After theater artist Brad Winters was strangled and stabbed to death in his Lakeview apartment on Aug. 17, 2003, Visions and Voices Artistic Director Brian Alan Hill embarked on a painful period of introspection.
'I was confronted with the death of a very good friend of mine, a person who was taken in the most brutal way. There was an acute sense of powerlessness—he was gone, and there was nothing that anyone could do,' Hill said.
'Brad's murder made me take a look at my own life and ask, what can I do differently as a human being to reach out? Does theater have the opportunity to affect positive change?' he added.
Hill's urgent internal query—what can I do?—found an outlet in Susan Lieberman's new play Arrangement for Two Violas, running through Sunday, Dec. 19 in a production by Visions and Voices at Chicago Dramatists.
Set in rural Wisconsin, 1938, the play is a love story defined by romance and secrecy. The lovers are Peter, a rural country doctor and violist who insists he is 'content' to live with without passion until he meets Henry, a lung specialist from Milwaukee.
'This play tells a wonderful story, but it also makes you take stock of who yourself, who you are and where you're at,' Hill said. 'The context of the show is between two men. But what it touches on—how we judge other people—is universal.'
Those prone to stereotyping might be quick to dub playwright and Wilmette resident Susan Lieberman—who has been married ( to a man ) for 14 years and the mother of three—as a suburban hausfrau unlikely to pen a play about gay men in the 1930s.
They'd be wrong.
'If you had asked me five years ago whether gays should be allowed to get married and have children, I would have said 'of course.' It was totally a non-issue to me. I mean, why shouldn't they?' she said.
'Since I've written this play, the issue of gay marriage has been politicized and I take it personally. The Defense of Marriage Act makes me enraged. I'm like—'you assholes—why are you doing this?' Lieberman said.
The anger wasn't always present, Lieberman said. Growing up with a gay cousin ( who has died of AIDS ) and parents who were immersed in the world of theater and art, Lieberman never thought to question people's sexuality.
And yet researching Arrangement for Two Violas and thinking back on her own life, Lieberman realized just how unaccepting the world—even her world—could be toward gays, she said.
'I have a wonderful sort of ordinariness in my life,' Lieberman said. 'My husband, my children—we love each other, we can be open about it, and we can express it, and everyone accepts it. It's tremendously empowering.
'But Henry and Peter—they have no chance to be ordinary. They have been robbed of what I consider the best parts of life. Never to have the option of getting married and having kids is tragic,' she said.
'My cousin never came out to our family until after he was diagnosed. Why?' she asks.
Stephen Radar, who plays Henry in the play, addresses the need for such silence with a telling anecdote from his last trip to visit family in the Deep South.
Arriving for Thanksgiving with a new piercing above one eye, Radar expected his family would weigh in vociferously on his new body art. Nobody said a thing.
'Here I was with this piece of metal sticking out of my face and nobody says a word,' Radar recalled. Toward the end of the trip, he mentioned to his mother he thought the lack of reaction was pretty odd.
His mother's reply was classic:
'Honey, if we don't talk about it, it just doesn't exist.'
Such is the denial that Henry and Peter face in Arrangement for Two Violas. Their love for each other can't exist. And therefore once they succumb to their feelings for each other, Henry and Peter are faced with suppressing the very essence of their own existences.
For all the progress that's been made since the play's 1938 setting, suppression is still a part of life today, Radar said. And it can crop up in the most unexpected places.
Several years ago, Radar was doing love scenes as part of a gay couple in the Chicago premiere of William Finn's musical A New Brain.
'I'd get notes from the director—'You're kissing too much and the kisses are too passionate. You're making the straights uncomfortable,' ' Radar recalled. 'I've never gotten a note like that about scenes where I'm kissing a woman.'
Seemingly innocuous language also reveals a chilling lack of acceptance, he noted.
'I've heard people say things like, 'Oh, he acts so gay ever since he came out of the closet.' And I'm like, um, isn't he just being himself now?
'It's like people are comfortable with you to a point. But if you cross the line, watch out.'
In the character of newspaper editor Karl Schuler, Lieberman addresses the insidiousness of intolerance and how a nasty streak of self-righteousness can embed itself just about anybody.
Schuler is Peter's best friend—until he realizes that Peter is in love with Henry. But the newspaperman's knee-jerk judgment doesn't make him a villain, said director Ann Filmer.
'Karl wants to change the world—he's speaking out on Margaret Sanger and socialism and really shaking things up until he is confronted with something in his own backyard. Then it's personal, and he can't deal with it,' director Filmer said.
'We see the moment that he finds out Peter—who has been like a son to him for years—is gay. To anyone that's going to be shocking. I remember being shocked back in college when a friend of mine called me up and said 'I have something to tell you. I'm gay.' You feel like you've never really known this person—that they've been holding something back. And they have,' Filmer said.
In Henry and Peter, Lieberman has penned two characters of wildly divergent temperaments.
Henry, said Radar, 'would definitely be Larry Kramer if he were living today.'
Peter is reserved and far more resigned to living a life where his great love can't be acknowledged publicly.
In a scene that quietly illustrates what the lovers are up against, Henry and Peter make complicated plans to attend a concert in Chicago together, going to great pains to sit in separate sides of the auditorium. That they can't even sit together at a concert without fear of jeopardizing their careers as physicians is among the more heart-rending points Lieberman makes.
'You see the extent that society can interfere with who we are,' Filmer said. 'We humans are all so frail.
'Peter realizes that life is not gong to give him everything he wants and he is just going to accept. Henry is not,' Filmer added. 'Henry wants children and a spouse and he doesn't see why he can't have those things. They reach a point in their relationship where something has to change. I think we've all been in relationships that hit that point, and that makes this a love story everyone—gay and straight—can relate to.'
Radar takes Filmer's point a step farther:
'Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could get to the point where we can talk about this play not as a play about homosexuality but just about two people and their struggle to be together?' he asked.
Arrangement for Two Violas, through Sunday, Dec. 19 at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago.Call ( 312 ) 635-8700 or log on to www.visionsandvoices.org .
