Alex Lubischer wants you to know that The Xylophone West is not like most LGBT plays about bullying. Although it shares a certain kinship with The Laramie Project, the young playwright is not simply adding his own thoughts to the "It Gets Better" project.
The Xylophone West—which opened last Friday at the Red Tape Theater, 621 W. Belmont Ave., courtesy The Fine Print Theatre Company—centers on Patrick, a victim of constant bullying by other kids at his high school. He hatches the idea to try running away with his only friend at the school, but a nightmarish accident occurs that forces him to confront them. All of this drama is set in a small Nebraska town.
"Patrick must come into his own, figure out who he is in this very athletic, hetero-normative traditionally masculine environment," Lubischer said. "What sets it apart is that it's a very masculine, athletic, movement-based play."
"Xylophone" will mark Lubischer's Chicago debut. In fact, the play's selection for production by Fine Print, which happened through his friend and the play's director, Josh Sobel, essentially brought him to Chicago in September.
It was only a few years ago that Lubischer had even decided to commit to becoming a playwright. He attended the University of Southern California with the intention of studying acting but became more and more interested in writing. His first play, Acts of Contrition, won Best Concurrent Play Lab Script at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in 2008. The summer after he graduated in 2009, he attended the Theatermakers Intensive at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., where he had his epiphany to become a writer.
Despite time in Los Angeles and Connecticut, the foundation of The Xylophone West comes from Lubischer's experience growing up in rural Nebraska. He said the play couldn't take place anywhere else.
"There's not a lot dialogue in rural towns and problems can arise for LGBT people in those communities," he said. "Closeted individuals must fend for themselves until they get out. That isolation is really unique to The Xylophone West."
Showing the challenges of what Lubischer described as places "where they believe an LGBT person has never come out of that town" and where "It Gets Better is a fictitious reality" motivated him to write the play.
"Telling these stories is the way of saying this exists and in more conservative parts of the country, that's where it starts," Lubischer said. "This exists. This is a real thing. [The play] doesn't say conservative people are bigoted—it doesn't have that stance at all. This is a real problem and an important thing we need to deal with now in this country."
Lubsicher said he wanted the play to be appreciated in different ways by both the traditional liberal theatergoer and a more conservative audience. He was, consequently, anxious recently when a great aunt from Nebraska visited him in Chicago and wanted to see the play. He warned her about the nature of the content, but Lubischer said she was very moved by it.
Creating a play that would have a greater universality to it was very important to Lubischer.
"I didn't write it to be topical or make political statement," he said. "I wanted to try and write a play about bravery, bravery to become okay and accept yourself, but also the bravery of a community to have empathy. It takes a certain amount of bravery to say everything around me says this is wrong, but I'm going to treat [LGBT people] with dignity and worth."
The Xylophone West draws on his own experience growing up, though in terms of his own sexuality, Lubischer did not begin to come out as bisexual until very recently.
"This is not a play I would've been able to write even two years ago," he said. "So much was born out of this need to write a story I was afraid to write and to find that bravery for myself as an artist."
As for the play's cryptic title, Lubischer doesn't want to ruin anything for audiences, but said that it was inspired by the lyrics to an old Tom Waits song.
The Xylophone West runs through April 4. Tickets are available through Article Link Here as well as Article Link Here .
