A strange thing is happening to what is, to me, recent gay history: it’s being made holy.
I’m thinking of director Joe Mantello’s TV version of playwright Mart Crowley’s 1968 script, The Boys in the Band, for instance. Mantello’s interpretation is an endless parade of Noble Agony. “Oh my God! Those poor gay men! How they suffered!” What bullshit. The movie version of The Boys in the Band inspired me to come out at 17. I was aware that it was a lot like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it was my version of Virginia Woolf. Besides, it promised cashmere sweaters and sandalwood soap. I was in! And those characters weren’t passive martyrs. At that time, to me, in that context, which I was living, they were fucking funny — and they were using humour to survive.
I’m also thinking of The Inheritance, a matched pair of plays by Matthew Lopez. I only saw Part 1 because it wrecked me with grief — and infuriated me because I felt like I’d been had: the script didn’t deserve my tears. The Inheritance deals with “the generation lost to AIDS”, my generation, so it pushed my buttons, which are very accessible on that subject — but the play hadn’t earned the right to push them. The Inheritance — Part 1, at least — is a superficial imitation of Tony Kushner’s exquisite and fully lived-in Angels in America. Both the plays that constitute Angels in America are complex. Part 1 of The Inheritance trots out the grief the pandemic inflicted without offering any deep understanding of it. In The Inheritance, the suffering associated with the crisis becomes a kind of iconic, heroic — and exploitable — abstraction, and that’s a disservice.
I had similar problems with playwright Nick Green’s Casey and Diana.
Set in Toronto’s AIDS hospice Casey House in 1991, at the height of the pandemic, it was inspired by Princess Diana’s real-life visit to the facility that year. In the play, she meets Thomas. Having outlived several roommates at Casey House, Thomas is on the brink of death himself but, when he hears Diana is coming in a week, he becomes determined to live seven more days.
That’s where the nonsense starts. In the fractured timeline, which skips between the real and the imagined, Thomas and Diana talk about the ringing they both hear, the sound of Hope. Thomas, who hasn’t left his bed in two weeks, starts striding around the facility delivering inspiring speeches about how all the residents need to stay alive until Diana gets there. The tone is heroic — and stupid. I can’t imagine anybody who actually lived through that time indulging in this kind of hagiography.
Another example. Thomas’s young roommate Andre has barely had a chance to experience gay life or gay culture. Marjorie, who volunteers at Casey House, tries to give Andre a gift by describing to him, in detail, the ecstatic seediness of Frankie’s, a largely gay brunch hangout, where Thomas waited tables. I experienced Marjorie’s intention as touching, in a way, but also annoying because, dramaturgically, it comes across as a deliberate celebration of a non-existent Golden Age of Queerdom. In 1991, folks would have loved a place like Frankie’s and mourned the hard times that had hit its community, but nobody would have self-consciously held up Frankie’s as an iconic anthropological artifact.
People were living places like Frankie’s, just as they were living places like Casey House. They weren’t making them into myths.
I’m going to make another significant complaint and then get into the stuff I appreciated.
Under Andrew Kushnir’s direction, virtually all the performances in this production are too big — too reductive and stylized.
Damien Atkins, who’s playing Thomas, has a beautifully flexible vocal instrument. Unfortunately, we can see him playing it, repeatedly hitting low notes for Thomas’s undercutting comic punchlines, and playing every other rhythm as though it were a predetermined musical exercise. As Diana, Lindsey Angell is so caught up in the mechanics of impersonation — Diana’s cocked head, her gentle delivery — that her characterization borders on the robotic. And Nora McLellan overindulges in comic showboat-ery as Marjorie. (She’s more successful with the pathos of the character’s undercurrents.) Emma Slipp, who’s playing Thomas’s estranged sister Pauline, hollers her way through Act 1.
In the more positive column, Ivy Charles is appropriately businesslike as a nurse named Vera. And Alan Dominguez (Andre) delivers the most consistently successful performance of the evening because, in its understatement, it feels true.
But let’s get back to Pauline. When Thomas received his AIDS diagnosis, Pauline, his older sister and longtime protector, abandoned him. The painful story of their attempted reconciliation — not Thomas’s idolization of Diana — is the true heart of the play. It takes too long for playwright Green to establish the centrality of this narrative but, when he finally does — in a heartbreaker of a scene in Act 2 — Casey and Diana finally lands, Atkins reveals more of the soul of his performance, and Slipp’s true capacity as an actor is on full, glorious display.
Casey and Diana takes its time moving towards its final curtain but, somewhere after the three-quarter mark of the second act, there’s a passage that’s so transcendent and profoundly moving that Casey and Diana becomes a different play. I’ll leave all that for you to discover if you choose to do so.
Most of this production did not fire for me, but that passage is a stunner.
CASEY AND DIANA by Nick Green. Directed by Andrew Kushnir. An Arts Club Theatre production. At the Stanely Industrial Alliance Stage until May 25. (Tickets and information)
PHOTO CREDIT: Damien Atkins and Lindsey Angell (Photo by Moonrider Productions. Costumes — Diana’s are particularly excellent throughout — by Alison Green)
0 Comments