The Play's The Thing

Over the weekend, one of my coworkers and invited me to go see the play The Little Dog Laughed at a local theater with her and her husband. I initially was unenthusiastic about it -- by initially, I mean when I first read the title -- until I read the description of the play:

Diane is a Hollywood superagent who likes to order her Cobb Salad with everything on the side, but finds it a wee bit harder to control the accompaniments that flavor the life of her #1 actor client. While she struggles to transform her budding leading man into the next Orlando Bloom, she encounters one small problem. He may well be falling hard for the cute male escort who recently visited his hotel room in New York.

Interesting enough subject matter. Plus, the description of the play on the website is also accompanied by this warning:

Contains Strong Language, Adult Content and Male Nudity

Male nudity?? That's my favorite kind of nudity!

(The nekkid parts, so to speak, were very brief, and I found myself concentrating on their faces intently during that part. It's a skill I honed when I had to pick my grandmother up from the bathroom floor numerous times in the late 90s.)

The description sort of made it sound like a Noel Coward sex comedy, or maybe something by Joe Orton. And that is a good thing. Plus, I hadn't been to any sort of live theater in a very, very long time, possibly since I last went to the Shaw Festival in Ontario. (Hopefully I'll get to go again this season. I need to see more plays.)

The play was very good: watching it, it seemed a little old fashioned, although it does involve a major pet peeve of mine -- the idea that only straight men seem are allowed to play gay characters in TV and films. Not just straight men, but vociferously straight men. What's up with that? They can't find any gay actors in Hollywood? Pardon me if I remain skeptical.

The audience was an interesting mix: about 2/3 older, obviously straight couples, people who I guessed had a subscription for tickets at this theater, and 1/3 of the the audience were groups of gay men. A fair number of seats were empty, and I wasn't sure whether this was a normal thing, or if this was due to the nature of the material. And a few people did not return after the intermission. One guy even left during the first act, which honestly made me feel bad for the actors who had to keep acting as he walked right out of the performance, even if it apparently is not an isolated incident.

Anyways, during the play, I did notice something peculiar -- namely, my discomfort when the gay characters did, well, gay things. Not because I don't want to see them -- anytime I can see some sort of representation of who I am, I appreciate it -- but because I'm conscious of the straight people with me, and what they think. I'm conscious of when they sigh and look at their watches halfway through the first act. I'm conscious of their tenseness. I had a similar experience when I visited Provincetown with my brother, his girlfriend, and my parents: I was extremely conscious that my mom was looking at a Tom of Finland poster in a shop window. And also the time in AmeriCorps when Dave and I went to see Brokeback Mountain in the theater, and we got to the part of the movie that featured the two leads having angry, desperate, unpleasant-seeming sex in the tent.

Apparently I view myself as some gay diplomatic representative in the lives of the straight people around me, responsible for their feelings and beliefs about gay people, a feeling that has only gotten more pronounced since I've moved to Virginia. Which is odd, since I have a lot more interaction with gay folks here than I ever did in West Palm Beach.

I wonder whether I'm the only person that feels this sort of thing? It's a defensive reaction, and one that drives me nuts. Why can't I just enjoy the play, and to hell with whether anybody else does? Their acceptance of me as a person is not contingent on whether they like the play or not. (The consensus seemed to be that they liked the second half better than the first, although my coworker lamented the "sad" ending.) Neither this play, nor Tom of Finland, really represents my experience as a gay man.

I don't really know what I'm trying to say. It's just been on my mind since I've seen it.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the play. I found, in the first act, when most of the interaction was between the two male actors, I tended to be very conscious of the artificiality of the language; during the second act, when the two female actors interacted with the men, it seemed to flow a lot better. I don't really know if this was due to my hyper-consciousness in the first half, although one of the coworkers mentioned something similar.

The second part also tended to be very "meta", with the action being described in theatrical language even as its happening, which was a neat trick, and something I don't see very often. And it also manages to make the traditional, Hollywood-happy-ending, seem melancholy and compromised, hence my co-worker's comment about the sad ending.

Overall, in spite of my discomfort, it was a good experience, and I would be interested in seeing more productions at the Barksdale Theater.