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A bounty of local theater I’ve caught over the last couple weekends has resulted in several heady experiences. And significant pondering about several topics: the gay experience, what it shares or doesn’t share with other off-the-beaten-path sexual tastes, pro versus amateur theater and why any regional theater continues to plunge ahead in the face of such daunting financial prospects.
One mostly pro play I saw (three of the five in its cast were Equity) was in an out-of-the-way theater so small the audience barely doubled the number of players. Another was all volunteer. What inspires such devotion and dedication?
Chronologically as I saw them, the plays were Silver Spring Stage's production of Edward Albee's "The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?", Charter Theater's production of Keith Bridges' "Lie With Me" and Forum Theatre's production of Tony Kushner's highly venerated "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches" (I have to go back to see the second part "Perestroika," which Forum is running concurrently). All three shows run through Nov. 22. Two of the playwrights (Albee and Kushner) are gay.
I'm not a big fan of making arbitrary comparisons to shows you happen to see back to back. It was unavoidable, though, after seeing "The Goat" and the much-lesser-known "Lie With Me" on two successive nights. "The Goat," which opened to controversy and acclaim on Broadway in 2002, is the story of a husband, Martin (Guy Palace), who falls in love with a goat. The play explores the damage this envelope-busting plot device has on his wife, Stevie (Laura Russell) and gay son Billy (Joshua Greenwald).
"Lie With Me" is also a dark family story in which father Stan (Jim Brady), whose wife Joanna (Maura McGinn) is dying in the hospital, attempts to make inroads into the lives of his two adult daughters, Carla (Rana Kay) and Susan (Liz Brown), who hate him to the point that they refer to him by his first name and can't engage in conversation with him without pain-fueled contempt dripping off every word. They have good reason — Stan had a years-long incestuous relationship with Carla.
Both plays, and "Angels" too, explore damage. The events that have led to the characters' emotional angst have already occurred by the time the pieces start. We don't see Martin's encounters with Sylvia, the goat he loves. It's already happened when we meet him. In "Lie With Me," we only see a brief flash of Stan's sexual relationship with Carla in flashback. And "Angels'" Prior (Karl Miller) and Roy (Jim Jorgensen) already have AIDS when we first see them. The plays ultimately are about grappling with the outcomes of these situations. They're all dark, but "Lie With Me" is by far the darkest. Both "The Goat" and "Angels" temper their bleakness with well-placed humor and offer, in "Angels" especially, hope.
The productions of "The Goat" and "Lie With Me" are the pleasant surprises. The Tony- and Pulitzer-winning "Angels" has received almost universal acclaim and Forum is well established as one of the D.C. area's respected outfits, so it’s no surprise “Angels” works. That Silver Spring Stage is a community theater company turned out to be an arbitrary point and one that wouldn't have crossed my mind had I seen the show knowing nothing beforehand about the group. This was the first of its productions I've seen but it proved a staggering introduction. The material, as with "Angels," is proven ("The Goat," too, is a Tony winner and was nominated for a Pulitzer). It's any outfit's gem to sully, but thankfully that doesn't happen.
Silver Spring Stage's production is full of delightfully fine elements, most notably Russell's heartbreaking portrayal of the devastated, incredulous wife. Palace, as the husband, is convincing and serviceable, but Russell's performance is a more artfully nuanced portrayal. It's not immediately apparent. Her voice has a quivery, slightly not-at-ease quality that sounds initially off putting. Her timbre suggests the kind of woman — the world is full of them — who's a perfectly polite and warm person but whose voice grates for some hard-to-pinpoint reason. This turns out to be a blessing, though, as Russell uses it to great effect in the play's blistering — and masochistically long — confrontation scene in which Stevie and Martin explore in excruciating detail the wreckage of their marriage and what led to it.
Nearly as good is Greenwald's portrayal; he does a heart-tugging job of bringing the gay son realistically to life. There's less to say about Doug Krehbiel as busybody family friend Ross, but he's fine. With material this searing and solid, you mostly just hope small town productions such as these don't get in the way. They don't. At times, as with Russell especially, they even enhance it.
"Lie With Me" has an equally strong cast playing a similarly damaged clan. There are no weak links among the actors though Brown's Susan especially stands out. She's bratty and obnoxious in an endearing way. Imagine Drew Barrymore without the coquettishness and you get a sense of her manner. McGinn is especially good as the mother though it's a thankless part. She spends most of the play unconscious in a hospital bed — hardly Helen Hayes Award-baiting stuff, but she makes the most of it. There's an abruptness in the writing that mangles a few notches off the dramatic power of a late-in-the-play deathbed scene she has with Susan, but Brown and McGinn make the most of it, emotionally bringing this first hopeful moment the play offers to welcomed life.
Rana Kay and Jim Brady are less flashy but equally dependable actors and their characters’ story is at the center of "Lie With Me." They're not blessed with material as exquisitely crafted as that of Albee, yet Bridges' work gives them plenty to grapple with.
Ostensibly these plays are about bestiality ("The Goat") and incest ("Lie"), but are they really? What elevates them is that they don't use these taboo topics only for shock value. Sure, both themes are handy little eyebrow raisers destined to generate pre-show curiosity and buzz. But once you're in your theater seat watching these stories unfold, it becomes clear that these plays are much more than that.
They're both mirrors — especially in the gay world — for us to consider our own plights and perhaps, at times, hypocrisy. We’re collectively as a gay community saying we deserve rights such as hate crime provisions, the right not to get fired (both issues on the national front burner at the moment) and the right to marry people of the same sex which for the District is unfolding now as its own searing drama. One of the not-so-pleasant topics gay rights advocates seldom want to address is why it's "normal" for us to want to marry other men (or women as the case may be) but it's not OK for adults to have sex (or even fall in love) with animals or fathers to have sexual relationships with their post-pubescent daughters ("Lie With Me" is about incest, not pedophilia). The short answer — and it applies to both topics — is consent, but the not-so-tidy matter is orientation. We've ridded the term "sexual preference" from our vocabulary and replaced it with orientation. Are there folks out there whose orientations are for animals or their own offspring? Interestingly neither Albee nor Bridges seems to think so. Albee makes it clear Martin has other issues (we learn what makes "The Goat's" Martin tick much more than we do with "Lie's" Stan; that's just one way in which Albee's is the substantially better work). We don't get to fully explore them — that's for Martin and, one imagines, his psychologist — but Albee gives us just enough to show us this guy is fucked up in multiple ways. Albee implies it's not really about the goat. That's just the way Martin's well-concealed issues manifest themselves.
"Lie With Me" does more by way of its victim. We learn far more about Carla and the damage her father's manipulation has done to her than we do about why Stan seduces her (interestingly the play points out that their sexual relationship was always consensual).
Albee's work is without question the better play. It's wittier, smarter and more insightful. But "Lie With Me" is also good. It's harder to sit through, so relentless is its darkness, but it's also the more convincing of the two and that's a key difference. "The Goat" ultimately is an allegory whereas the unnamed "Lie With Me" family could be next door for all we know. There's also a nice everyday-type banality to "Lie With Me" that works well. We see these characters in the bathroom, sprawled out on their beds talking on the phone, getting dressed and undressed, getting coffee from hospital vending machines. The ho-hum nature of the appropriately bland settings contrasts vividly with the play's abnormalities.
"Angels" takes that concept several steps further wildly contrasting hospital beds and ringing-off-the-hook office phones with hallucinatory trips to the Arctic and ghostly visits from ancestors and angels. That juxtaposition is central to the beauty of Kushner's great play but it's also where the play finds its hope, a concept almost totally absent from the Albee and Bridges works.
All the “Angels” players are rock solid and especially well cast. Jim Jorgensen's Roy, Casie Platt's Harper, Jennifer Mendenhall's Hannah and especially Karl Miller's Prior are the standouts though there's no weak link in the acting chain here. They're well-chosen conduits in which to experience this epic work up close and personal performing in the round with the audience surrounding them from three sides. This setup gives the work an immediacy and penetration tougher to convey, I imagine, in a larger theater.
There was only one misstep in the presentation but it was a huge one. Mere seconds after the players took their bows, out came director Jeremy Skidmore begging for money. It was a jarring coda to what had just been an emotional, mystical experience — we'd just seen the angel after a three-hour-20-minute buildup and barely had seconds to digest it before this guy stormed the stage asking for donations. There's a place for such things — before the play, in my opinion. The solicitation was well intentioned. Theaters such as Forum and practically any off Broadway deserve support beyond ticket prices (Forum's are wildly reasonable, by the way). But to be slapped with such harsh reality immediately after the climax of one of theater's most inspiring moments of the last 20 years reduced what had been a sublime experience to the crassness of a commercial break on network TV. Post-play afterglow is sacred time. We’ve given our undivided attention for hours — we’ve earned the right to bask in the moment and reflect.
All three theaters deserve kudos for their efforts. Charter is proceeding with edgy fare with little obvious commercial appeal (Bridges is hardly a household name) while Silver Spring is doing the Albee hoping, I imagine, just to break even. Forum has less to lose but still the Kushner, no matter how you cut it, is a mammoth undertaking. The best quality all three share is the chance to witness these behind-closed-doors conversations we can only imagine in real life up close and personal. In such small settings, the emotional wreckage and damage of the texts are magnified. I was on the front row for "The Goat" and nearly had to shield my face when Russell smashed a lamp mere feet from me. That's in-your-face drama for sure.
 Posted by Joey DiGuglielmo,
Washington Blade Features Editor | Nov. 9 at
12:49 PM | JDiGuglielmo@washblade.com
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