The Chicago theater scene is about to lose the gifted out actor and playwright Sentell Harper. He's planning on relocating to Brooklyn soon, so now is the time to catch him locally in Seek and Ye Shall Find, Harper's amazing one-man show for Mortar Theatre Company focusing a guy's love-hate relationship with different people and aspects of the gay Black male community.
"This show is deeply personal because I really feel like even though it's through the characters, it's really my journey," said Harper, who started developing the idea for this one-man show in graduate school at Arizona State University in 2008.
Back then, the show featured only about 15 characters and was drawn from more formalized interviews. But now the dozens more characters Harper portrays in the show have been also drawn from his hometown in Washington, D.C., and from his past five years living in Chicago.
"When I came to Chicago, it was wonderful to be surrounded by other gay Black men," Harper said.
Yet Harper also developed a lot of qualms about many of his peers. For example, there's a vignette in the show where he goes to a Black gay book club meeting and is shocked to discover that he was the only person who actually read the book (The Lovely Bones). The gathering then shifted focus to everyone just listening to the latest Rhianna CD.
"That really did happen!" Harper said with a laugh. "When I was in those situations, I noticed that I myself was passing a lot of judgement and I felt like I didn't fit into this group, so I felt kind of like an outsider, even in this specific community."
One of the amazing things about Harper's show is how he transitions so seamlessly between characters, who are homages to people he knows and have met through the years.
"One of the reason I've always wanted to be an actor is because I love character transformation," Harper said. "It really was my desire and love to make sure that every character was precise."
Harper also tackles a lot of issues facing not only the African-American gay community, but also other communities at large. The "down low" issue of gay men maintaining a straight facade is, of course, brought up, although one character in the show points out that it doesn't just happen in the Black community.
"I did want to tackle HIV and I wanted to look at it not in the terms of 'Oh, I'm so sorry for this gay Black man who has HIV,' I wanted the audience to actually hear from someone who has survived and is surviving his experience," Harper said. "What I love about the character of Shawn, who has HIV, is that he overhears this shade being thrown and instead of him being shunned by it or feeling awful about, it he stands up to it."
One constant that Harper found throughout all his interviews was a lot of men are still dealing with incidents and insecurities from their childhood and early teen years, which became a sort of theme in the show.
"There's a lot of hurt, angry men in the gay Black community. And instead of getting to the root of what's causing that, which could be something that either has to do with something about themselves or has happened to them, what happens is that they blame the outside and I found that's what I did," Harper said. "I took a whole group and started to generalize them and it wasn't until I was able to say to myself, 'Wait a minute, I'm worthy and I'm good enough,' that I was able to open up a little more and allow people to be who they were."
Mortar Theatre Company's Seek and Ye Shall Find continues through Saturday, June 8, at the Apollo Theater Studio, 2540 N. Lincoln Ave. Performances are 3 p.m. Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays, and 7:30 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays. Tickets are $15 and $10 for students; call 773-935-6100 or visit www.mortartheatrecompany.org .
Gay plays in the suburbs
One expects to be able to see prominent gay plays in a major metropolitan city like Chicago. But what about in the traditionally conservative Chicago-area suburbs like the ones in DuPage and Kane counties?
It's interesting to note that Batavia-based Albright Theatre in Kane County recently staged a 20th-anniversary production of Jonathan Harvey's British gay teen drama Beautiful Thing (following Pride Films and Plays, which produced its own 20th-anniversary Chicago staging earlier this season). Meanwhile, Village Theatre Guild, in DuPage County's Glen Ellyn, is just about to open its own production of Geoffrey Naufft's 2010 gay spirituality drama Next Fall just as AstonRep Theatre Company is finishing its run of the show at the BoHo Theatre at Heartland Studios.
And it's not just gay drama making inroads to the suburbs. On the musical side, the new Naperville company Bright Side Theatre this June will stage Rent, Jonathan Larson's award-winning 1996 rock opera which prominently features LGBTQ relationships. The Chicago Gay Men's Chorus has also in recent years performed regularly in Oak Brook at the Mayslake Peabody Estate and plans to perform more in Skokie in the future.
Although Albright has produced shows with gay characters in the past like The Laramie Project and Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, Quirk said that there was some resistance from the Albright Theatre board of directors to Beautiful Thing since it dealt so openly with a gay romantic relationship—particularly between teenagers.
"This is the first show in 40 seasons where there's actually been physical interaction [among gay characters]," said J.P. Quirk, director of Albright Theatre's Beautiful Thing, noting that he received two letters from subscribers who said they felt some of the shows this season "were not appropriate." "We made it very clear that we were not promoting a specific agenda but we also advertised it and made it very clear what the show was about."
Jim Liesz, director of Village Theatre Guild's Next Fall, also says that his venue has received letters from some subscribers saying that they will not be attending Next Fall, but he feels it's important for even suburban theaters to produce shows that challenge audiences. Liesz points out that Village Theatre Guild has also done edgier works with gay characters like Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy and David Marshall Grant's Snakebit in the past.
"What's going on with Proposition 8 in California and gay marriage before the United States Supreme Court, we could not have picked a more relevant time to be doing this piece," said Liesz about Next Fall and the questions it brings up about faith within a gay relationship and how it is tested when an accident occurs. "This play needs to be done and people should see the show."
Quirk was proud to point out that Beautiful Thing ended up being the second highest-grossing show of Albright's season. Yet he's slightly disappointed that Albright's next season is largely traditional fare from the 1940s and 1960s.
"I think [Beautiful Thing] delivered a really great message, especially when we're talking about all sorts of things like teen suicide and teen bullying and yet another state legalizing same-sex marriage," said Quirk. "It's things like this that make me go, 'Guys, look, this is what people want to see. Just because we're in the suburbs doesn't mean we can't be doing shows like this.'"
Village Theatre Guild's Next Fall plays from Friday, May 24, through Saturday, June 15, at the corner of Butterfield Road and Park Blvd., Glen Ellyn. Performances are 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays (plus Thursday, June 13), with 3 p.m. Sunday matinees. Tickets are $18; call 630-469-8320 or visit www.villagetheatreguild.org .
For more LGBTQ shows playing throughout the summer, don't miss the Summer Theater Preview issue of Windy City Times running Wed., May 29.
