The trouble with gay theater

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185 La Cage Aux Folles
The trouble with gay theater

DAN ROTTENBERG

Aspiring playwrights, I used to assume, couldn’t go wrong by following Rottenberg’s Fourth Law of Drama, to wit:

Outsiders are inherently more interesting than insiders; underdogs are more interesting than overdogs; minorities are more interesting than majorities; losers are more interesting than winners; the powerless are more interesting than the powerful…

You get the idea. The meek may not inherit the earth, but they do inherit the stage, if only because oppression and suffering build character and sharpen survival skills.

So it should follow inevitably that, other things being equal, women will be more interesting than men, blacks will be more interesting than whites, Jews will be more interesting than gentiles, gays will be more interesting than straights, and so on. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better people— just better subjects for drama. That’s why consumptive courtesans like Marie Duplessis become subjects of operas (e.g., La Traviata) and white male powermeisters like George W. Bush don’t.

But this past May, after overdosing on a cast-full of loveable, decent, earnest, innocent, conscientious gay characters in the Philadelphia Theatre Company’s world premiere of Terrence McNally’s musical celebration Some Men— the same sort of harmless gay guys I encountered last year in William Finn’s Elegies— a heretical thought struck me: Could my theory be mistaken when applied to gender preference? Notwithstanding the avalanche of gay-oriented plays that have reached mainstream stages in recent years— and notwithstanding conventional mainstream stereotypes of swishy perverts and exhibitionist drag queens— are gay men and lesbians really relatively boring people?

Men need sex, and women need…

The problem is that the essence of drama is conflict— and there’s ample conflict in the endless dance between the sexes but relatively little conflict in the seduction of one gay man by another. In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins famously complains, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Conversely, Gilbert and Sullivan’s heroine Gianetta, in The Gondoliers, laments, “Ah me, you men will never understand/ 
that woman's heart is one with woman's hand!” Relations between the sexes remain exotic and mysterious because men and women really are wired differently.

The essential difference, according to Rottenberg's Second Law of Gender Relations, is this: Men need to have sex in order to feel good, whereas women need to feel good in order to have sex. Since straight men and women need each other (either for sex or to feel good, or at least to produce children) but also remain largely clueless about each other, relations between the genders offer infinite and universal dramatic possibilities. But no such cluelessness exists between gay men or between lesbians; here the process of finding love (or sex) is less a matter of piercing a mystery than of negotiating a time and place. Can you imagine a homosexual Henry Higgins singing, “Why can’t a gay man be more like a gay man”?

The conflict between gays and straights

Virtually every gay-oriented play or musical with universal appeal derives its drama not from relationships between gays but from gays’ confrontations with the repressive straight world, and from the psychological oppression of being forced to pretend to be something one isn’t. Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart dealt with a gay man’s rejection by his straight family. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America focused (among other things) on Roy Cohn’s obsession with concealing his sexual orientation in order to preserve his power. Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency and Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love dramatized the persecutions of, respectively, Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman. In Elegies, the villain was faceless: AIDS. At this year’s Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Theater Festival, Martin Moran’s The Tricky Part recounted his sexual abuse as a teenager, and Blair Fell’s Naked Will speculated on Shakespeare’s sexuality.

(I was out of town for this June’s Gay Theater Festival, but you can test my thesis for yourself at the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, July 13-25. Click here for details.)

Or consider gay-oriented comedy. Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out parodied the panic of straight athletes upon learning that one of their teammates is gay. La Cage Aux Folles lampooned the efforts of a gay male couple to pose as man and wife in order to land a respectable bride for their straight son. In the 1974 film Groove Tube, Ken Shapiro did a hilarious turn as a closeted gay man desperately deploying every conceivable euphemism in a futile effort to seduce his straight (and oblivious) roommate. In each case the humor, like the drama, derives from confrontations between gays and straights, not gays and gays.

What gays can teach straights

Why, then, does gay theater today command such disproportionate attention on mainstream stages (especially cutting-edge local stages like Philadelphia Theatre Co. and the Wilma)? For the same reason, say, that French and Thai cuisine command disproprtionate attention among American gourmets.

For one thing, the gay-straight chasm does indeed offer powerful dramatic material. For another, gays have plenty to teach us smug straights about sexuality, repressed self-expression and outsider angst. The sheer abundance of brilliant gay playwrights is a factor, too. From Langston Hughes to Tennessee Williams to Caryl Churchill, gay writers have provided some of our most incisive observers of human nature, for good reason: If your collective voice had been stifled for a few thousand years, you too would be bursting with plenty to say once the lid was finally lifted.

But unlike the war between the sexes (which will doubtless continue forever), the war between gays and straights will eventually go the way of most other enmities. A century ago there might have been real drama in a play about a Catholic in love with a Protestant, or a Frenchman in love with a German; no more. And a generation ago you or I might have been shocked to discover that one's son/brother/cousin/boss/teammate/lawyer/accountant was gay. But that Age of Ignorance is rapidly (and thankfully) drawing to a close. (Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, a spoof of sexual roles written in 1980, seemed dated when Wilma revived it this year.) For this enlightenment, ironically, we can thank today’s generation of openly gay writers. But from here on, their challenge will be: What do you do for an encore?


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