Performance Review: "Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays" more

Access Provided by Columbia University at 05/12/11 4:35AM GMT 120 / Theatre Journal varied, often conflicting attitudes toward gay marriage among contemporary American queers. What emerged was an instructive picture of ambivalence and compromise. The centerpiece of the evening was a series of staged readings of thirteen short plays, each commissioned for the event. Performed in a former synagogue, the performers (including Matthew Broderick, B. D. Wong, Lola Pashalinksi, and Debra Monk) stood, somewhat ironically, where a couple might stand at their wedding. While fundamentally committed to marriage equality, several plays included a critical perspective on its consequences for queer life, particularly the preservation of what Michael Warner has called a “queer ethos,” marked by alternative sexual and political practices. Indeed, two of the first plays presented gay couples squirming toward social transformation. “When gay men move in together, they stop having sex,” protested the male couple in Constance Congdon’s Something Blue; “maybe it’s fear . . . that we’ll lose something.” Similarly, in Holly Hughes, Megan Carney, and Moe Angelos’s Let Them Eat Cake, a militant, unnamed Femme cried to her Butch: “Everything I’ve done in my life has been against this moment.” Nonetheless, both plays participated in the narrative of inevitability made popular by gay marriage proponents. The couple in Something Blue put on wedding tuxedos. The Butch and the Femme, who played their scene in the aisle, sat and participated as spectators in the rest of the evening. These complementary plot structures illustrated how ambivalence is “resolved” by the push for marriage equality. What was left behind—in the back room of a function hall, in the aisle of a theatre—was pride in the legacy of sexual liberation. Discussions of sex were notably absent in the more celebratory plays. The soon-to-be-married grooms in Jordan Harrison’s The Revision adjusted their vows to reflect the reality of disenfranchised married couples: “Do you promise, in the eyes of God and the ever-shifting whims of state and federal constitutional law . . .” Their sense of injustice was politically fermentable, framing the movement as a struggle to render the wedding vow efficacious. Kira Obolensky’s Brave New Words, in which a wordsmith tried to convince her colleagues to make their dictionary’s definition of marriage gender-neutral, bracketed the issue of romantic and sexual politics altogether. When she argued that, “polyamory got in” to an earlier edition, the wordsmith was rebuffed: “That’s love, though. Not marriage.” Behind this discourse stood a tangible need for personal affirmation. Both in Obolensky’s play and Marcus Gardley’s One Last March to Rome, in which The truck stop’s band (Rhonda Coullet, Jason Edwards, David Miles Keenan, James Cruce, and David Jackson) was similarly constricted. Although this group performed every musical number, it was incongruously placed behind the actors. And while a lone band member might sporadically mosey through the diner, the musicians most often delivered the driving rhythms of the iconic (yet mostly nonintegrated, nonspecific, and diversionary) songs from stationary upstage positions. Further, as the production progressed, the characters’ nonparticipation in the numbers became particularly jarring. Although the truckers and their wives appeared to enjoy the musical reveries, their static involvement (metronomic head-bobbing/toe-tapping) undermined much of the score’s power. In short, these characters were seemingly deprived of the chance to vocally and physically invest in the musical soundtrack of their lives. All of the aforementioned elements culminated in a particularly illuminative moment. After Hartman recounted the loss of his truck after thirty years, the band performed “This Old Road” while he stood pensively downstage, flanked by projected photographs of a young, proud man and his rig. Ironically, during this interlude, it was the real-life trucker in the untouched photo who commanded the stage and whose authentic story begged to be told, exemplifying the overall missed opportunity by Mama to truly examine the soul, psyche, and modern-day crisis of an original American Joe. PAMyLA A. STIEHL University of Colorado at Boulder STANDING ON CEREMONy: THE GAy MARRIAGE PLAyS. Readings of plays by various authors. New York Theatre Workshop, Angel Orensanz Center, New York City. 14 June 2010. No activist movement arises from a rational, naturally occurring consensus; instead, movements mask contradictory emotions within the social groups they represent, channeling some political feelings while restraining others, as organizers determine what is politically possible and desirable for their constituents. Sometimes, usually in private and counter-public spaces, feelings with no place in a movement’s narrative are spontaneously given voice, and the mechanics of compromise and participation become visible. Last June, Standing on Ceremony, a one-nightonly theatrical event and fundraiser in support of same-sex marriage, provided a cross-section of the PERFORMANCE REVIEW / 121 Christopher Sieber, the Reverend Canon Thomas P. Miller, S.T.M. Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, and Wilson Jermaine Heredia in Pablo and Andrew at the Altar of Words, along with other cast members from Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays. (Photo: Gabrielle Sierra, courtesy of Broadwayworld.com.) a pair of black civil rights veterans argue over the marriage movement’s controversial lineage with their struggle, love between a same-sex couple was affirmed by the endorsement of gay marriage. These moments, represented in quiet and barely acknowledged asides, may be read either as the “real” argument for same-sex marriage or as the inscription of sex as an act affirmed within marriage’s confines—indeed, these two readings may not be incompatible. Complementing these more personal expressions of the issue, Paul Rudnick’s The Gay Agenda and Doug Wright’s On Facebook used comedy to register the exhaustion of queers and their allies in combating the hypocritical assertion that opposing marriage equality is not “discrimination.” Rudnick aimed his typically eviscerating satire against a bubbly, high-strung Ohio housewife giving a “Focus on the Family”–style speech. She explained how she “loves” her “same-sex couple” neighbors except for their “Gay Agenda,” which manifested as a disembodied “gay voice” that, whenever the men were around, made catty comments about her dishware and her shoes. On Facebook dramatized a Facebook thread in which Beverly, an opponent of gay marriage, quarreled with the author’s online compatriots while insisting, “I’m sure we could all be friends.” Wright’s play presented a classic gay marriage consensus: a variety of genders, races, sexual identities, and romantic entanglements standing up against oppression. This vision of a unified queer constituency motivated by the salvific potential of gay marriage was delicately subverted, however, in Moisés Kaufman’s London Mosquitoes, perhaps the finest play of the evening. An elderly man (played by Judd Hirsch) delivered a eulogy for his late lover in which he explained that getting married would have made their “fifty years” together seem invalid. This moment was a brief, dismissive detour in a broader narrative about human progress, coded in evolutionary terms, that concluded with the dying lover’s insistence that, as same-sex lovers, “We can’t mate with the rest of the world. . . . We’re the new species. . . . We will save the world.” Without fanfare, Kaufman’s play quietly dismissed the link between same-sex marriage and its most common discursive companions, progress and gay self-affirmation. The question of what to do with the variety of affective and political positions expressed in Standing on Ceremony was answered, in part, by the evening’s conclusion. By presenting José Rivera’s Pablo and Andrew at the Altar of Words as the evening’s finale, the broader dramaturgy of Standing on Ceremony recalled the final moments of Something Blue and Let Them Eat Cake: the resolution of ambivalent feelings through a critical but sincere act of support for gay marriage. The cast members from the other plays returned to witness the fictional marriage of Pablo and Andrew. Rivera’s couple rewrote the language of their ceremony to celebrate their particular expectations of wedded life—including “utterly nasty” sexual indulgence. The play’s, and the evening’s, final line innocently marked an honest way forward for reluctant queers faced with the seemingly/hopefully inevitable march toward marriage equality. After Pablo’s last line, Andrew mischievously turned to the congregation and said, “He improvised that last part.” JASON FITZGERALD Columbia University PROMISES, PROMISES. Book by Neil Simon. Music by Burt Bacharach. Lyrics by Hal David. Directed and choreographed by Rob Ashford. Broadway Theatre, New York City. 10 July 2010. Nostalgia reigns as the zeitgeist of 2010. In its first Broadway revival, the 1968 musical Promises, Promises, which is set in New York, speaks to an American audience feverishly watching television’s Mad Men and gazing at a more prosperous past. While his production capitalizes on the musical’s vintage appeal, Rob Ashford’s staging is hardly enveloped in a rosy, nostalgic haze. The revival is sensitively