit to, but I think
we got it right.”
Mr. Urie, who is perhaps the best known of the
cast members from his run on “Ugly Betty,” became involved early on in
the play’s development. “There aren’t many opportunities to do new work
where the writing and language are this full and interesting, and where
the characters are rich with history,” he said. “In addition, playing a
guy who is struggling with his career and his personal life is familiar
to me, keeping your personal life to yourself but also being free and
open to be yourself in the world.”
The Barrow Group Studio
Theater, where the play ran initially, is a black box theater with only
a few rows of seats, where the actors coming and going on the bare
stage are just a few feet away from audience members. (It is now
playing in Barrow Group’s larger theater.)
“We could see 60- and
70-year-olds in the audience, and you could look in their eyes and see
flickers of recognition when we mentioned gay touchstones of that era,”
Mr. Ryan said. “I thought, boy, how many evenings at the theater have
had that personal relevance for them before?”