Offscript - Less than fabulous

When gay plays succumb to stereotypes

It’s no secret that the gay sensibility — for lack of a better term — strongly influences live theater. Gay playwrights, directors, designers and actors give the art form an incalculable amount of style and energy. In America’s current culture, drama provides essentially the frontline forum for hashing out our society’s changing views toward homosexuality and vice versa.

Considering Atlanta’s reputation as a gay mecca, it seems strange that “queer plays” seem to be suffering such a slump. For months I’ve been watching plays with gay roles rely on tired stereotypes and threadbare conflicts.

Arch drag queens (Whole World’s Sordid Lives and Process Theatre’s Journeys) and otherwise catty caricatures (Essential Theater’s Most Fabulous Story Ever Told) have aimed for disappointingly predictable laughs, like the duo who exclaim “Fabulous” in unison at the end of the Alliance Theatre’s A Death in the House Next Door to Kathleen Turner’s House on Long Island.

Even the less comic roles prove overly familiar. The opera-quoting roommate in Actor’s Express’ Burn This probably didn’t seem like such a cliche when the play premiered in the late ’80s, but today it looks like the template for a zillion other gay best pals. Works with serious themes, like the coming-out drama of Jewish Theatre of the South’s Visiting Mr. Green, or the death-with-dignity issues of Journeys provide muffled echoes of earlier, stronger plays on the same subjects.

As a straight theater-goer, I know it’s not my place to say what gay audiences should or shouldn’t find offensive. I’m not necessarily the target audience for these shows, and nobody’s asking me to consult on “Straight Way for the Gay Play.”

But for a community that prides itself on diversity and inclusiveness, it’s surprising to see such a narrow range of personalities. It’s as if Theatre Gael only cast chipper Irish pub-crawlers with a gift for blarney.

Especially welcome would be more scripts that reflect the flux and complexity in the gay community, like Steve Murray’s Rescue & Recovery and Terence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (recently staged at Onstage Atlanta). Drag queens can do more than croon show tunes and quip about pumps and hairdos. Two of the most compelling roles of any orientation in the past several years happen to be East German transvestites: Hedwig in the glam musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Charlotte in Doug Wright’s new Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning I Am My Own Wife. Both shows rely on knotty portrayals of identity and self-expression, not just female impersonation.

Fortunately, some upcoming productions tackle less conventional material. In September, Theatre Gael presents Terence McNally’s musical A Man of No Importance, in which a humble Dubliner examines his own sexuality when staging Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

This spring, Theatre in the Square presents one of the most celebrated gay plays of recent years, Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winner Take Me Out, in which a major league baseball player outs himself. While Take Me Out could easily draw a crowd to Actor’s Express, Horizon or either of the Alliance Theatre stages, it bows on Theatre in the Square’s modest, 125-seat Alley Stage. Producing artistic director Palmer Wells explains that the Alley Stage tends to be the playhouse’s venue for edgy fare, and permits an extended run if the show proves a hit.

Still, campy roles remain in force, with Neighborhood Playhouse staging the cross-dressing musical La Cage Aux Folles through July 11 and Onstage Atlanta presenting the drag-heavy comedy Eula Mae’s Beauty, Bait and Tackle through July 17. But 7 StagesWizzer Pizzer in 2005 promises to turn images of drag queens and kings upside down with its comic take on “curing” homosexuality.

Steve Murray says swishy characters “wouldn’t exist if the audiences for them didn’t.” It puts a different spin on the rallying cry, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” But since we are used to it, what next?

Long play’s journey into night

If Twinhead Theatre’s Whatever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts were a DVD, it would be a multidisc box set. Twinhead’s inaugural production features five actors in 100 roles in a 10-hour play, presented in two acts per night for four nights.

Originally a one-woman “performance novel” written and acted by New York playwright Heather Woodbury, Whatever tells a sprawling, transcontinental story a la Charles Dickens in the modern United States. Twinhead artistic director Deisha Oliver worked with Woodbury to develop the show’s slightly less demanding five-person ensemble version, to be performed by Diana Brown, Barbara Tushbant, James Yates, Rob Bullard and Kristi DeVille.

Oliver, who directs Whatever, says each act runs about 70 minutes, and while each evening’s production works as a self-contained story, the play proves most satisfying in its entirety.

Whatever plays July 8-18 at the Top Shelf of Dad’s Garage Theatre, and then “reconvenes” July 25 for a one-day, 10-hour marathon production at Eyedrum. (404-587-2566, twinheadtheatre@yahoo.com.)

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com