Pictured Confessions of a Mormon Boy. Moises Kaufman. Take Me Out. Silk Road Theatre Project's Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith.
Last week, Mary Shen Barnidge and Rick Reed gave their takes on 2005 theater. WCT Theater Editor Jonathanl Abarbanel gives his views on 2005 GLBT theater below.
The universe of GLBT theater in 2005 opened in January with a one-man show at Bailiwick, Confessions of a Mormon Boy, continued with another one-man show in August at Bailiwick, TV's Leslie Jordan in Like a Dog on Linoleum, and rang out the old year at Bailiwick on New Year's Eve with the final performance of Naked Boys Singing.
However, all that glittered and was gay in theater was NOT exclusively the domain of Bailiwick. The Goodman Theatre went quasi-gay in January by bringing I Am My Own Wife back to town for a month. The Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play by Doug Wright had been developed in Chicago a year earlier by About Face Theatre in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art and director Moises Kaufman. Then in February, Porchlight Music Theatre gave a gay twist to Closer Than Ever, the song cycle about relationships, by having two men play one of the couples in the show, although that's not how it was written. Porchlight put gay themes center stage in March with its two-month festival of the works of composer/lyricist William Finn, most notably In Trousers and March of the Falsettos.
GLBT theater heated up in April as the baseball season started to roll. About Face in association with Steppenwolf Theatre Company presented Richard Greenberg's Tony Award play, Take Me Out, about a gay superstar professional baseball player. The play offered plenty of meaty social commentary and plenty of meat in its celebrated locker room nude scenes. April also saw Eclipse Theatre open a three-play season devoted entirely to the works of gay author Lanford Wilson, among them one of Wilson's most gay-specific works, his early one-act play The Madness of Lady Bright.
May was—er—graced with The Bad Seed: the Musical at Corn Productions, another of that troupe's satires of films, film stars and popular culture. While neither exclusively nor even specifically gay, The Bad Seed: The Musical also was neither exclusively nor specifically NOT gay, if you know what we mean and we think you do.
Back at Bailiwick in June, gay time turned back 400 years for Marlowe, a new play by Harlan Didrickson about supposedly gay Elizabethan playwright, free thinker and spy Christopher 'Kit' Marlowe, a dangerous contemporary of Shakespeare's. The production went on to the New York Fringe Festival. Also appearing at the Fringe Festival was GayCo, Chicago's GLBT sketch comedy group, which took Weddings of Mass Destruction and returned to Chicago with one of the top Fringe Festival prizes.
As we reached the Fourth of July, Hell in a Handbag Productions offered Scarrie: The Musical, another in its string of campy, hit satires of films, film stars and popular culture. While neither exclusively nor even specifically gay, Scarrie: The Musical also was neither exclusively nor specifically NOT gay, if you know what we mean and we think you do!
July and August brought not one, but two productions of Miguel Pinero's jailhouse drama with gay secondary themes, Short Eyes, the first by the Latino Aguijon Theatre Company and the second by Blind Faith Theatre Company. A tough piece of work, there's no love to be lost or found in this show, gay or straight.
September saw the first of two Noel Coward shows as the 2005-2006 theater season began. Circle Theatre in Forest Park made Coward's menage-a-trois comedy, Design for Living, as gay-specific as it's ever been ( and far gayer than the closeted Coward ever would have condoned ) . Then, late in the year, Northlight Theatre launched a revue of Noel Coward songs, A Marvelous Party, allowing his sexual double entendres to speak for themselves.
October saw a late-night musical snatched directly from the national headlines about two male penguins that bonded and hatched an egg. Although they had reservations about the writing and execution of Tuxedo Love, by Theatre 5.2.1., critics agreed that it was a great and clever stand-in for the current debate over gay marriage.
October also saw a rarity, and a very important one, as Chicago Theatre Company, an African-American troupe, took on gay cultural issues in Stage Directions, by L. Trey Wilson. The Chicago Theatre Company has done gay-themed plays before, and is the only one of our city's Black theater troupes willing to address being Black and gay on a continuing basis.
It's even more difficult for Islamic culture to confront gay issues. In theatrical terms, there are very few theaters anywhere in the United States that interpret Islamic or Arabic cultures at all. One that does is Chicago's Silk Road Theatre Project. The troupe's October-December production of Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith, by American-Egyptian author Yusseff El Guindi, includes a gay subplot. The play takes on too many issues, and deals only superficially with the possibility that a son in the family might be gay, but it's a start.
November and December offered the year's final rounds of gay-themed works, among them the regional premiere of Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home at Next Theatre Company, and Caryl Churchill's gender bending Cloud 9 staged by Infamous Commonwealth Theatre Company. For the most part, however, the late-2005 shows were light-hearted holiday fare such as GayCo's newest sketch comedy show, Do You Fear What I Fear?, Bailiwick's It's A FABULOUS Life and Judy's Scary Little Christmas from Hell in a Handbag.
Without doubt, 2006 will prove to be an equally gay gambado.
