Shrunken Heads and Enlarged Egos

Quoted in Another Article at The Fix

2011-11-07T09:52:00.001-08:00

Sobriety: Better Than Prozac!

A new study finds that people in recovery are happier than their non-alcoholic peers.
Image:

High or just happy?

By Rachael Brownell

Newcomers aren't always the happiest campers. The early days can be all about withdrawal, misery, and a struggle to stay away from that first drink. But many of those who stick around begin to feel sensation that "normal" people would call happiness. This is tempered, of course, with references to all the messiness of life—ill health, marital troubles, financial challenges—but to the AA veteran, these are part of accepting “life on life’s terms.” When I was new, I used to look around at the happy sober people and think I’d stumbled on a secret society of blissed-out spiritualists with horrible distant pasts. “We are not a glum lot,” says the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, referring to the sometimes eerily upbeat nature of many meetings. So are alcoholics and addicts in recovery actually happier than "normal" people?

According to Christopher Murray, a New York-based psychotherapist, “folks in recovery have learned to manage their emotions without reaching for a substance in order to let loose. Perhaps the step work and the sharing and anxious phone calls at three in the morning have taught them how to access all their feelings with greater ease.”

Complete article here!

Quoted in The Fix

2011-10-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

How To Get High (Naturally)

We all know how to take a drink or pill to reach an ecstatic state. But you can also get high without spending a dime—or losing your sobriety.

By Rachael Brownell

10/24/11

Since the beginning of time, humans have enjoyed getting high. From peyote to fasting, from booze to orgasm, people love to alter their consciousness and feel good. Some argue that addicts and alcoholics crave this transcendence more than the average person, noting that our brains are just wired differently. And this is a bit of a pickle for those in recovery, particularly those of us who don’t believe someone can actually be high on things like knitting or laundry or scrapbooking. I don’t know about you but I like boom-boom big pleasure: I want dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and zippy laugh-riot good times. While I’ve learned that a lot of those big highs come with devastating lows, there are many people in recovery who’ve learned how to get those natural highs without the long-term losses associated with our using days.

Full article here!

2011-04-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

Stanley Stellar, Mitch (from upcoming Leslie Lohman show)

Gay Gallery Seeks Museum Status, Funding

By Christopher Murray
April 26, 2011 | 7:41 p.m

"I guess they focus on a particular kind of art here," drawled Emily Germain dryly, as she sauntered into Soho's Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation on 26 Wooster Street on a wet Saturday. Ms. Germain, a petit and unfazeable 27-year-old, is finishing up her masters in social work at N.Y.U. and dropped into the gallery on a whim. Its current show, "Four Visions", features paintings by a quartet of artists who don't shy away from depicting specifics of the male form and, in some cases, several male forms combining in erotic acts and poses. "There are a lot of penises here," she said.

The Leslie/Lohman gallery, named for its founders, Charles W. Leslie, and his partner, J. Frederic "Fritz" Lohman, who passed away in 2009, has been presenting erotic and often explicit work by "unambiguously" gay artists, mostly men, since its founding in a modest storefront space in Soho in 1990.

Now, the gallery, which is a nonprofit foundation known for the 4,000 works in its collection, its provocative fare and its lively parties, is on a mission to go mainstream. The centerpiece of the plan is to win designation as a museum in a New York State Board of Regents vote next month. CUNY art history professor James M. Saslow, author of Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, a board member, is shepherding their application for museum status through the byzantine State Department of Education. So far, it's gotten a "favorable review" and the Department of Education passed it along to the Regents, who have the final say in May. The Regents normally greenlights the Department's recommendations.

Mr. Leslie can't be sure of what will happen, but he knows of no formal opposition to his museum dreams at this time. And the proposal does dovetail with the state's stated goals to boost diversity in their cultural tourism offerings. For the gallery, the designation as museum would mean greater acceptance, and the public and private grant dollars that might follow.

"We've been struggling in the darkness for many years," Mr. Leslie said recently. "These efforts will help us help gay art continue morphing into something much broader and bigger."

Certainly, the gay perspective, the queer aesthetic, so to speak, is not hidden under a decoratively hand-painted bushel in contemporary culture. But explicit art of any kind, gay or straight, with the exception of the tasteful anatomical study, remains on the margins.

The National Portrait Gallery's controversial "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" exhibition, which closed in mid-February, was a watershed event in both the art and gay communities. It underscored the historical significance of gay art as well as its continuing position as a lightning rod in the culture wars. Still, "Hide/Seek" had a markedly lower penis-to-frame ratio than almost any Leslie/Lohman exhibition.

Tim Webster, 24, a Brooklyn artist in the M.F.A. program at Hunter College, thinks the gallery's mission to preserve gay art of earlier eras, and particularly the work and collections of those who perished of AIDS, has been "enormously valuable." At the same time, he didn't fully endorse its programming, "There's more to the gay experience than the kind of sex we have." Mr. Webster has been to several of the popular and scene-y openings at Leslie/Lohman, and while they were fun, he also found them "a little tacky, with shirtless bartenders."

"Well, no one was having sex behind the bar," said Jerry Kajpust, the gallery's director of external affairs. "Look at advertising, half-naked men and women attract people. That's just a fact."

Art collector Mark Grischke, a fashion stylist and editorial director, came across the Leslie/Lohman gallery in the early '90s, "when it was hiding in plain sight on Prince Street and it was thrilling to discover this haven where I could see gay art, meet gay artists and start collecting." His original purchase of gay art, a Robert W. Richards charcoal of a handsome man dangling a high-heeled shoe from his lips, was bought off the wall during his first visit to Leslie/Lohman, and the piece remains his favorite. "It's both perfectly respectable and slightly louche," he grins.

Writer and longtime Leslie/Lohman supporter Perry Brass sees three stages in gay art in the Unite States. "There's before Stonewall, when gay artists remained hidden or encoded; then there was the post-1969 Stonewall Rebellion period," which ushered in the gay civil rights movement. "That was a real 'Hold your hats and hallelujah, Mama's going give it to you' period," said Mr. Brass, quoting Stephen Sondheim's lyrics in Gypsy, the musical, to describe the cascade of art both commercially successful and exuberant, or AIDS-era defiant and imperative, like Robert Mapplethorpe or David Wojnarowicz.

Now, we're in a "post-Brokeback Mountain era," Mr. Brass said, trying to define what a gay artist is and "how far the identity can stretch," even as some gays seem intent on pushing for "same as" status with heterosexuality, all wedding bands and carpooled kids, and art where the sexuality of the artist is moot.

Mr. Brass praises Mr. Leslie as a kind of impresario championing artists whose work has not found a place elsewhere. "Charles literally invented artists" by given them a platform when homophobia or queasiness threatened to strangle any sustaining lifeline for their development. When asks what speaks to him most in art, Mr. Leslie describes "the romantic aesthetic, an erotic frisson, and I find art with political content thrilling."

The aspirations of Leslie/Lohman are to expand to a three-headed entity: part gallery where art can be purchased; part foundation to support gay artists and collect their work; and part museum to show and educate the public about the art of this community.

But at the end of the day, for the viewer, it's all about what kind of work you like and where you feel comfortable hanging it. For some collectors, including a Financial District psychotherapist whose home-office practice is comprised mostly of attorneys and bankers, pieces purchased from Leslie/Lohman are strictly relegated to "bedroom art" status.

As for Ms. Germain, she judged the work on her visit "like porn ... but artistic." She doesn't think her boyfriend would allow her to have erotic art in their apartment, but "everybody loves nudity, but some people are afraid to say it." She turned to another work featuring several creatively intertwined male bodies. "O.K., well, that's a little graphic."

editorial@observer.com

Dating Offline article in WSJ

2011-03-22T06:17:00.000-07:00

A quick mention in Elizabeth Bernstein's clever "Bonds" column in the Wall Street Journal today...

Scary New Dating Site: the Real World

Dear Lonely Hearts: Do you spend hours at your computer, clicking through pages of single people on online dating sites? Are you exhausted from tweaking your profile, updating your photos and emailing potential matches? Are you sick and tired of feeling rejected when so many of them don't answer?

Lisa Jenkins, 42, met her fiancé, Ian Stickler, 41, after they each volunteered to work on a fund-raiser.

It may be time for you to break up with online dating and try meeting a mate in the scary, old-fashioned way: face to face.

For generations, people met at parties, in church or synagogue, through friends, even—horror of horrors—at work. But then we went online. We began making friends on Facebook and trolling for potential partners on websites like Match.com and eHarmony.

Sometimes it works. You probably know at least one couple who met online. I know half a dozen. But there's something that's easy to lose sight of: These happy folks aren't typical. Most people never meet their soul mate online. "It's exhausting," says Kate Wachs, a Chicago psychologist and author of "Relationships for Dummies." "People burn out really fast."

Before you even get started, you have to create your marketing pitch—get some decent photos, write an engaging profile, sometimes take a personality test. Then you scan hundreds, maybe thousands, of profiles and compose emails to the people you want to meet. If all this doesn't wear you out, the actual dates will.

That's, of course, if anyone bothers to email back. A lawsuit filed in December and seeking class-action status in U.S. District Court in Dallas alleges more than half the profiles on Match.com are "inactive, fake or fraudulent." Match.com general manager Mandy Ginsberg says the site's full-time fraud-prevention team works to identify and block fake profiles, including IP addresses that are in specific countries where fraud is prevalent or that try to set up multiple profiles. There are 1.7 million paid subscribers on the site, Ms. Ginsberg says, and fraud happens to very few of them.

"Online dating is a lot of time for very little return," says Jeff Koleba, 31, a Manhattan consumer-brand manager. At one point, he had active profiles on five dating sites. He says he found it draining to come home each night and study profiles, draft clever emails to the women he was attracted to—and then often receive no response. He recently quit online dating.

Now, Mr. Koleba tries to meet women when he is out and about—taking improvisational comedy classes, playing on a co-ed intramural soccer team, exercising with a runners group. "It's easy to talk, because we already share a common interest," he says. "So at least you'll usually get a decent conversation, even if it winds up going nowhere dating-wise."

Where can you meet Mr. or Ms. Right without going online (or to a bar)? I've asked around and heard these suggestions: Home Depot. The airport. The supermarket produce section. (Whole Foods and Trader Joe's have "the best looking and healthiest prospects," according to a musician friend of mine.)

I had some luck recently at a triathlon finish line in Miami—and I didn't even have to break a sweat. I was there with my sister, Rachel, to cheer on my brother-in-law, J.J., who was running in his first race. I was waiting on a breakwall by the water when a handsome man in running shorts sat down next to me. He asked if I was waiting for a husband or boyfriend, and I suddenly developed a southern accent: "Whah noooo, Ahm not!"

Then it hit me: Here was a mass of people in skimpy outfits who were clearly very fit—and had their ages written right on the back of their calves! It was easy to find things to say. We chatted about the race. Mr. Triathlon got to brag a little, and I got to show my nurturing side, asking concerned questions and offering to get him more water. I was having a great time—until my sister appeared abruptly and announced that her husband was exhausted and we needed to leave immediately. (It took two days, but I did start speaking to her again.)

Last year, Karen Jordan methodically told her friends, family and acquaintances that she was looking to meet a man who was "kind, generous, accomplished yet humble." "To me, it's just like when you are looking for a new job," says Ms. Jordan, owner of a Los Angeles skin-care company. "It's a matter of asking for help." She met her boyfriend through someone in her church choir.

After Lisa Jenkins, 42, a Clarkston, Wash., marketing consultant, got divorced several years ago, she came up with a method she calls "reverse stalking." Once or twice a week, she frequented places she found interesting—bookstores, art galleries, a bistro, a charity—at about the same time of day. "People who might be interested in you know where to find you when they finally get up the courage to ask you out," she says.

While volunteering on a fund-raiser for a local college art center, she met another volunteer, who asked her to lunch. Three years later, they are engaged. "I am very glad I didn't leave it to chance," Ms. Jenkins says.

Christopher Murray, 43, a Manhattan social worker, invited all his single gay friends to a game night at his apartment. Twelve men ate pizza and played a charades-like game called "celebrity" (you divide into teams and try to guess the names of famous people). Mr. Murray says the activity "allowed people to be interactive and work on a project together." His friend, Manhattan artist Joseph Cavalieri, 50, says, "It puts so much less pressure on you, because it's a group of people, so you are more relaxed."

How can you meet more people offline? Ask everyone you know for help. Be specific about what you are looking for, though, so you'll only get introductions to people who might actually be good matches.

When you volunteer with your local alumni club, fund-raising event or political campaign, sign up for the job that gives you an excuse to call others.

Become the designated photographer at weddings, bar mitzvahs and other events. Shooting video of Uncle Phil's 90th birthday requires you to wander around and talk to people without being self-conscious.

Put down the device. Get your head out of your smartphone, computer or iPad. You won't seem approachable if no one can see your face.

Smile more. Pretend you're on vacation, which is a time when most people are more relaxed, seem more approachable and talk more to strangers.

Travel in business class. People are less grumpy, more chatty. And there are free drinks.

Move to a neighborhood or a building that seems to have lots of people you'd like to meet.

Borrow a cute puppy and walk it someplace with sidewalk cafés. Or take it to the dog run. But be sure to own up to the fact that it isn't your dog: You don't want to get caught in a lie before your first date.

—Write to Elizabeth Bernstein at bonds@wsj.com or follow her column at www.Facebook.com/EBernsteinWSJ.

The Hunt column from The Times....

2011-03-10T17:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/realestate/13Hunt.html

Tina Fineberg for The New York Times

The Hunt
A Shorter Commute to the Office
By JOYCE COHEN
Published: March 10, 2011

FOR 15 years, Christopher Murray lived in what he describes as a “perfectly serviceable” one-bedroom railroad apartment in South Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was a rent-stabilized fourth-floor walk-up with a view of a back alley. The neighborhood “grew and evolved when I was there,” he said. So did he.

Last year, a friend in the building bought a co-op and moved out. “We are the same age,” said Mr. Murray, who is 43, “and it jogged me to say maybe it was time to move on.”

At the time, his rent was about $875 a month. He longed to see weather from his window, and to eliminate his lengthy F train commute to his office in the West Village. On weekends, “I would go home and isolate,” he said. “The psychic distance across the East River is longer than the actual distance.”

Maybe the best plan would be to consolidate home and office. Mr. Murray is a licensed clinical social worker. For the past five years, he has had a private practice (christophermurray.org), working out of a small office building on West 13th Street. Serendipitously, as the idea of leaving occurred to him, an art therapist became interested in his office space, and Mr. Murray was able to sign over his lease. His office rent had been $1,875 a month.

For a new home and office, he was willing to pay up to $4,500 a month — though he would be happier in the $3,000s.

“Live-work spaces are a holy grail for therapists in New York,” Mr. Murray said. “It would be great to have all the comforts of home right there.”

And yet he understands that many therapists are of two minds about having clients enter their home, “as we should be, since ‘ambivalence’ is our middle name,” said Mr. Murray, a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Hunter College School of Social Work. He was concerned about maintaining a professional distance from his clients. “I’m friendly,” he said, “but I’m not a friend.”

More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/realestate/13Hunt.html

GAY CITY NEWS Op-Ed with Shane Spicer

2010-11-24T12:29:00.000-08:00

To New York Gay Men: Freaked Out? Take Care

GAY CITY NEWS
Published: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 1:56 PM CST

BY SHANE SPICER, MD, & CHRISTOPHER MURRAY, LCSW

In the last several months, a steady drumbeat of anti-gay attacks — personal, political, and symbolic — has unnerved the gay community across the nation.

In New York, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn rightly called the Bronx bias attacks of three men suspected of being gay “horrible and unforgivable,” while Mayor Michael Bloomberg called humiliated Rutgers student Tyler Clementi’s suicide, “a tragedy.”

Meanwhile, defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino’s ridiculous yet unretracted comments about gay men’s be-Speedoed antics at pride parades set a new low for an already inflammatory public figure —and cost him any real shot at victory.

As mental health practitioners working with the gay community, we applaud the vigorous response to these demonstrations of intolerance and ignorance, both on the part of gay men and our beloved allies. But we feel it is vitally important to add to the condemnation of anti-gay violence, discrimination, and hate speech a warning about the emotional consequences of gay men’s lightning rod status in the current culture wars.

Especially here in New York, gay men exist in an oddly ambiguous social position — as both an empowered and respected subculture and in a crucible of sometimes harsh cultural conflict. As much as we feel rightly comfortable holding hands walking down many streets of Chelsea or Fort Greene or Washington Heights, each one of us remains subconsciously wary, knowing the possibility, however remote, of winding up on the cover of the Post following some atrocity.

It’s important that we all drag this subconscious awareness of our vulnerability into the light so that we can deal with it. There is probably no gay man in New York who didn’t feel endangered growing up, subject to the taunts or the threats of social and familial isolation and exile, whether physical or emotional.

Playwright and public intellectual Sarah Schulman’s terrific recent book, “Ties That Bind” (thenewpress.com), discusses familial homophobia with remarkable insight and laser-sharp focus. (Doug Ireland’s November 12, 2009 review in Gay City News, “It Has to Be Said,” is linked in the online version of this story at gaycitynews.com.) Schulman makes the case for the ways in which kids who go on to become gay adults are shunned in their families for performing gender roles differently than expected. That sense of rejection, she argues, follows us into adulthood, impacting the quality and depth of our relationships.

These forces go largely unnoticed and remain submerged in the vast majority of gay men. This is why, when so much negative energy is focused on us, as now, taking care of ourselves emotionally becomes a necessary act of resistance, resilience, and health.

Even the remarkable “It Gets Better” viral video series, while an extraordinary expression of love for the next generation of gay people, stirs up tremendously difficult emotions and may tear the scabs off of barely-healed wounds.

Gay men of New York: Recognize that we live in times of extraordinary change in how we are viewed and in the ways we can live our lives. That is great in many ways, but please don’t ignore how the tabloid coverage, water-cooler conversations, and sheer incidence of targeting can take a real toll on us emotionally.

Talk about the impact on you of these events with your loved ones, other gay men, and sophisticated, caring allies. As much as you play the “teacher” role with family or ill-informed others, make sure you are getting plenty of nourishment from people who understand the full complexity of how wonderful and scary it remains to be a gay person these days.

If you become preoccupied with the incessant onslaught of troubling and frightening news, reach out for support and help from those who love you or one of the many counseling centers or practitioners who competently and sensitively provide care to our community. Don’t pretend nothing’s happening or that is doesn’t really effect you.

A client recently discussed reading about Tyler Clementi’s death in the newspaper and expressed sadness at that desperate act. But the client never made the seemingly obvious and important connection to his own lived experience as an adolescent completely isolated from his family and peers for fear of rejection or attack. When the parallel was pointed out to him, his realization was to say in stunned tones, “That truly could have been me.”

When that realization hits, it carries a powerful emotional punch. Sometimes it ain’t easy being a queen. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other.

Shane Spicer, MD, a psychiatrist and Christopher Murray, LCSW, a psychotherapist, are both in private practice in Manhattan. You can contact them at shanespicermd@gmail.com or christophermurray.org.

Good Reading

2010-08-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

MY LIFE IN THERAPY

By DAPHNE MERKIN
Published: August 4, 2010
All those years, all that money, all that unrequited love. It began way back when I was a child, an anxiety-riddled 10-year-old who didn’t want to go to school in the morning and had difficulty falling asleep at night. Even in a family like mine, where there were many siblings (six in all) and little attention paid to dispositional differences, I stood out as a neurotic specimen. And so I was sent to what would prove to be the first of many psychiatrists in the four and a half decades to follow — indeed, I could be said to be a one-person boon to the therapeutic establishment — and was initiated into the curious and slippery business of self-disclosure. I learned, that is, to construct an ongoing narrative of the self, composed of what the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller calls “microdots” (“the consciously experienced moments selected from the whole and arranged to present a point of view”), one that might have been more or less cohesive than my actual self but that at any rate was supposed to illuminate puzzling behavior and onerous symptoms — my behavior and my symptoms.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/magazine/08Psychoanalysis-t.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Mannequins of Mexico City

2009-04-13T21:23:00.001-07:00

Here are some of my favorite mannequins in Mexico City, these from a uniform store on Insurgentes Sur in La Condesa. They are so sexy, if a little motheaten, (but that's my type, really).

My Margaret Dumont poem

2009-04-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

Margaret Dumont

Dowager queen of loose-necked flesh, glide
across the foyer to greet your kooky guests.

They are hanging like monkeys
from the chandeliers, pissing down
on the invited guests and cackling.

Remember to smile and never waver, well-bred
and resolute as you take your medicine.

Come Harpo, you satyr, and Groucho,

make fun of my weight. Here is the thick-
accented one, selling tuttsi fruitsi from a cart

and lingering over the rump of my favorite
maid. So she's yours, you deliberate jackal,

take her and fuck her, while I am forced to hear
and stay awake in the room next door. I think
you all are charming boys. I relish your hump

and pant and fart and spit and slap and frequently
violent approach to my hospitality. Come again,

you males, deride my pearls and my hem. I will
stand here majestic like Liberty or Truth
or Justice or your wife and take it, take it, take it.

"My Diva" on bookshelves now!

2009-04-05T21:32:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to announce the publication of "My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them," edited by Michael Montlack. The book looks beautiful and I'm very proud to be a part of this wonderful celebration of women by some of the gay men who love them.

Here's my essay on Margaret Dumont, but please go here and buy the whole book, it's terrific!

Margaret Dumont: Duchess of Dignity

Margaret Dumont was called "the fifth Marx Brother" by Groucho, appearing in seven of their films. In each, she played the comic foil: a stately society matron who was a perfect target for the boys' insults and jibs. Unlike some of the other divas, she was not a subject of adulation, but rather has become someone for whom I have empathy. She played the role of an often-oblivious woman whose only purpose was to be made fun of. This is a lesser known kind of diva, but an important one. As much as gay men identify with the glamour of a screen siren or a disco diva, we also have always been drawn to tragic figures of ridicule. Monica Lewinsky is a recent inheritor of this mantle, a society woman who becomes a target for widespread sexualized derision. It takes the special perspective of the homosexual male to rescue her, to reverse the prevailing attitude, and to put her on a pedestal as a survivor, a person worthy of dignity.

Dumont was also the still center around which comic chaos revolved. Without her, the Marx Brothers' madness had no form, no structure. I imagine the never-seen internal experience of her character and a growing rage toward her tormentors. This parallels the gay man's anger a being a target of bullies and demagogues. Certainly, she was ridiculous: pompous, hefty, and self-important. Her flaws rationalize the enmity directed at her, but don't excuse it. The viciousness of humor operates in opposition to the human necessity for tolerance and understanding. In our fantasies, like our comedies, we take delight in behaviors that wouldn't be acceptable in our real lives. The sadism shown toward Dumont is the sublimation of those darker impulses toward misogyny and even rape in the deepest reaches of the male psyche. Dumont is punished by the Marx Brothers for no longer being sexually attractive and for representing the power found in social position and money. For this, she must undergo humiliation. If she isn't destroyed, she may become the castrator.

This weak stab at Freudian interpretation aside, my attempt to imagine Dumont's pain is analogous to any gay man's attempt to connect with the glamour and emotional freedom of a more conventional diva. In fact, my groping toward empathy for Dumont embodies that creative leap from observation to identification that is the hallmark of the gay man's love of his diva. That it can be applied not only to the victorious siren and femme fatale, but to the forlorn, forgotten, fat, and fatuous as well, is, to me, moving and transformative.

I never thought the Marx Brothers were all that funny. They were barbarians and bullies, stupid and self-aggrandizing. But something in me responded to their cruelty. When I was in the fourth grade, with my parents involved in a bitter separation, I took my confusion and hurt to the schoolyard. There by the tree next to the swing set, I became one of the Marx clan and mercilessly teased and taunted an outcast, a boy named Mark with a round face and funny square glasses who spoke in a stilted, strangled voice. I made him my bitch, calling him names and pushing him in the dirt. I relished making him cry, tears drawing a path down his face towards his mouth open in a round howl of surprise and pain.

My favorite teacher, Mrs. Brady, witnessed my torture of Mark, and I'll never forget her confusion and dismay as she asked me why, why had I targeted this poor boy with such ferocity? And then I felt flooded with shame, felt it rising in my own throat like bile. It was my first and maybe still my most intense experience of being ashamed, greater than any based on my latent sexuality. I had become my disapproving father, my rough brother. After that, I know somehow that I couldn't live my life managing my own pain and fear by transforming into an aggressor. It felt too terrible to have a person I admired like Mrs. Brady show me to myself as a bully.

Eventually, I tried to make amends to Mark, befriended him. At first he was wary and uncertain, but after a while I learned his solitary games, began to share his complex inner world of dreams and fantasies. For the rest of my life, I would carry with a special sympathy for the underdog, the misunderstood and the maligned. I make no claims to perfection in this; I'm still too aware of the seductive pleasure of sadism, the glee and sexual thrilled of kicking someone when he's down, but I know I am unable to sustain that mode of being in the world.

Gay men get a lot of labels and proclivities slapped on them. At worst we are vain, shallow, obsessed with image and externals, sex-crazed drug addicts. At best, we are image-makers, czars of style, and wielders of wickedly delightful wit. But in my personal experience, we are most often alternating between a trio of roles: the outcast feeling fat and excluded by the cool disdainful beauties, the tormentor who cackles "Get her!" and points toward the frump sitting on the barstool across the room, and the rescuer who recognizes the beauty and dignity of the maligned.

It's so hard not to keep seeing other gay men as a united front of unapproachable, shirtless clones. The challenge us to reach into that swirling mass of bodies and recognize a person who you can cultivate as an individual with his own secret history of pain and resilience. At best, gay men are ultimately kind because they understand derision firsthand and know at their core what it is like to be excluded. Margaret Dumont wore her ridicule on her face for all of us to see, with only bemusement and faked obliviousness as her protection.

There was a myth about Dumont, promulgated by Groucho, that she never even got all the jokes and insults targeted toward her. That was a fib. "I'm a straight lady, the best in Hollywood," she later said. "There's an art to playing the straight role. You must build up your man but never top him, never steal the laughs." Dumont played the dupe, but it was an act, a role that showed us the power of punny punctures that the Marx Brother's used to deflate pomposity. But for me she will always remain a duchess of dignity in the face of ridicule, only her eyes secretly communicating the diva's ultimate message, "I will survive."

Panel on Wednesday

2009-03-23T20:38:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday March 25th at 6:30 PM the NASW-NYC LGBT Committee will host a Career Panel.

The meeting, as always, will take place at the LGBT Center on West 13th Street.

Speakers and topics are as follows:

Annemarie Redelmeier, MBA, LCSW

American Cancer Society Doctoral Grantee

University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work

Annemarie will speak about Social Work Doctoral studies.

Liz Margolies, LCSW

Executive Director National LGBT Cancer Network

Liz will speak about starting a non-profit organization and her experience in private practice.

Christopher Murray, LCSW

Christopher will speak about being in private practice

Polo Jean Louis, MSW

Polo will speak about his experience with a lengthy job search in a difficult market.

Shaun Adams, LMSW

Assistant Program Director The Prince George Hotel/CUCS

Shaun will speak about the job search from and employerâ€™s point of view.

On POZIAM Radio next Sunday

2009-03-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

Hey, all! I will be talking about the experience of younger guys who have HIV on POZIAM web radio this Sunday night. Topics will include: where do young poz guys go for support when they find out?, how can they find other guys their age who are poz?, how do they deal with disclosure to friends and family/, how do they negotiate sex and romance?

Listen in Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 9pm EST, or check it out later when you can at: www.blogtalkradio.com/poziam. Or call in and share you experience at 347-215-9442.

My Diva - At a bookstore near you soon!

2009-03-04T20:54:00.000-08:00

I'm terribly excited that my essay on The Marx Brother's comedienne Margaret Dumont is coming out this month! Check it out!

My Diva
65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them
Edited by Michael Montlack

“There is something about these larger-than-life stars that represents our yearnings for vindication, in which we see ourselves transcending the difficulties a gay man faces in this world.” —Edward Field, on Gloria Swanson

From Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Midler, and Diana Ross to Queen Elizabeth I, Julia Child, and Princess Leia, divas have been sister, alter ego, fairy godmother, or model for survival to gay men and the closeted boys they once were. And anyone —straight or gay, young or old, male or female —who ever needed a muse, or found one, will see their own longing mirrored here as well.

These witty and poignant short essays explore reasons for diva worship as diverse as the writers themselves. My Diva offers both depth and glamour as it pays tribute with joy, intelligence, and fierce, fierce love.

Michael Montlack is professor of English at Berkeley College in New York City. He has published two chapbooks of poetry, Girls, Girls, Girls and Cover Charge. This book was inspired by his love for Stevie Nicks.

A sampling of contributors and their divas include:

Virginia Woolf by Brian Teare

Margaret Dumont by Christopher Murray

Bessie Smith by Sam J. Miller

Lotta Lenya by David Bergman

Marlene Dietrich by Walter Holland

Grace Paley by Mark Doty
Eartha Kitt by D. A. Powell

Anna Moffo by Wayne Koestenbaum

Rocío Dúrcal by Rigoberto González

Liza Minnelli by Jason Schneiderman

Laura Nyro by Michael Klein

Ricky Lee Jones by Timothy Liu

Margaret Cho by Kenji Oshima

Princess Leia by Christopher Hennessy

For more information regarding publicity and reviews contact our publicity manager, Chris Caldwell, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu

New Groups!

2009-03-04T18:59:00.001-08:00

I'm enrolling now for three groups to start at the end of March, 2009.

-A 10-week Life Coaching Workshop I'll co-lead with Jack Bethke (www.jackbethke.com).

-A 10-week psychotherapy group for gay men in their 20s and early 30s.

-A 10-week psychotherapy group for gay men in their 20s and early 2-0s living with HIV.

Please contact me via www.christophermurray.org if you are interested or would like more information.

Thank you!

2008-09-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

Healing the Homos
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
09/11/2008

Of gay people experiencing physical pain and stresses, chiropractor George Russell warns, "If we bury our history… then it generally bites us in the ass."

LGBT/ Q&A

Do we have gay bodies? George Russell has some interesting insights, not to mention clinical experience, about that question.

A chiropractor, Russell has grown a unique practice melding his medical training, his background in dance, and his interest in spirituality. His practice, while not exclusively targeted to gay people, has informed his perspective about gay bodies and the emotional forces that affect them.

Russell graduated from Wesleyan University with a major in intellectual history and dance, then earned a masters degree in movement studies from the same institution. Afterward, he choreographed and danced in modern dance companies in New York and taught college-level dance courses.

In his 30s, he returned to school for his chiropractic degree, graduating with honors from the University of Bridgeport in 2000. Russell sees clients in an airy office off Union Square and is an instructor at the Swedish Institute and the Kripalu Yoga Center in Lennox, Massachusetts.

He's also a guest choreographer and dance master at the De Facto Dance Company in New York City.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: What happens in your examination room, for goodness sake?
GEORGE RUSSELL: You never know! My work varies greatly depending on the patient's issues. This week I released muscles and joints in a frozen shoulder and helped a woman to move her arm more efficiently and fully. I did bodywork on a man with chronic pain and gave him imagery for coping with his pain and relieving it; and I helped a yoga teacher discover why she has lost hip mobility. I released muscles and coached her poses until she could sit in a full lotus position again.

And one college-aged patient remembered that she had surgery on her big toe as a child, which explained why I had noticed she twists her spine and takes a short step when she walks on the left foot. I fitted her for orthotics that would allow her gait to normalize and her spine to be even.

CM: Do people usually come with something clearly busted or in pain?
GR: Yes, I'd say so. Injury - be it mental, physical, spiritual, ecological, economic - is usually the intersection of long-held habits with an unfortunate event. In the case where the woman remembered the surgery in childhood, it was new back pain from sitting at a desk that made her decide to get help. But it was her gait that had to be corrected so she wouldn't be vulnerable to re-injury. Of course I treated her back as well.

My simple job is to provide relief from the pain. My complex and ultimately more important job is to identify the habits and the stressors that underlie them, and to help patients adapt their lives to make their systems more resilient.

CM: How do you understand the spirit/body connection?
GR: Well, the two words are two ways of approaching the same phenomenon. Science tells us that energy and matter are actually the same thing, but even scientists are having trouble catching up with that idea. And we barely have words in our language for talking about how the soul - if you want to call it that - and the lower back, for example, are always influencing one another.

I mean, there's a reason why feelings are called feelings - they happen at a physical level. And so trauma - or ecstasy, for that matter - at any level will manifest on all the others. We talk, and we generally approach injury and pain, as if the body were merely physical. But we all know intuitively that it isn't really so. In my work, I help people bring it all together.

CM: Are LGBT people any different in this? Do you see a lot of LGBT folk?
GR: I'd say the process is no different, but LGBT people generally have a history - or a present, alas - of trying to deny aspects of ourselves as they manifest in our bodies. And the habit of holding a space between our spontaneous sexuality, gender, and social orientation really dies hard, no matter how much we've come out. It forms a part of our subcultures, our psyches, and, certainly, the way we hold and move our bodies.

Imagine the way you walked down the hall in eighth grade. The awkwardness, the hiding, the pretending, the sense of disconnect between what's required to survive and our spontaneous impulses have effects that often last throughout life.

Did you ever see a big bodybuilder - and when you looked closer you could still see the frightened scrawny kid inside the shell of muscle? Sometimes what looks like our strength is really our armor, and a suit of armor is heavy to carry around. Of course, the way we've overcome adversity also provides us with tremendous physical and character strength as well.

CM: So you think people physicalize homophobia and transphobia.
GR: Oh, definitely. And it doesn't all wash away. We start with a certain genetic nature. And how we nurture ourselves as LGBT adults has a lot to do with recognizing how the culture that nurtured us - and oppressed most of us - has affected our whole selves, including the physical.

If we bury our history - especially the minute physical history of how we responded to an environment that didn't have a space for who we actually were - then it generally bites us in the ass. If we can recognize the effects of the past on the present and deal with what comes up in the present with self-honesty and compassion, then we get the dividends that we see all around us in our community - compassion, wisdom, courage, and a power we didn't know we had to change ourselves and our world.

We'll have more power and information if we pay attention to our bodies. Body memory takes us right back into all the crucial moments of our lives.

CM: You must see trends in the kinds of issues people bring to you. What trends do you see among the queer people you work with?
GR: It's hard to generalize. A lot of the people who come to me - queer or otherwise (and a lot of my straight clients are pretty queer) - are aware that the exercise forms of our culture fall short of what we need to be truly healthy. They know that, for example, that emotion and physical experience run together, but they need feedback and ideas to help them integrate and improve their experience of self.

To have comfort and health, we need at least to be able to feel - from feeling the floor under our feet to feeling how someone's reaction to us makes us tighten our necks. Our culture hasn't done a good job of teaching any of us to really feel ourselves, and queer folks least of all, since we were told in profound and unique ways to act against our impulses. Many of my queer clients know this, and are aware of still working on some level to become more fully authentic.

CM: Help me understand the overall process of working with a client. I'm sure it varies, but what's usual in terms of process, length of time in treatment, severity of complaint, and degree of resolution?
GR: As long as we're alive, we are always healing - coming into, and out of, comfort, wellness, and ability. People ask me to step in and give them a boost in a difficult situation, or when they are having trouble moving in the way that they want to. It could be a yoga pose they want to be able to perform, or it could be - literally - that they've fallen and can't get up. Some people want ongoing help to feel fully alive and awake - to live fully - while other people want to be set right in the moment so they can continue on.

My clients and I set goals together. One thing I don't like to do is fix things. I don't think an approach like that respects human experience. It's great when your neck can move again when you couldn't turn it a half hour ago, but if you don't have an idea about why it happened, what it means to you, and how you can maintain your joy and power when you walk out of the room, I don't think I've done my job. I want clients to leave my office feeling more empowered, happy and wiser then they came in.

CM: How did you come to be doing this work?
GR: I always knew how to do bodywork - to work on muscles and bodies in a way that made people feel better. Maybe that had to do with being raised by a very physical Sicilian mother!

I was a modern dancer and I started working on other dancers, casually. Then people just started seeking me out to do this kind of work. I figured I'd better get some training to figure out what the hell I was doing, because it was all intuitive at that point.

I got all kinds of movement and bodywork training, and then I went to chiropractic school. I'm still studying - most recently, Focalizing with Michael Picucci, a body-based approach to resilience in all areas, Rosen work with Heather Brown, a psycho-spiritual bodywork form, Alexander Technique with Joan Arnold, improving alignment and ease of movement... the list goes on. I keep adding new things to keep me open and flexible.

CM: How does your background as a dancer influence your approach?
GR: It's all about movement. Irene Dowd, one of my primary mentors, said that whenever she had a question about a client, her teacher Lulu Sweigard would say, "Did you look at movement?" Everything about the self is reflected in our movement patterns, and I know a problem is resolved when I no longer see it in the person's walking or sitting or whatever.

CM: What advice to you have for queer people about how they relate to their bodies?
GR: Be courageous. Feel your body fully. Seek spontaneity. At work, on the street, alone, in the gym, ask yourself, "Am I having the experience I want to? Is my behavior reactive to an imagined criticism or danger?" And then see how you work with that information.

And, of course, drink plenty of water and call me in the morning.

©GayCityNews 2008

Katherine Linton interview

2008-08-27T21:21:00.000-07:00

Trumping Politics with Culture
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
08/14/2008

Katherine Linton, producer of LOGO series "Lesbian Sex and Sexuality"

Katherine Linton is best known to gay folk around the country from her time as the host of the long-running PBS series "In The Life." Since then, she founded her own media company and has produced a series of documentaries focusing on gay life.

Originally from Westport, Connecticut, but now recently single and living in Brooklyn with her cat Popeye, Linton, 41, studied theatre at New York University and then went to Ringling Bros. Clown College. Afterwards, she joined the Big Apple Clown Care Unit and worked in municipal New York hospitals entertaining sick children.

After that came her time with "In the Life," initially as host, but then with producing duties as well. Linton was asked by LOGO to create their first documentary, "The Evolution will be Televised," but perhaps her most controversial and high impact project has been the series "Lesbian Sex and Sexuality," also for Logo. Gay City News spoke to Linton as she prepared for the "series two" launch in September.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: If anyone knows, you do: what's the hot new thing in lesbianism?
KATHERINE LINTON: Not calling yourself a lesbian. Everyone is queer now it seems.

CM: Tell the truth, what do you think the world really thinks about lesbians?
KL: The world? I think the world still thinks we are as perverted and sick as ever, and I don't think the stereotypes about us have changed all that much. We're ugly, man-hating and wouldn't be gay if only we had the right man...but since we hate men, that's not likely to happen. I'm afraid that is what the world still thinks of us.

CM: I've always been confused about the role of dildos among lesbians. What's the real deal? Merely a functionary implement, or is it a representative symbolist object, or a vibratory tool of aggression and repression?
KL: D. None of the above. They are fun....and detachable.

CM: How fast is queer identity changing right now, and where the hell are we going?
KL: I wouldn't begin to pretend to be an expert on queer identity, but I do have hope that we are going to win this nasty culture war that has been waged against us for so long. The key to winning it, though, is that none of us become complacent because we have a couple of channels or some images on TV. The religious right is still a remarkably organized and powerful force in this country, and we have to be vigilant, active, and aware.

CM: Tell me about the new season of Lesbian Sex & Sexuality, what can people expect?
KL: Sex. No just kidding. Some sex, of course, but this season is more focused on expressions of sexuality. One episode focuses on Lesbian Camp, another on fashion. We go behind the scenes of Dinah Shore, and explore the issue of whether lesbians pay for sex. Another episode gives tips and techniques on how to keep sex hot in a relationship. It's a fun season so I hope people like it!

CM: It must have been so wonderful working on this series. Tell me about one of the encounters that surprised you and one that changed your view of lesbian sexuality.
KL: Well, it's been fun but hard, I can tell you that. We filmed a lesbian sex party and that was intense to say the least. I had never been to one, so didn't know what to expect. Let's just say it was really hard to figure out how to film in a way that we wouldn't have to blur the whole thing for TV.

CM: I know you are really interested in the intersection of sexual identity and religion. What's up with your piece on the founder of Operation Rescue?
KL: It's my own film in development called "Randall and Me: Together at Last". It features Randall Terry-yes, the insane fundamentalist-and me attempting to have a real dialogue. At the end of the day it's impossible to change the mind of a fundamentalist, but maybe I moved him slightly on gay issues, I don't know. But what was and is important to me is to really listen to what the right says about us and to hone my own responses to the attacks. Living in New York and being so liberal it's easy to ignore them or call them crazy, but as I said, I think that is dangerous. Fully going into Randall's anti-abortion, anti-gay world was scary and shocking, but he is certainly not alone. On Randall's side, my world is scary. I took him to Stonewall and he thought a gay man wanted to fight him. Turns out the guy was just drunk and wanted us to film him. I had to remind Randall that it's not our side that is violent, but his. We'll see what happens with the film....

CM: Do you think we are heading towards another bang up between sexuality and conservatism as the presidential election comes down to the wire?
KL: I don't think so and hope not. Gay marriage was such a hot button issue in the 2004 election, and every pundit pegged George Bush's victory on our backs as I made clear in the launch documentary, "The Evolution will be Televised," for Logo. Maybe McCain will go there, and if he does, I just hope Obama doesn't falter as badly as Kerry did. We'll see.

CM: What do you think is the impact in American culture of positive yet saucy and sex‑positive images of queer people in the media?
KL: Armistead Maupin said it best in an interview I did with him for "The Evolution": "Culture will always trump politics." Where the culture goes, politics will eventually follow. So I have a lot of faith in the impact of culture. However, we need to make sure we challenge our cultural images again and not become complacent with just a few, and also keep pushing on the political end.

CM: What else are you working on now?
KL: Just trying to get this series Lesbian Sex and Sexuality out the door. Developing a series to pitch on polyamory. Company image make-over with our website and logo. And trying to get out of the city more!

CM: You started out in the theatre, didn't you? What do you think is most important about the ability of art forms like theatre, film, and t.v. to help tell the stories of queer people?
KL: Culture is hugely important for our community. With AIDS alone, Rock Hudson's death suddenly woke the world up-albeit inspiring a hateful panic-but then you had "Angels in America" and "Philadelphia" and so many others that were so crucial in inspiring compassion, understanding, and activism. Don't know where we would be without the arts.

CM: If you could wave your magic wand and change one thing about representations of queer people generally and lesbians particularly in the mainstream media, what would you change?
KL: More images that are more realistic. And maybe Shane's haircut, only because there were so many copycats...but that seems on the wane...and it wasn't her fault.

CM: What makes you hot?
KL: Turtleneck Sweaters.

©GayCityNews 2008

2008-07-22T19:46:00.000-07:00

Scandal in Manhattan

July 21, 2008

By Christopher Murray

Playwright and director Bobby Holder's comedy Scandal in Manhattan, part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival, tells the tale of two Southern sisters (Brittany Bell Spencer and Elizabeth Phillipp) caught in a rivalry for the affections of a handsome young wannabe troubadour with a secret (Evan Dahme). Following the mysterious death of their father from roach poison placed in his coffee instead of sugar, the sisters decamp to a midtown New York hotel where they encounter a cast of zanies.

Prime among the kooks they meet is the Hotel Royale's front-desk manager, the flamboyant Fred Fontaine (Joe Iozzi), and his ditzy new assistant, April (Kelly Kemp). Added to the mix like extra ingredients to a stew are an aggressive rose seller, a pair of newlyweds, and a robber with a passionate relationship with a stuffed animal, among others.

Screwball comedy is a difficult form to master. Silliness and complications galore must be balanced against a performance style that exaggerates reality without completely breaking with it. In the case of Scandal in Manhattan, the cast of 12, despite a great deal of energy, falls short of creating a delightful chaos and manages only a mostly shrill, forced, and frankly exhausting 90-minute juggernaut of pratfalls, smashups, and shouting.

When broad comedy fails to catch fire, it can be hard to assess the reasons, but in this case a flaccid script and sloppy direction leave the cast adrift, forcing them to fill in unmotivated behavior and nonsensical plot with formless and uncomfortable posturing.

Presented by the Actor's Project NYC as part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival at the WorkShop Theater, 312 W. 36th St., 4th floor, NYC. July 20-30. Remaining performances: Sat., July 26, 3 p.m.; Wed., July 30, 8:30 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.

2008-07-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

Ain't Misbehavin'
July 21, 2008
By Christopher Murray

This beloved revue of Fats Waller's immensely appealing songbook was performed originally in 1978 on Broadway by a company of three women and two men. In this revival by Harlem Repertory Theatre, the show has been expanded to a cast of almost 20 enthusiastic young performers, directed and choreographed by Artistic Director Keith Lee Grant. Harlem Rep makes clear its association with the City College of New York's Department of Theatre and Speech but still purports to be a professional theatre. On the basis of this production, despite flashes of potential, it must be said the quality remains strictly amateur.

That being said, it's moving to hear Waller's feisty, flirtatious, and flamboyant tunes sung just across St. Nicholas Park from where the composer grew up at 107 West 134th St. And despite a curtain speech that alerted the audience that there is no plot in the show, each number encapsulates a dramatic world of its own, full of delightful detail and dramatic potential.

Several of the performers make the most of the opportunity, notably guest artist Jimmy Mike assaying 1934's "The Viper Rag" with much style and charm, the honey-voiced Danyel Fulton delivering 1929's "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling," and the powerhouse Alexandra Bernard and sassy Nathaly Lopez teaming up on 1929's "Find Out What They Like."

The barnlike but elegant Aaron Davis Hall is decorated by set designer Marcel Torres as a cabaret space with a banner emblazoned "Cotton Club" and a hanging triptych of images of Waller with his trademark impish grin and wagging eyebrows. But the supporting cast of over a dozen performers struggles to fill the space in dark patches of lighting by Brian Aldous and Jason Boyd and uneven amplification by Kane Chaing.

However, the seven-piece band, led by pianist and musical director Andre Danek, provides a strong platform for some lovely harmonies by the cast — in particular evidence during 1929's "Off-Time" — and ample enjoyment in the sheer joy of singing Waller's insouciant lyrics and unforgettable melodies.

Presented by Harlem Repertory Theatre at Aaron Davis Hall, 150 Convent Ave., NYC. July 18-Sept 14. Schedule varies. (212) 650-5960.

2008-07-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

WALL-E is Gay
(In fact -- surprise! -- he's me!)

By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY

07/17/2008

Okay, the gay gaze sees gays everywhere. We can turn the most innocent phrase into a sexual innuend0 - including even "innuendo" yuk yuk. We can insist for years that Tom Cruise is gay - really! I know a friend of a friend of a friend who did him in his trailer! Really! We can even almost reasonably imagine Bert and Ernie as the classic co-dependent gay couple, endlessly arguing over the curtains.

But to turn this sweet, lonely, Clutterers Anonymous robotic wannabe turned megastar at the megaplex into a closet case just strains credulity, doesn't it?

Heck, no! It's as clear as the lack of a nose on his cute little binocular face, he's a big homo-robo if ever there was one!

Let's run the numbers:

- I don't care if Babs doesn't make an appearance in any of the clips, he's obsessed with "Hello, Dolly," isn't that enough? He recreates the choreography, for Crissakes! (Full disclosure - I recreated the tearful goodbyes from the song "Anatevka" from "Fiddler on the Roof" in my teenaged bedroom.)

- He's a card-carrying fetishist, fondling objects obsessively and creating altars to display them. Let's not even talk about the scene with the brassiere. (Full disclosure - it was my older sister's baby blue one-piece bathing suit and I looked fabulous!)

- The damn movie opened Gay Pride Weekend. Duh!

- He knows lighting. All those little twinkle lights he puts up to create a mood? You go, Ms. Thom Filicia 2.0!

- His best friend is a cockroach with a penis-shaped head to rival that of Darth Vader.

- He has a speech impediment, the electronic version of a lisp.

- He's a lonely, deformed little gnome-atron dutifully carrying out his assigned tasks with a masochistic fervor while pining away for the unobtainable beauty to whom he slavishly devotes himself. (FD: Daniel Oberholtzer, track team Adonis, I still love you and I always will!)

- He doesn't want to shtup her, he just wants to hold hands. 'Nuff said.

So. Do I make my point clear? If not, the mewling sobs of the queens in the back row of the movie theaters might clue you in. We've always had a special place in our hearts for the quasi-human Pixar characters - that big sexy bluish bear-thing in "Monsters, Inc.," the prissy Ty Rex in "Toy Story," Ellen Degeneres' ditzy Dory, the fish in "Finding Nemo," Monica Lewinsky in "The Intern." Oh, sorry, she hasn't been pixilated yet. But I can't WAIT!

Yet what's clear from a queer reading of "Wall-E" is the reality that gay male self-image is still, even in these late, marriageable days, inextricably bound up in deep-rooted feelings of exclusion, unacknowledged valor, and the transcendent, redemptive power of being able to distinguish an unrecognized treasure from garbage. And showtunes, glorious, glorious showtunes.

WALL-E, you're my hero, you trashy little stud. Why won't you return my text messages?

©GayCityNews 2008

"Can I Help You?" Backstage Review

2008-07-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

Can I Help You?
July 18, 2008

(photo by Jared Slater)

By Christopher Murray

"Alphonse, you are going to feel a big needle." Nine words blandly spoken but likely to strike terror in the heart of poor Alphonse — and a typical moment in the experimental collaborative Exploding Moment's new work.

Can I Help You? takes as its source material footage from an unnamed medical reality television program that focuses on patients admitted to a trauma center after various car accidents and mishaps. Five actors — Shea Elmore, Johnny Lops, Sharla Meese, Katherine Sullivan, and Katherine Wessling — painstakingly directed by Catharine Dill, re-enact different snippets of footage in a deliberately deconstructed manner. A transcriber upstage sits keying in the shoots, ostensibly for editing purposes, while varying perspectives are presented in the foreground.

Sometimes the actors gather around and meticulously pantomime a procedure in an operating theatre; additional sequences mimic medical personnel narrating surgeries or commenting on a patient's prognosis. Yet other moments are more clearly theatrical expressions, as when actors playing a doctor and patient engage in a pas de deux of pain to the "music" of a newly admitted patient crying out, or when closed-circuit video shows sides of meat being poked to replicate the often graphic shots of operations shown on television.

This postmodern presentation of the cable-ubiquitous images of real-life distress is often captivating in its technical sophistication, but the work's greater purpose is to reveal often unintentionally ironic shifts in perspective and purpose, in this case among medical staff, patients, and videographers.

The subject matter couldn't be more dramatic or, oddly enough, banal. Life and death moments alternate with the snide, self-protective sang-froid of nurses in cutesy scrubs and the often callous utilitarianism of a TV crew performing a surgery of its own to get the footage needed for a program.

The iris of the piece keeps opening wider, however, with increasing and disturbing poignancy as it reveals more of the backstory of some patients, particularly one Lisa Campbell, played with devastating bovine candor by Meese. Hospitalized after a car accident that might be concealing another, more sinister trauma, Lisa is drunk and belligerent when first admitted, howling in pain, then coy and self-congratulating days later as she prepares to be released back to the stresses of single motherhood and intones, at a cameraman's suggestion, "I will never drink alcohol again."

Such complicated albeit incomplete stories rely on the viewer to connect the dots and make interpretations and elevates Can I Help You? from an obsessively detailed theatrical experiment into a moving short story in which the audience is seduced into the role and responsibility of narrator.

Presented by Exploding Moment at the Bushwick Starr, 207A Starr St., Brooklyn, NYC. July 17-26. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m. (212) 352-3101 or (866) 86118-4111 or www.theatremania.com.

Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project

2008-07-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

I'm totally jazzed that my dear friend director Chas Brack's new film, Dreams Deferred, about the horrible 2003 bias murder of 15 year old Newark queer youth Sakia Gunn is being shown August 22-24 at BAM's Rose Cinemas, following it's successful premier last month as part of the NewFest, New York's annual LGBT film festival.

Go here for times and info and check out the project's website here. It's a tremendously important documentary. I was proud to support it and encourage you to see it!

The Nonprofit Career Guide

2008-07-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

Take a look at my friend Shelly Cryer's just published book, The Nonproft Career Guide, which outlines employment opportunities for young people looking for a job that makes a difference in the world.

Chapters focus on practical assessments of nonprofit employment options, advice on interviewing and resumes, and a few dozen profiles of people working in nonprofits across the country, including me!

My profile focuses on the work I did during my time at New York City's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. I'm pleased to have it included.

For more information, check out the book's webpage here.

Ryan Green Interview

2008-07-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

Ms. Green Sings the Blues
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
07/10/2008

Bringing order by day, Ryan Green offers mournful tunes by night.

RYAN GREEN
"Ms. Green - Assisted Suicide"
Dixon Place
258 Bowery, btwn. Houston & Prince Sts., 2nd fl.
Jul. 15, 22 & 29 at 8 p.m.
$15; $12 for students, seniors
dixonplace.org or 212-219-0736

By day, Ryan Green sits behind that queer spacepod of an elevated desk just inside the front door of the LGBT Community Center on West 13th Street. There he oversees a staff who welcome more than 5,000 Center users each week, a responsibility that includes the Herculean task of keeping the place safe for everyone. That might mean smoothing ruffled feathers, calming frayed nerves, talking down a drama queen, setting some limits, and occasionally even calling an ambulance.

When he found out his son's job description, Green's dad, an undercover drug cop in Cincinnati, said, in mock shock, "You're in charge of cupcake security!" Thank God someone is.

By night, Green, 28, is an up and coming gender-indifferent chanteuse of the Justin Bond school. His new show, "Ms. Green - Assisted Suicide," runs Tuesday nights in July at Dixon Place as part of the queer HOT! Festival, where he is artist-in-residence for the summer. The show, a series of songs and monologues musing on mortality, emerged largely in response to his father's death from cancer in December.

Ryan has made a name for himself singing moody and sometimes mournful bossa nova numbers - including a Brazilian version of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." Trust me, it's brilliant. In order to master the form, he learned to play the guitar, the pandeiro (a type of Brazilian tambourine), and to speak Portuguese. He recently released a bossa nova CD, "Tive Razao" ("I Was Right"), with guitarist Scott Anderson, available on iTunes.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: What's the show at Dixon Place about and why does it have such a cheery title?
RYAN GREEN: It's about being alive and the problems that arise as a result. It's about surviving bad things that happen. The title is cheery, isn't it? Well, I think everyone has thought about killing themselves at one point or another. Or thought about asking someone else to kill them. I think it's all part of human nature. And I really feel like none of this would be happening were it not for my director, Michael Cherry, who has, in the words of the Divine Miss M, "taken chicken shit and turned it into chicken salad."

CM: What special privileges come with being the Dixon Place Hot! Festival's artist-in-residence? Do you get free popcorn or anything?
RG: I think just free cold cream.

CM: Who else is in the festival that people should know about?
RG: Well, there's so many great people. There's [monologist] Laryssa Husiak, who is just so good. And there's [operatic sexpot singer] Joseph Keckler and his pal [writer] Erin Markey. [Kiki & Herb's] Kenny Mellman and [Liverpudlian cross dressing stripper] LaJohn Joseph. And, of course, the amazing [dancer/choreographer] Rose Calucchia, who also works at the LGBT Center with me.

CM: Where did your interest in Brazilian music singing in Portuguese come from?
RG: Well, I was working at this restaurant in the West Village while taking French lessons from a Parisian in East Harlem. One day while waiting tables, I overheard some women speaking the most beautiful language I'd ever heard. It turned out they were from Brazil speaking Portuguese. It was in that moment that I said, "The hell with French."

CM: Are you Latino? How do you manage all your identities? Which ones take precedence?
RG: I am not Latino. I'm actually a half-breed. Half white and half black. Just a mulatto girl really. You know, like Mariah Carey. People always ask me if I felt like I had to choose. I didn't. I just was what I was. But when I think about, you know, childhood trauma, I think about being called a fag and all of that - walking the hallways of my middle school - my eighth grade social studies teacher, Mr. Zimmerman, a white man with a jerry curl, making fun of me in front of the entire class. That kind of abuse sort of overshadowed everything else. The bi-racial stuff was more of a side issue.

CM: Do you consider yourself to be working in any specific gay performance tradition?
RG: I would consider what I'm working on as sort of progressive gay cabaret. Storytelling and song singing.

CM: What songs make you weep at home alone at 3 a.m.?
RG: Oh God. Well, when my aunt died in 2000, I would just sit in front of the television in my dorm room and watch Bette Midler sing "Stay With Me" from "Divine Madness," over and over and over and just cry and cry. It was all very gay. Also, when Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman do "Moments of Pleasure," that really gets me.

CM: So running the front desk at the LGBT Center - that must be trippy. How do you wrangle and intimidate everyone from Larry Kramer on a rampage to dozens of homeless drag queens every day?
RG: Intimidate! I love that. Well, it's a wonderful job. I love the people I work with. The girls of the front desk are a special lot. I'm very proud to be a part of the Center and I really do feel like I help people.

CM: From your vantage point as the welcome wagon lady for the gay community, how are the homos changing these days? Are we getting better or worse?
RG: Oooh, what a question. Well, I think lesbians have always had their shit together more than us faggots. I think we're a real mess. I can't believe how internally homophobic we are with each other. Its like, the lesbians have, at least from my perception, this openness and acceptance of butch/ femme identities - but the faggots all want to be "straight acting" which is such a screwed up term and I can't believe people use it as a compliment. It's like the N-word to me. I don't get it. I think we need a faggot revolution where femme faggots, off stage, are valued as much as the butch ones. Am I right? I mean the Center has a lesbian group called "Butch Femme Society." Would gay men ever have a group like this? Well, why the hell not?

CM: You used to wear a big droopy, funereal purple silk flower in your lapel at the front desk. Why, and where is it now?
RG: It's actually navy blue with purple accents. It's in a drawer under my vanity. I wore it to draw attention to my chest area. I think I have a nice breastbone. But then I started to notice that every time someone showed me a picture from a work thing, or a night out, I had that goddamn flower on. I thought, "Lady, it's time to move on." It was really heavy anyway. Plus, it always caused such a scandal with the girls on the A train every morning. Especially when I wore it with my Daisy Dukes.

CM: What's the new musical frontier for Ms. Green?
RG: I'm very into world music: bossa nova, French chanson, and now fado, this really depressing Portuguese music. The word fado means fate - "the inexorable destiny that nothing can change." The fado singers, know as fadistas, are backed by two guitarists. They wear black shawls and sing about death and loss. I had my first fado gig last weekend on the day of the Gay Pride Parade. I thought it was a wonderful idea. I mean, come on, suicidal Portuguese music sung by a homosexual in an Italian restaurant. What better way to spend Gay Sunday?

©GayCityNews 2008

2008-06-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

Everyday A Challenge
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
06/26/2008

So what happened with gay men and meth? A couple of years ago everyone was in a panic. Eighth Avenue was crowded with bus stop posters decrying the scourge that was crystal methamphetamine, it seemed like everyone knew someone who had just lost their job or soul to Tina, brunch pals were dropping like flies. Health officials and community activists made the direst possible predictions about the perfect storm of meth and HIV, not to mention flesh-eating, drug-resistant bacterial infections. Yikes!

Well, the truth is that meth, like crack cocaine, is still around and still wreaking havoc in the lives of gay men and others; it's just gone underground. The public panic has waned, as it always does - a point this newspaper's Duncan Osborne has taken pains to point out - and all the hoopla has subsided into the daily grind of users using and former users struggling to stay clean.

The effort to silence the seductive siren's call of crystal meth has proven in many cases to be a tremendously difficult battle that still takes enormous effort even years after a user has admitted he has a problem and taken substantial steps to address it.

Just ask anyone in the still crowded rooms of the 12-step group Crystal Meth Anonymous (http://www.nycma.org), which has more than 30 meetings a week in Manhattan. Those guys know the different cycles of relapse, because they hear about it every day.

There are people like Davis (all the names in this article have been changed) in early recovery but still struggling to go for even a week without binging. "It's like I'm trying to climb up the slope of a mountain and just can't get traction. I keep sliding back. If I have money, I'll buy drugs. If I feel down, I'll go online to try to hook up with someone who's using. I just can't get over the hump."

Achieving abstinence can be particularly difficult with meth because the way it operates on the brain may actually interfere with a person's ability to withstand triggers to use. Cocaine is known to flush the brain with more than 500 percent the normal level of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine, whereas meth can stimulate the release of more than 1,500 percent. But when the party's finally over, a user is running only on fumes to support his emotional stability as the brain slowly attempts to recover.

For many people, getting sober requires an all-out effort, not infrequently an inpatient detox program with specific experience in treating meth addicts like the ones at Manhattan's Addiction Institute (http://www.addictioninstituteny.org), at the Pride Institute (http://www.pride-institute.com), a long-time presence in Minnesota that now operates in New Jersey as well. But go-away rehab programs are costly and often not covered by stingy managed care companies. Luckily, there are other options, like the LGBT Community Center's new outpatient recovery program (http://gaycenter.org/health/recovery) that operates on a sliding scale based on people's ability to pay and accepts Medicaid.

But all too often, even when someone has been able to cobble together a few months of clean time, and has a whole host of new perspectives on what made them vulnerable to getting hooked on meth, and has even re-crafted their world from a shady network of users into a supportive sober community, relapse is more often the norm than an exception.

"I was six months off meth," said Charlie, "I was going to CMA meetings every day. But I was lonely I hadn't learned how to have sex and be intimate with another guy without meth. Slowly I started back sniffing around online, then jerking off thinking about crystal sex. An old fuck buddy from like more than a year ago texted me one day I called in sick to work and was back in the saddle with meth."

For Charlie, his relapse was luckily just a slip and within a couple days, he was back at CMA and slowly counting each clean day again. But for some guys, getting back to sobriety can take months. "I was so ashamed of myself," said Gordon who relapsed last year after being two-and-a-half years off meth. "I was supposed to be a pillar of sobriety, advising people who just got clean. I was supposed to have it figured out. When I broke up with my boyfriend, I got so depressed, and then when I relapsed, I just couldn't face telling people it had happened. And so it kept happening. It was really a nightmare."

While Gordon has stopped again, the sense of fragility - that the specter of meth addition might raise its head at any time - plagues him daily. "It's never over with crystal," he said. "As long as it's out there somewhere, I need to be constantly vigilant."

While the intensity of the drug and its effect on the brain explains some of the frequency of relapse, it's likely that there are other contributory factors. Internalized homophobia may find expression in the power of the drug to silence all the self-lacerating chatter that goes on in the minds of gay men as they attempt to find love and connection in a world still freaked out by HIV and where standards for physical beauty and success can often seem unattainably high.

Crystal's sneaky specialty is that it puts gay men in a precious mental zone where they can be with themselves, with their own bodies and with other men and their bodies, without the often covert self-sabotaging thoughts that tell them they are too fat, too stupid, too something to be loved. The problem, of course, is the awful price that meth exacts for the few hours of unalloyed pleasure.

If relapse is regularly a part of the recovery process with meth, the challenge is learning how to quit through slips - not let them deter you but rather teach you, helping you to get back up on the horse. Relapse is dangerous, certainly, but the hope is that the skills that someone learns in getting clean once can be applied when they are needed again - skills like reaching out to others, making sure there are plenty of resources to help and not the bare minimum, and uncovering the shadowy influence of internalized homophobia.

Gay men are nothing if not resilient. In the ongoing battle against addiction to crystal meth, meeting the challenge of relapse means being fully who we are and not allowing a drug to turn us into mere shells of ourselves.

Christopher Murray, LCSW, is a therapist in private practice in Chelsea who can be reached at http://www.christophermurray.org.

©GayCityNews 2008

2008-06-26T19:03:00.000-07:00

Melissa Sklarz, a New York transgender rights advocate, shown here with New York Governor David A. Paterson, will be on the Rules Committee at the Democratic National Convention in August.

Conventional Wisdom Is the Goal
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
06/26/2008

Although she snagged only a cameo in the 2005 film "TransAmerica" starring Felicity Huffman, Melissa Sklarz has played a long-standing role as one of the most respected and effective transgender community activists in New York. After proving an important mover in the recently successful push to finally get GENDA, a gender expression non-discrimination bill, through the State Assembly, she was just named one of ten New Yorkers on the Rules Committee of the Democratic National Convention set for Denver this August. In 2004, Sklarz was one of only six transgendered delegates at the convention in Boston.

A director of the New York Trans Rights Organization, she's currently the vice chair of National Stonewall Democrats' board of directors and is a former president of Manhattan's Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats.

By day, Sklarz, 57, is the collections manager at the Actor's Fund Credit Union, having previously worked for Gay Men's Health Crisis and the Gay Games. A former high school varsity athlete, she's a center fielder on the Vikings team in the Big Apple Softball League, where she's played the last eight years.

A 14-year resident of Manhattan, Sklarz recently moved to Woodside in Queens. Growing up on Long Island, she went to her first transgender bar in 1976 and has "never really looked back."

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: So, you are heading to Denver!
MELISSA SKLARZ: I have been elected to be on the Rules Committee as one of the representatives from New York State at the Democratic National Convention.

CM: Does that mean you are an Obamamaniac?
MS: I was elected as Hillary Clinton supporter, and the New York part of the Rules Committee is made up of about 60 percent former Clinton supporters which is no surprise, since she did so well in New York. State Assemblymember Jonathan Bing was also selected, and he supported Hillary. Gay activist Corey Johnson will come, too, and he is an Obama supporter. For all of us, going on the Rules Committee, but not as delegates, will mean we have credentials and access without having a floor vote.

CM: Are you supporting Obama now? How is he on trans issues?
MS: Yes, I am. He is supportive of a trans-inclusive ENDA [the proposed federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act] and trans-inclusive hate crimes legislation. Those are the two big issues, the only ones that either of the candidates will ruminate on.

After he's elected, Obama may well think more outside the box. But anything progressive that the congressional Democrats manage to pass legislatively will be challenged by the conservatives through legal action and - guess what? - the courts have been thoroughly Republicanized. Just look here in New York State, where we are seeing conservatives suing Governor Paterson for saying he'll recognize any gay marriage performed outside of New York.

CM: Do you think the trans community nationwide shares the optimism of Senator Obama's supporters?
MS: I cannot speak for an entire national community, but here in New York, we are thrilled about the passage of GENDA in the State Assembly. That victory provided for reasonable and serious debate about our community on the floor of the Legislature. So we are doing good here, as for the other 49 states... I think our trans community is used to being victimized and it's hard sometimes to even acknowledge our victories. I think trans people carry their personal hurts and defeats along with them. However, I expect the political environment of 2009 to be very different, and that it will enter the realm of exciting possibility.

CM: Will there be any other trans people at the convention?
MS: From coast to coast, there will be eight or nine of us in Denver, a few more than last time, so we've seen an increase, which is good. In Boston in 2004, the most important thing for us was the coming together of a national trans community working as one to create a foundation for our political process. We had a meeting with the Kerry people with a full national transgender agenda prepared. They were not very open to it, but what we did ask them to do was to stop saying "gay, gay, gay" all the time and instead refer to "the LGBT community," and that they did.

CM: You mentioned the passage of GENDA in the State Assembly, what's the next step there?
MS: Having the bill come before the State Senate. Senator Tom Duane is carrying the bill, but I don't think we have any Republican involvement yet. The Senate has historically been unfriendly to LGBT issues, but we either need to find Republicans to support it, or to take back the Senate, so that's the next step.

CM: What to your mind was the tipping point on passing GENDA in the Assembly?
MS: Well, the Empire State Pride Agenda made it a number-one priority of election year 2008. We got our coalition together - who told their Assembly people, who eventually were able to convince Speaker Sheldon Silver of its importance. The explosion over ENDA in Washington may also have had an impact. But the clear commitment of ESPA is to make the Democrats the majority in the State Senate.

The process for GENDA in the Assembly this year was great. The bill went through quick and easy. I was there for the debate and was very moved by hearing our friends and rather shocked by listening to our enemies, I've never heard firsthand what the conservative Republicans think of our GENDA bill before. I've spent almost ten years trying to convince our Democrat friends this is important and valid. But hearing the Republican perspective for the first time during the debate was ugly. The conservative party has their talking points about GENDA, and it has to do with locker rooms and bathrooms, and the idea that sexual predators will now be dressing up as women and getting access to women-only spaces

CM: How does it feel to hear these things?
MS: Simple - more work. More work is all. Hell, they are lawmakers, and they are entitled to their opinion. They just need more education. We need more voices, more faces, more education. But our friends were great - Danny O'Donnell, Deborah Glick, Dick Gottfried, and Brooklyn's Jim Brennan, they were all great.

CM: Tell me about the pain of the last Congressional session's debate about ENDA.
MS: We had spent years... how do I put this? In the Bush agenda there is no room for trans rights or LGBT rights. They worked very hard to de-gay their legislation. All the work of the Clinton administration, they worked hard to remove. Only since 2006, since the Dems took over Congress, have new ideas come into play. I started lobbying federally in the Clinton years and stopped in the Bush years. It didn't seem to make sense.

CM: Are you saying you weren't surprised by what happened to ENDA?
MS: As recently as 2002 we were trying to get the language of ENDA changed to be trans-inclusive. It finally had a chance when the Human Rights Campaign changed their mind in 2004. After the fiasco here in New York when trans-language was never included in the gay rights bills, Matt Foreman went to bat for us, while he was running the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, but then last year HRC reversed its decision.

CM: So why did the powers that be decide to exclude the trans-inclusive language?
MS: Hard to say, really. My guess is that perhaps it came from George Miller [the California Democrat who chairs the House's Committee on Education and Labor] or it's very possible that the supportive Republicans came together in conference with [Connecticut] Representative Christopher Shays and demanded a gay-only ENDA. We don't know, but the Dems didn't want a war on this. Whether it was ultimately Miller, Barney Frank, or Nancy Pelosi's strategy decision, I don't know. But HRC supported it. In any event, it would be hard to change it back now that it's gone through the House. I'm not all that optimistic.

CM: I'm struck by your dispassionate stance, how practical you are. Is that the voice of experience?
MS: My focus is the fight. I don't focus on victory. I'm in it for the fight. Our trans community is so small and virtually invisible, and for me to make demands of the culture at large where so few relate to and recognize our needs would be a waste of energy.

CM: How to you keep going?
MS: I think the fight is worth it. I like the fights. I like the ideas behind the fights.

©GayCityNews 2008

I've gone kookoo for social networking sites!

2008-06-19T20:44:00.001-07:00

http://profile.myspace.com/

http://profiles.friendster.com/christophermurray

http://www.facebook.com/

Private Practice

2008-06-19T12:18:00.001-07:00

www.christophermurray.org

Slackonomics

2008-06-17T20:50:00.000-07:00

My Revson Fellow pal Claudia Preparata introduced me to her friend, writer Lisa Chamberlain this past weekend. Lisa's new book, Slackonomics, comes out in a week or so and looks like a terrific window in the the generation x world through an economic lense. Check it out at her webpage!

Recent Backstage Review

2008-06-17T20:18:00.001-07:00

Four Women & a Waitress
June 13, 2008
By Christopher Murray
Each of the brief one-acts on this double bill features a pair of women engaged in conflict -- two sisters in Edward Allan Baker's Rosemary With Ginger and two actors in Strindberg's The Stronger, translated by Carl Mueller -- expressed in coarse argument in the former and subtle observation in the latter.

In Rosemary With Ginger, the eponymous sisters come together upon the closing of Rhode Island's Peter Pan Diner in 1993. Among the worn chairs, dirty walls, and half-filled coffee cups, they attempt to fill out an entry for a mother-of-the-month contest to honor their long-suffering mom but quickly fall into recrimination about the way their lives have turned out.

Pamela Shaw, with big hair and blue sunglasses and cracking both gum and wise, portrays the alcoholic Rosemary as struggling to maintain a sense of umbrage at most likely losing custody of her children. Aria Alpert as Ginger maintains a tense smile in the face of her sister's foulmouthed jeremiads even as her own marriage has hit the rocks. The play, directed by actor Karl Bury, is a little clunky, following standardized dramatic clichés, but the actors reveal the bonds of survivorhood that temper the sister's obvious distaste for one another.

In Strindberg's jewel of a monologue, Frau X (the frisky and intelligent Francesca Faridany) comes upon her old acting and romantic rival, Mlle. Y (noted Swiss actor and director Marthe Keller) in a café on Christmas Eve. While Frau X talks and talks, working her way through nostalgia, accusation, and finally self-satisfied admiration for her friend, Mlle. Y sits silently, nibbling on almonds and reacting only in gesture and glance.

The piece, directed by opera director Stephen Wadsworth, is a cheeky bit of theatrical effect in its deliberate unbalance, but it works, because both actors are so tuned into one another's communication of emotion and tension, expressed in endless anecdote or the meaningful silence of a cat. Keller's beatific smile and worried eyes say volumes, while Faridany's sense of comedy and pathos is evident from her entrance, when she first spies her friend and her eyes light up and the torrent of words gushes forth.

Presented by Maggie Maes and Kimberly Vaughn
at the ArcLight Theatre, 152 W. 71st St., NYC.
June 11-22. Tue.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 5 p.m.
(212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.

Recent Backstage Review

2008-06-05T19:30:00.000-07:00

This Is a Cowboy Poem My Daddy Taught Me
June 03, 2008
By Christopher Murray
Katie Bender's wistful and moving new play, in which she also appears, is set in the west Texas desert town of Marfa, which, a program note explains, the playwright passed through in 2004, learning it was the adopted home and creative laboratory of minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, who died in 1994.

Throughout This Is a Cowboy Poem My Daddy Taught Me, Bender has a fictionalized version of Judd (the craggy Stephen Payne affecting a folksy twinkle reminiscent of Will Rogers) deliver a series of monologues explaining his creative and social vision as defined by his commitment to building an artistic haven among the dusty, disaffected denizens of Marfa.

Bender also explores the impact of this transplanted patriarch on the intersecting lives of a young woman named Love (Bender), who is retracing the pit stops of her wayward post-hippie mother; a disappointed local named Scrappy (Jesse Presler); and, in flashbacks, Scrappy's bellicose, rifle-toting sister Crystal (Mary Guiteras). Scrappy and Crystal were abandoned by their parents to white-trash squalor and an intense, almost incestuous interdependence.

On Stephanie Tucci's economically designed set, short scenes alternate among three locales: Judd's studio, the bar where Scrappy pours whiskey for Love as they share tales of lost legacies and shattered dreams, and the dilapidated front porch of the siblings' house, littered with dented Diet Coke cans used for target practice and the jetsam of a hardscrabble childhood: broken toys and overwashed underclothes.

Lost parents and the betrayals inherent in moving on from childhood's disillusionments are themes expressed mostly in traditional realistic dialogue, with expressionistic collage elements added as the play builds to its climax under Stephanie Yankwitt's deft direction. The subtle and apt costuming is by Jennifer L. Adams.

An excessive reliance on monologues to express the characters' emotional states reveals the play to be incompletely dramatized, but heartfelt performances engage the audience's empathy. Presler stands out in a workhorse role, his pinched, unshaven face moving from an adolescent's gawky credulity to a young man's numb disbelief in the possibility of his own redemption.

Presented by Rockstead Productions and the Cardinal Group at the Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex's Dorothy Strelsin Theatre, 312 W. 36th St., New York City.
May 29-June 15. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.
(212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.
Casting by Judy Bowman.

The Brooklyn Paper Shout Out

2008-05-30T15:48:00.000-07:00

The redoutable editor of the award-winning Brooklyn Paper, Gersh Kuntzman, (did you know he also co-wrote the critically acclaimed off-broadway play "SUV: The Musical" with songwriter Marc Dinkin?), was kind enough to give my private practice a shout out in last week's issue. Thanks, Gersh!

Our gay/political/social work/writer/Democratic insider pal Christopher Murray was happy to report that he’s now licensed as a social worker by New York State and has set up a private practice. First on the agenda? Life-coaching sessions with gay men or men with a history of substance abuse (or both?). Contact him at www.christophermurray.org. …

Josef Kozak Drawing

2008-05-29T20:21:00.000-07:00

I just acquired this untitled drawing by Josef Kozak from the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation. Outsider artist Kozak creates detailed mythological fantasias often weaving elements from 17th century and Native American images and motifs. Usually sexually explicit, his work is technically at a high level, and incorporates a winking humor into a strongly narrative expression.

This piece was featured in a recent edition of "The Archive," the journal of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, and was made available to me by Charles Leslie.

An interview with Kozak appeared in the Spring/Summer, 1999 edition of "The Archive".

Backstage Review of The Judas Tree

2008-05-04T14:54:00.000-07:00

The Judas Tree
April 29, 2008
By Christopher Murray

The historical story of currently incarcerated Latina serial killer Dorothea Puente, who dispatched elderly and drifter residents of her Sacramento boarding house, makes terrific dramatic material in Mary Fengar Gail's fictionalized The Judas Tree.

MultiStages' world premiere production is set a film noirish 30 years previous to the 1988 conviction of Puente. Voluptuous landlady Elena Fiero (played with defiant intensity by the comely Roseanne Medina) sees herself as a bruja and priestess of nature, saying, "I killed no one…. They sacrificed themselves through me," though she happily cashes her victims' government checks. When the uncle of a young woman who disappeared while staying with Elena asks a retired private investigator (John Haggerty) to insinuate himself into her world, he quickly falls prey to Elena's seductive charms and risks being another victim planted in her garden.

Told through the familiar Law & Order framing device of a trial, The Judas Tree alternates between somewhat prolonged two-person scenes full of florid language — "We chicas know the chacha of the flowers as they dance" — and sung commentary by five dancers comprising what the program calls the Chorus Corpus Flora, who wave their arms in ecstatic, Isadora Duncan-style movements choreographed by Jennifer Chin.

This play with music (by Anika Paris, with lyrics by James Schevill) drags in places by overlaboring the religious and botanical symbolism of Elena's specious rationale for her murders. But a strong supporting cast helps make up for that, particularly Daniel H. Hicks in the dual roles of the concerned uncle and an elderly boarder, Tanya Perez as a chatty boarder and expert witness, and José Febus in several roles, most movingly a disabled boarder who becomes an unwilling accomplice.

Presented by MultiStages

at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center's Teatro La Tea, 107 Suffolk St., 2nd floor, NYC.

April 26-May 11. Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., May 4, 5 p.m.; Sun., May 11, 2 p.m.

(212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.

2008-04-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

A White Crane Conversation with David Mixner

By Christopher Murray

This is only an excerpt...

Called “the most powerful Gay man in America” by Newsweek magazine following his successful efforts to marshal Gay money and resources for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, political advisor David Mixner helped start the nation’s first Gay political action committee, the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), and was a co-founder of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, the Washington-based national organization that identifies and supports highly qualified LGBT candidates for public office. He has been a leading advisor on several other presidential bids, including those of Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart, and George McGovern. In February, Mixner endorsed Barack Obama, saying, “The major factor in my decision to endorse Obama is the war in Iraq. To put it simply, he was right from the beginning. There is absolutely no question in my mind that Senator Obama is Senator Clinton’s peer on substance and policy. Clearly, he is not only ready on day one to be president, but he also will be right on day one! Obama has surrounded himself with some of the best minds in the country. He has the ability to inspire us to make sacrifices and to serve our nation. The senator has one of the best minds in the country. Like President Kennedy, he and his family will make us proud to have them in the White House. So, with great enthusiasm, I embrace Senator Obama and am allowing myself to dream and believe again.”

Christopher Murray: You said to me once that you have a vision for a Gay president. Why? How?

David Mixner: In America, the ultimate sign of success of a group making it, whether it was John Kennedy being Catholic, or a Jewish president someday, is living in the White House. Right now, we have two candidacies in part powerfully motivated by one being African American, Barack Obama, and one being a woman, Hillary Clinton. The attainability of someone from our Lesbian and Gay community being president one day is the ultimate symbol that one has arrived and been accepted by society.

That’s power, real power, where we are judged on our talents as whole human beings and not on our sexuality, where it’s possible for young Gay people to have any dream that they want and know that it’s attainable. If you one of us could be president, then any of us could be anything we want.

Murray: What is Gay political power and how is it changing over time?

Mixner: I don’t know if there is such a thing as Gay political power. I think there is such a thing as political power and that Gays are finally in a position to participate. If we are talking about Gay political power, we are talking about who is head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. Real power is people: Gay people heading committees in state legislatures and city councils. For the first time in the last decade, we are now in the position of attaining major political power and having not only a place at the table, but helping to design the table. It was less than four decades ago that Elaine Noble, when she ran for the legislature in Massachusetts, had to have armed guards. It was literally only two decades ago that Michael Dukakis refused to take organized, Gay-bundled funds. It was three decades ago that people refused to take my check as a political donation because I was openly homosexual.

That meant that the political power we had was internally focused. Who was on what board. Our status and self-esteem was based on our own community-based organizations. Now we are finding out as members of the community and getting married, having families, that we are no longer tokens. That although we have a broad range of frontiers to still break through, the fact of the matter is that it is not an anomaly for a Gay person to head the budget committee or ways and means committee in the legislature, which is real power. It is not an anomaly to be an openly Gay campaign manager for a candidate for president. So, what we have made is a transition from that internal focus of power to now where we are participating in power in society generally. This applies outside of politics as well.

Murray: What price have you paid personally for the unprecedented access you have had to the top echelon of political power in our country?

Mixner: It’s something I don’t think about too much. Thinking about it makes it more difficult to accept. It’s easier to avoid the question and just move on. I come from a time where I sat around my family’s dining room table and when a young Gay man killed himself in our neighborhood, my father and mother thought his family was better off. And a time when my partner was served by friends on paper plates because of fear of AIDS. When I was growing up, I thought I wanted to be an ambassador or senator or president but was told that would not be possible.

So there is no question, being Gay has changed the course of my life. Having children was out of the questions, running for political office was out of the question. Being fired from your job or being destroyed politically was a very real possibility if anyone knew. We saw friends arrested for sexual activity in parks and their names printed in the newspapers. What toll did it take? An enormous one. Eventually you cross a line with that oppression where you just aren’t willing to take it any longer. And that resolution to fight that oppression becomes your energy. Not only mine, I remember Harvey Milk and Elaine Noble and many others saying we cannot let another generation go through this. It was an understanding of the modern LGBT movement that few of us would experience the spoils of victory from our work. At this point, we’ve experienced success far greater than any of us would have expected. I’m too old now at sixty to be a dad and throw a football around with my son, but I could still run for office if I chose. But by the time that possibility came into my grasp, I had no desire for it.

Murray: Examples of the cost are that you have been blackmailed and sent into the political wilderness several times in your career.

Mixner: When I was working against the Viet Nam war and achieved notoriety working for Eugene McCarthy as one of the four coordinators of the Viet Nam War Moratorium Committee, there is zero doubt in anyone’s mind that, if I had been openly Gay, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that work. None. I would have been viewed as a horrible weight on the anti-war movement and doing damage to the greater good. So, I was closeted. And during that period, I fell head over heels in love with someone who had been planted by someone. Some intelligence agency or some Gordon Liddy-type operation. It’s still unclear to me who. Photographs were taken and I was blackmailed and told that if I didn’t get out of the anti-war movement, those explicit photographs would be sent to my parents and the press.

I made a pact with myself that if the photos were sent that I would kill myself. I finally figured out that they wouldn’t send them other than anonymously, which would discredit them in the press, so I held firm, but it dramatically reminded me of my vulnerability. I pulled back and became less visible. I developed a persona of the harmonica-playing cowboy who was a grand strategist who said, “Aw, shucks, I don’t really want to do any of those interviews.” A lot of us kept behind the scenes those days, in Hollywood, in politics, just close enough to get a taste of what it was we really wanted, but not in visible danger.

Murray: How do you understand the growth of the Gay rights movement over time, both politically and socially?

Mixner: Chris, that is a question that could take hours to answer. But I remember, growing up in the 1950’s, it wasn’t unusual, for a family who discovered their child was Gay,

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane. We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going. So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

David Mixner blogs regularly at www.davidmixner.com

This is Christopher Murray’s first contribution to White Crane as part of a collection of interviews for a book he is writing entitled Brave New Faggot. Murray writes regularly for Gay City News in New York and is a licensed social worker and psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. He can be contacted at christopher@christophermurray.org or at www.christophermurray.org. He is a member of the White Crane Gay Men’s Health Leadership Academy.

Portrait of David Mixner, Oil On Canvas, 2002, by George Towne. Courtesy of the artist.

Inteview with Chas Brack

2008-04-18T08:43:00.001-07:00

Telling Sakia Gunn's Story
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
04/10/2008

GAY CITY NEWS
Director and producer Charles Brack is in the final, frenzied stages of completing a feature-length documentary about the 2003 bias crime murder of 15-year-old Newark resident Sakia Gunn. Media coverage of Gunn's murder was paltry compared with that of Matthew Shepherd -- though Gay City News was a notable exception -- raising questions about the way race and gender play out in discussions about bias crimes against queer people.

Brack, 48, who is called Chas by his friends, grew up in Chicago and has youthful memories of the disorder during the 1968 Democratic National Convention there. The June day he left Ohio's Antioch College in 1983 with a degree in communications, he drove through the night to arrive in New York for the Gay Pride celebration.

Brack worked for the New York City Commission on Human Rights in its Lesbian and Gay Discrimination Unit and later the AIDS Discrimination Unit as a human rights investigator, eventually becoming an associate producer in the Education Department.

In 1992, he joined Gay Men's Health Crisis where he was the co-coordinator of the Media Unit and associate producer of the "Living with AIDS" cable news magazine program. In 1996, he returned to the Commission on Human Rights, in its Community Relations Bureau, where he worked closely with the police on bias cases.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: Who was Sakia Gunn?
CHARLES BRACK: Sakia was a 15-year-old so-called "aggressive" [defined on the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's website as a homosexual woman of color who dresses in masculine attire], living in Newark, New Jersey, who was killed by a gay basher. Sakia and her friends were returning to their homes after hanging out in Greenwich Village when they were approached by men making sexual advances. Words were exchanged and a fight ensued. Sakia was stabbed and bled out on the streets of downtown Newark. The assailant turned himself in to authorities and is currently serving an approximately 20-year sentence.

CM: What was the impact on you when you first heard about the murder?

CB: When I saw the report on television, the picture of Sakia said more to me than the newscaster. It was clear to me that there was a gender and/ or sexual orientation slant to the story that was not being reported. The person that the media described was a 15-year-old black girl, but I saw a 15-year-old black boy. I knew that there was more to be revealed.

CM: When did you decide to make the documentary?

CB: I was approached by a colleague about doing the film, so I jumped at the chance to do what I do, which is to try to lift up black LGBT people. I was the co-founder of Lavender Light Gospel choir, a charter member and ordained clergy in Unity Fellowship Church --NYC, as well as involved in other community-based organizations in New York City. I don't know, I just love my people.

CM: How is a documentary going to impact the course of events?

CB: I hope that LGBT youth will know that my generation is watching. Although we've been through a different struggle, we care about them. I hope that the film will signal to the larger LGBT and black communities, respectively, that they are not disposable. I hope that Sakia's name will become widely recognizable and that her death was not in vain.

I believe even in this time of morally and ethically declining media coverage of important issues, that media is still a powerful tool for social change, if wielded well. I have learned a lot about the issues that LGBT youth face on a daily basis. I thought that we'd come farther. Sadly, obviously this is not the case.

CM: At what point in the process is the film?

CB: We are in the post-production phase of the film, meaning that we have a rough cut. We hope to be finished in time for upcoming film festivals and New York City's Pride month. It's been a long road but well worth the travel.

CM: How can people support the film?

CB: Donations always help! Just a few more dollars will allow us to actually pay the very generous editor, who has been working for pennies to take out any audio glitches, which can occur when filming off set. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of money out there for this kind of work, but we have managed to get this far. I want the film to serve Sakia's memory well. It needs to look good and sound good in order to get noticed in the vortex of pejorative drivel that is passed off as good representation of black LGBT people.

CM: How did your interest in human rights come about?

CB: I have always been interested in diversity and social change from the time that my little Baptist church on the South Side of Chicago started visiting synagogues and nunneries. I can remember my first Seder at age 10. I guess that explains my past proclivity for Jewish men.

I knew that there was a world outside of the ghetto where I grew up. But I had no idea that that world would be so hostile to a little sissy boy with thick glasses who was accused of being uppity because I spoke proper English. So, all of my educational and employment choices have reflected that initial introduction to multiculturalism.

CM: What do you think LGBT people need to know about human rights and bias crime in our own community?

CB: We need not believe the press on our community. The fight is far from over. Even if we win the fight for gay marriage, it will not be a social panacea to cure all the remaining social plagues inside as well as outside of the LGBT community, like homophobia, sexism, transphobia, and racism. We need to know that most incidents of bias go unreported. We need to know that simply being gay is not a point of departure for our quest for diversity, we still have to do the work to make our community unified.

CM: What else do you have going on?

CB: I am currently working at Third World Newsreel as the operations director. Third World Newsreel is an alternative media arts organization that fosters the creation, appreciation, and dissemination of independent film and video by and about people-of-color and social justice issues.

CM: Do you think you could have been friends with Sakia Gunn?

CB: For many years when I was a kid, I was mistaken for a girl. Let's just say that I was not the butchest boy on the block. So, yes, I think we would have been running in the same circles.

I too grew up in a big city that did not have a clearly established place for black LGBT youth. But like Sakia and many others, we created locations and activities where we could just be ourselves. Our relationships were valued and solid. We cleaved to each other. Although it was a very different time when I was 15, we still encountered the same prejudices that queer youth of color face today.

CM: Are there personal reasons why this murder moved you?

CB: When I was young I even faced the disdain of my father, brother, and community because of my obvious feminine ways and appearance. It was a rough and simultaneously joyous time. Thank God for the Black Church! Despite their effort to cloak us, we are in force there.

But that little thing inside me, that I guess some would say was my spirit, would not be squelched. It's the same spirit that made Sakia and her friends strike back at their assailants.

CM: Can you explain the tangled interplay of homophobia, sexism, transphobia, and racism in Sakia's story?

CB: It's as simple as the cards being stacked against you. For as with many minority groups, the struggle is more complicated. But, being a man of faith I now know that these so called burdens have only proven to make me stronger.

So, for instance, while the straight black community and the white gay community stand on the precipice of the ongoing discourse about who is the most tortured protected class, black LGBT folk exist in a crevasse where we know that none of us is free until all of us are free.

I tire of the question, "Which is worse: being called a nigger or a faggot?"

For more information about Charles Brack's documentary film about the murder of Sakia Gunn, visit sakiagunnfilmproject.com

©GayCityNews 2008

Interview with the Artist Jamie Rauchman

2008-03-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

Painting Cuba
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
03/27/2008

The artist and documentarian James Rauchman, 55, has been doing a colossal series of work about gay life in Havana, Cuba. What began as the expression of a sexual obsession has grown into a major series of works in different forms - oil, watercolor, film - that embraces the kaleidoscopic contradictions of gay people's experiences in Cuba.

Born off Exit 10 on the turnpike in Metuchen, New Jersey, Rauchman received an MFA from Columbia in 1987. It was there where he met his partner of more than 20 years, the Barnard biologist Paul Hertz, with whom he lives in an art-filled apartment on the Upper West Side.

"We were introduced by a British gay rabbi," Rauchman said, obviously delighting in the transgressiveness.

Rauchman's work has been seen at Marian Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, at CRG Gallery in Chelsea, in the 2005 Havana Biennial, as well as in a special showing organized by the pop duo Ashford and Simpson at their Upper West Side restaurant Sugarbar.

His sensibility is defiantly gay, and sometimes graphic, but the work always maintains an intense sense of location and context that complicates a viewer's expectations about the figures depicted. His newest project, a documentary about the traditional Cuban religious holiday honoring Saint Lazarus, weaves a complex and moving portrait of a gay flower seller whose wares follow a torturous path to an altar.

Shortly before Fidel Castro's official retirement from the Cuban presidency, Rauchman paused from editing the new documentary to discuss his work.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: What drew you to making art in Cuba?
JAMES RAUCHMAN: I went to Cuba for the first time in 1997, following Paul, who was working there with some Cuban scientists. I had recently had an exhibition of Riverside Park landscape paintings with the New York City Parks Department, which represented about three years' work. Suddenly I was feeling stuck and was thrashing around looking for some new subject matter, when Cuba came up and grabbed me by the neck. Cuba to me is like a mirror image of the United States - everything is reversed there in terms of official and even societal priorities and I find this utterly fascinating.

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CM: How much of your Cuba work is about gay themes?
JR: I did a series of about 40 oil paintings detailing my ill-fated infatuation with a male hustler there. It helped me work out the feelings, so to speak. Since then I've done a series of watercolor portraits of all sorts of people, not gay-themed, and have made a couple of short documentary films that are about spiritual and economic issues in the society.

CM: What have you learned about gay life in Cuba?
JR: I've learned that, like everything else in Cuba, gay life is one big mass of contradictions. On the one hand, societal mores are about 40 years behind enlightened Western understanding of gay people - especially in the countryside. On the other hand, one night in Havana I was invited to a party at a public school where they were celebrating National Teacher's Day by presenting a lip-synching drag show for the pleasure of the local teachers and their children. Strange, but true.

CM: Is the role of art and artists different in a place where there is a dictator?
JR: Here are my biased oversimplifications: In Cuba there are official artists, and there are independent artists, and their roles are different from one another. The official artists do work that is Cuba-centric and nationalistic, and are promoted by the government in the official media, the only media there is. Meanwhile, the independent artists who have been university-trained along the lines of Western conceptualism, and are talented and clever, are scrambling for international exposure, just like artists everywhere.
The totalitarian Cuban cultural bureaucracy is very sophisticated in that they have figured out a way to allow, and even encourage, a kind of free artistic expression, including cultural, political critiques, among a certain segment of their artistic elite, which is available for export, but is not readily accessible at home. Thus they can keep a tight lid on their own population, while appearing to be more liberal than they are from abroad.

CM: Do Cuban gays think life will be better when Fidel Castro is dead?
JR: As I hear about it, there is already a lot of official support for gay people, through the agency of the daughter of Fidel's Castro's brother and [then] Acting President Raul Castro. She is known as an academic sexologist and has spoken out on TV for all sorts of LGBT rights. Too bad the average person has no civil rights to begin with. I think all Cubans in some way wish that that situation might change soon, at least when Fidel dies.

CM: A lot of your work is autobiographical in one way or another. Is it challenging to be in your work as well as creating it?
JR: On the one hand, I think that all artists use their lives as raw material in some way. I mean, what else do you have? But the specific challenge of representing myself, as an image, as a person, in a painting, comes out of a need, which I think some other gay people may share, to compensate for a sense of unreality I felt about myself when growing up. I think I have painted myself as a way of retrieving myself after having blocked myself out, or not accepting myself, for many years.

CM: You've been making documentaries about life in Cuba lately. What drew you to that form?
JR: I love what's going on with the art of documentary film these days. I realized when I was doing the series of paintings about my experiences with the hustler that it was sequenced like a story board for a film, and finally I realized I just had to pick up a camera and try to tell a real life story in that way, in that medium, in order to keep growing as an artist. It was especially exciting to have my first short documentary shown at last year's Woodstock Film Festival.

CM: Your partner Paul Hertz and you have a wonderful collection of contemporary art. When you look at what you and other artists are creating, how do you understand how art is changing now?
JR: Um, can I dodge that question? Paul and I collect what we like and we have reasons for liking what we like, but to try and explain those reasons is like trying to explain your whole life in one sentence. I don't understand how art is changing now, besides becoming more technological. I always thought that the best art was about something that doesn't change.

CM: If you could change something about your life as an artist, what would it be?
JR: Ah, good, now we're getting to the funny questions. Listen, it's been such a struggle getting to a state of basic, artistic self-acceptance, I wouldn't want to be seen being churlish, wishing for something as mediocre as material success. Next question!

CM: If you could have sex with a famous artist, living or dead, who would you pick and why?
JR: My kinky, inquisitive side wants to say Toulouse-Lautrec, but based on the pears and apples, I have to conclude that sex with Cezanne must have been very satisfying. But since you'd probably have to get both of those guys drunk to have sex with them, I'll just sprint ahead to Matthew Barney based on his looks, since he seems to be game for anything.

www.jamesrauchman.net/

©GayCityNews 2008

Recent Backstage Reviews

2008-03-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

Jackie Mason: The Ultimate Jew
March 24, 2008
By Christopher Murray

"Even if the show is not too hot, I don't care, I'm not coming back," says Jackie Mason in his new standup show at New World Stages, referring to this purportedly being his "final one-man comedy." Well, it's pretty lukewarm.

Mason is the last of the Mohicans of borsht-belt comics. At 71, he has honed his delivery and timing over decades. He can handle a heckler, spin a one-liner out of recent headlines (as he does with Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace), and he knows his audience. His right-of-center political comedy and retro ethnic-stereotyping gags went over well with the mostly over-50 crowd on the night I saw the show, but the whole thing had a tepid quality.

The son and grandson of rabbis and one himself in his young adulthood, Mason's comedy is in the Jewish tradition of puncturing an inflated ego and exposing hypocrisy. That's a wonderful basis for comedy, but Mason's delivery feels pretty rote in this new show. The two main topics of the two-hour evening are skewering the Democratic presidential candidates and riffing on the American obsession with status. In the second act, Mason pulls out some chestnuts with impersonations of his old boss Ed Sullivan as well as mid-century figures like Liberace, Alfred Hitchcock, and even newsmen Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley.

While it's a pleasure to see someone do something he knows how to do superlatively well and also to gain appreciation for an old-school style of performance, Jackie Mason: The Ultimate Jew feels too much like overheated leftovers.

Presented by Jyll Rosenfeld, IAG, and Allen Spivack/Adam Spivak/Larry Magid
at New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St., NYC.
March 18–June 29. Tue.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (Additional performances Wed., March 26, April 9 and 23, and May 14, 2 p.m.)
(212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7250 or www.telecharge.com.

Romeo and Juliet
March 17, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Theater Breaking Through Barriers (formerly Theater by the Blind) presents Shakespeare's tragedy of young lovers with just four actors and at a breakneck pace, the idea being to honor the uncut script as well as the purported original size of the troupes that performed the Bard's early works. It's an unfortunate and fatal miscalculation in the hands of director Ike Schambelan.

Played on a clean gray-blue set (designed by Bert Scott, who also did the lighting), the production presents the warring families of Verona as Boston Brahmins (the Montagues) and Southern aristocrats (the Capulets), their costuming (by Chloe Chapin) in shades of red and orange for the former and hues of blue for the latter.

Most of the rest of the play's characters are portrayed as members of various ethnic or cultural groups, including the disabled, but the accents used to indicate these identities are so broad and so bad as to be highly stereotypical. In fact, in the rush to clock the entire play in at two hours with no intermission, the four actors -- George Ashiotis, Gregg Mozgala, Nicholas Viselli, and Emily Young -- are reduced to dispensing with any sense of emotional reality and popping in and out of costume and character like wooden cuckoos out of clocks.

This is occasionally -- and absurdly -- played for laughs, as when Juliet in Friar Laurence's cell attempts to convince Paris, to whom she has been unwillingly betrothed, that she looks forward to their union. What should be a poignant scene of the young woman's foolish ploy becomes ridiculous because Emily Young has been cast as both Juliet and Paris. It's a particular shame, as Young provides flashes that she understands both the giddy excitement and feverish desperation of Juliet.

As Mercutio, also played by Young, asks, "What curious eye doth quote deformities?," this reviewer must ask, What director's eye doth deform this tragedy into low comedy?

Presented by Theater Breaking Through Barriers
at the Kirk Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., NYC.
March 16-April 6. Wed. and Thu., 7 p.m.; Fri. and Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.

Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles!
March 14, 2008
By Christopher Murray

"Hey, do me a favor: Give me a vamp in F," says one character in Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! -- and with only that much pretext launches into another zippy song with fingers a-strumming. Such a casual yet enthusiastic spirit defines this slight but enjoyable new musical with book and lyrics by Uke Jackson (founder of New York Uke Fest, of which this show is this year's jewel in the crown) and music by Terry Waldo, best known for his scholarship about ragtime music.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a moment late in the 21st century when the pharmaceutical industry has taken over the world, outlawing sex, mandating pill popping (laughing out loud has become pathologized as LOL Syndrome), and limiting musical expression to something known as the Top Ten, gold-jacket-wearing performers who have won an American Idol-type contest.

Three antiestablishment ukulele players -- Max (John Forkner), Liz (Lindsay Foreman) and Julie (Meg Cavanaugh) -- self-proclaimed musical outlaws, have been meeting in secret to rehearse as a prelude for entering the contest, though they also meet just to enjoy the modest, kooky, nostalgic and charming obsession that is ukulele playing. When Pete, a mysterious stranger (Andrew Guilarte), offers to coach them for the contest, ambition and attraction threaten to foul things up until the harmonizing power of the ukulele sets things right again.

The show is replete with fun and upbeat choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall -- featuring the elastic and enthusiastic dancer Dustin Flores -- and winsome and witty costumes by Susan Gittens. The songs, all in the New Orleans jazz mode, are short, optimistic, pleasantly forgettable, and come cascading one right after another. The performers play the broad, winking comedy appealingly, particularly John Forkner as a kind of uke sex symbol with his crown of curly hair and aren't-I-cute smile.

A fast 90 minutes, Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! charms with ease, rightly wearing its limited ambitions as a badge of honor: to provide a little musical entertainment in a troubled world.

Presented by and at Theater for the New City as part of New York Uke Fest 2008,
151 First Ave., NYC.
March 13-April 6. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com or www.theaterforthenewcity.net.

Brains and Puppets
March 03, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Brains and Puppets comprises two short plays by Edward Einhorn, The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Robot and A Taste of Blue, which evoke the experience of young people with the neurological conditions autism and synesthesia, respectively. Both plays are designed and directed by Tanya Khordoc and Barry Weil, who each perform in one.

In The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Robot, a parable of self-acceptance, Weil plays a boy who grows up in a land of robots. His full name, Organic Unit #1, is shortened to Orgo. He struggles to understand his limitations in comparison to his efficient robot friends -- "He got very tired and had many malfunctions" -- and his lack of connection with other organic units. His habit of counting and listing and his mirthless bark of a laugh confuse his friend Lisa and her stepmother, but they ultimately help him find a dragon queen who holds the key to his greatest desire. Although the story is slight, the winsome puppets and gentle humor convey the importance of tolerating difference and the right of all people to define their own identity.

Tanya Khordoc uses dyed liquids on an opaque projector and a series of light boxes to create colorful images that approximate how a person with synesthesia -- a condition that causes a person to experience a blurring of sensory stimuli: "hearing" colors, "seeing" music -- experiences his or her world. A Taste of Blue is a first-person narrative of a girl who is powerfully aware that she encounters her environment very differently from those around her. A honking car horn, for example, is "a burst of brownness." While the monologue acknowledges the essential loneliness of difference, it also finds great beauty and solace in accepting one's unique perspective.

There were just a few children in the audience of Brains and Puppets at the performance I attended. It's highbrow stuff for kids, perhaps, but these lovingly created stories work magic in transforming seeming limitations into privileges.

Presented by Untitled Theater Company #61 and Evolve Company
at Walkerspace, 46 Walker St., NYC.
March 1-15. Sat., 6 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatremania.com.

Our Country's Good
February 29, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Folding Chair Classical Theatre performs classic texts with a minimum of production values, choosing instead to focus on "story — plot and character — rather than on stagecraft," according to press materials. Its bracing revival of Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, which is based on The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally, therefore features a cast of 10 — most playing multiple roles — barefoot and in street clothes, with the only costume elements being military dress coats worn to designate those characters who are members of the Royal Navy or Marines. It's a "light up, lights down" design, with the set consisting merely of two benches, plus five wooden cubes holding the small number of carefully chosen props.

Our Country's Good concerns an officer in the penal colony at New South Wales who has been charged with directing a group of convicts transported to Australia in the late 18th century in a production of George's Farquhar's comedy The Recruiting Officer. Class, gender, and racial issues are exposed as rehearsals for the play within the play progress.

The pared-down scenic elements lend the flavor of a workshop or academic exercise to the production, which is belied by the commitment and acting chops of the company. It's difficult to single out any one actor, as the entire cast delivers with passion and intelligence in portraying the conflicts among the characters as they are transformed by — dare I say it — the magic of the theatre. Our Country's Good is all about the power of storytelling to show us to ourselves in new and novel ways, and Folding Chairs' production is a brisk and supple demonstration of this theme.

Although the team utilized a dialect coach, the multifarious accents are sometimes all over the place, and occasionally the performance style veers into acting with a capital A. Still, ample credit must go to director Marcus Geduld, also the company's artistic director, for eliciting such strong and moving performances.

Presented by Folding Chair Classical Theatre
at 78th Street Theatre Lab, 236 W. 78th St., NYC.
Feb. 28-March 22. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 2 p.m. (No matinee performances March 1, 2, 7, and 8.)
(212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.

Recent Backstage Reviews

2008-02-26T16:14:00.000-08:00

Cat's Cradle
February 25, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Untitled Theater Company #61's adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle is subtitled "a calypso musical," but that's not quite accurate. This ingenious production, adapted and directed by Edward Einhorn, is more accurately described as a play with music (by Henry Akona) performed by an enthusiastic 22-member company. It also makes diverting use of a small camera focused on an intricate series of models (designed by Tanya Khordoc and Barry Weil), with the resulting images projected onto a beige curtain along the upstage wall to indicate various settings.

The complexity of the production is matched by the convoluted plot. Vonnegut's deadly serious satire concerns a writer (Timothy McCown Reynolds) playing detective to unravel the mystery of a famous scientist's strange and dangerous discovery, ice-nine, a compound that causes water to freeze at room temperature and may be able to wreak havoc globally.

The trail the writer follows leads him to the dead scientist's grown children and the tiny imaginary Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, where he becomes embroiled in machinations of state, religion, and the heart. The potentially dangerous amalgam of unfettered ambition, ingenuity, and creativity is shown to have disastrous consequences for both families and communities.

The creators' ambitions are characteristic of Untitled Theater Company #61's mission to produce "a Theatre of Ideas, political, scientific, and philosophical." While the different elements sometimes compete with each other in a confusing mélange, the overall effect is bracing and makes for intriguing theatre. The adaptation remains incompletely dramatized, but the actors' commitment to the storytelling keeps things focused and energized.

The company makes full use of its somewhat limited musical ability, and several actors stand out in featured parts, among them John Blaylock in dual roles as a laconic model-store owner and a cynical foreign-service attaché and Sandy York as a chirpy denizen of Indiana with big hair and replete with zeal for any Hoosier she encounters.

Presented by Untitled Theater Company #61
at Walkerspace, 46 Walker St., NYC.
Feb. 23–March 15. Tue., Thu., and Fri., 7:30 p.m.; Sat., 8 p.m.
(212) 353-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com.

Ghost on Fire
February 25, 2008
By Christopher Murray

It's not quite clear to me why Oberon Theatre Ensemble chose to revive Ghost on Fire, Michael Weller's 1986 play about a disillusioned film director named Daniel Rittman (Don Harvey) who is facing the serious illness of his onetime collaborator and the potential breakup of his marriage. The play is creaky, to say the least, and replete with characters stuck in a perpetually dyspeptic mode as they wrestle with the disappointments and torpor of middle age. "You ponderous bastard," Rittman's old cameraman Toomie (Brad Fryman) shouts at him. But the play itself is a ponderous mediation on coming to terms with the loss of youthful dreams and optimism.

Oberon's production, directed by Eric Parness, is a little creaky itself, unfortunately. A series of monologues by the main characters is upstaged by actors setting up for the next scene, the blocking frequently seems unmotivated, and often the actors seem a little vague about their position in a scene, sometimes staring aimlessly into the ether during another's speech.

That being said, Harvey, with his deep-set eyes, communicates the essential loneliness of a man who has walked away from his life's passion. The most energy, however, is stirred up with seeming ease by Brianne Berkson, who plays several roles and excels as the trophy wife of an Israeli businessman. She slaps suntan lotion on her legs with a disdainful mixture of boredom, intelligence, and erotic charm and slaps down the dithering men around her in much the same way.

Presented by Oberon Theatre Ensemble
at the Lion Theater, 410 W. 42nd St., NYC.
Feb. 21–March 9. Schedule varies.
(212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.

Robert Espinoza Interview

2008-02-23T21:21:00.000-08:00

Poet and Go-To Guy

By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY

02/21/2008




	With his background in labor union work and LGBT philanthropy, Robert Espinoza just completed a study on the funding needs of queer people of color groups.

A few weeks ago, an organization dedicated to encouraging financial support for the queer community released a groundbreaking report on the work done by LGBT people of color institutions, how they see their efforts, and how they survive.

The report was penned by Robert Espinoza, who is the director of research and communications at Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues. Espinoza, 31, has developed a strong national voice in the philanthropic world on issues related to queer people and people of color. In his work, he has also pressed grant-making organizations to think generally about how to share power and become more inclusive.

The former communications director for the Denver Service Employees International Union local, Espinoza was appointed by that city's mayor to the Public Safety Review Commission in 2002 and was on the founding staff of the communication department at the Gill Foundation, a philanthropic organization that supports LGBT and HIV/AIDS initiatives. He serves on the Queer Youth Fund of the Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles and for four years was one of six panel members of the OUT Fund, at New York's Funding Exchange. A published poet,Espinoza recently moved to Brooklyn's Sunset Park and is working on a series of poems about superheroes.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: What does Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues do?

ROBERT ESPINOZA: We work with foundations around the country to support their institutional giving to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer [LGBTQ] organizations. We produce research reports on foundation giving to lesbian and gay communities, and we bring together funders from around the country to collaborate and to strengthen each other's giving. The goal is to spur more foundation dollars to our various communities, notably groups working on racial, economic, and gender justice.

CM: Why was the new report on LGBTQ people of color organizations undertaken?

RE: We wanted to understand how to better support groups led by and for LGBTQ people of color, many of which work at the local level and are more obscure to mainline foundations. The report helped identify about 84 autonomous LGBTQ people of color groups across the country, spanning 20 states, plus DC and Puerto Rico. This report also helps launch our Racial Equity Campaign, a multi-year effort to increase foundation giving for racial equity among our communities.

CM: What were the major findings?

RE: We found that most of these groups represent a pretty diverse spectrum of racial/ethnic populations and are generally local, based in urban or mixed settings, rely largely on volunteers, and survive on small annual budgets, typically raised through community events and individual donors. Also, few of these groups rely on foundations for support. In fact, our research shows that of the roughly $65 million that US foundations gave to LGBTQ causes in 2006, only nine percent went to LGBTQ communities of color.

CM: Were there any surprises?

RE: One notable finding is that these groups have shaped their organizations to address economic inequities and poverty, which isn't surprising given how entwined race and class are in this country and around the world. For example, we found that 35 percent explicitly work with poor and low-income people and many of them work on a range of socioeconomic issues such as immigration, the criminal justice system, employment, housing, and so on. When we support an autonomous LGBTQ people of color infrastructure, we're also helping people of color deal with economic injustice and all its ugly by-products.

CM: Since LGBTQ people of color organizations have largely functioned without much governmental or philanthropic support, how will they grow and should they become more mainstreamed?

RE: Many of these groups could benefit simply from multi-year, general support grants, allowing them the breathing room they need to strengthen their infrastructure and become more resilient. Others have remarked how they also want technical assistance. Our grant-maker challenge is to not assume that because a group is small or doesn't reflect the traditional structure of larger organizations, that it can't handle a grant or that it's fragile and ineffective.

For me, mainstream speaks to the ways in which an organization understands power and its relationship to the mainline institutions that govern our country. Many groups often grow in size, budget, and programming and, in order to sustain this growth, or to meet the mainstream values of its larger donors, take on a character that becomes less about building a strong base of community members and then holding those same institutions accountable. Do these larger groups continue to operate in clear, principled ways that reflect our communities and not the narrow interests of the governing elite? I think our own organizations are a microcosm of a much broader democratic tension among money, politics, and civic engagement.

CM: As a Latino gay man, how do you understand the intersections of your various identities?

RE: I see them as a source of strength and understanding. Growing up queer and working class in a Mexican immigrant family taught me a lot about the insidiousness of racism, classism, and homophobia, as well as how interrelated they are in everyday life. I came of age in a mostly Latino, Southwestern town in southern Colorado yet was tracked through the public school system in advanced courses with mostly white students. Many of my family members struggled financially and held deeply embedded homophobic attitudes about queer people. And the more I've moved within policy circles, or now in philanthropy, I'm reminded how few progressive queer people of color are represented as decision-makers.

Popular discourse prefers simplicity when it comes to identity. You see this in the Hillary/Barack debate, where the public insists on debating which side has it worse, erasing all of us who live multiple identities, or forgetting how the right [wing] targets many of us in multiple ways. Our political movements have to recognize that we share the same opponents and that we live complex, multifaceted lives.

CM: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges for gay people of color in their individual lives and as different groups?

RE: I think we face ignorance, hostility, and discrimination, across our various identities, in all parts of our lives - our homes, our jobs, on the street, and in legislation. Yet so often the "solutions" that policy makers devise or the programs that practitioners create assume that a one-fits-all remedy will suffice, as if all LGBTQ people experience inequities in the exact same ways. Many LGBTQ people of color groups are making up for the void in our movements that has left unaddressed the cultural specificity of our needs.

CM: What would you like to change about the LGBTQ community?

RE: In activist circles, I'm disappointed by the ways in which mainline, often national, LGBTQ organizations have crafted policy agendas that minimize the racial, economic, and gender dimensions of our rights. You can advocate for relationship recognition and nondiscrimination laws without turning the other way on policy questions of race or economics. I want a queer movement that speaks out on labor rights, or against the war, or for transgender inclusion, without believing that such stances distract from its goals.

CM: Why do you write poems about superheroes?

RE: I like the creative tension of comic icons and everyday life. I'm fascinated by thinking about how our culture makes sense of extraordinary people, and what superhero means in a world ravaged by war, poverty, global warming, etc.

CM: What's going on in Sunset Park these days?

RE: Typically, they involve quiet evenings and weekends. It's a great neighborhood and comforting to be back in a largely Mexican environment.

Recent Backstage Reviews

2008-02-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

Blue Coyote's Happy Endings
February 15, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Blue Coyote Theater Group asked nine playwrights "for their take on the sex-worker industry." The entertaining result, Blue Coyote's Happy Endings, presents nine short pieces of great variety, all of which in some measure wittily explore questions of how we see each other in the context of our desires.

A tatty red velvet curtain frames the performing space for a succession of vignettes featuring go-go boys, peep show habitués, lonely hearts, and lovers. Theatrical serial Burning Habits author Blair Fell's piece, Beauty, begins the evening with a voyeur in a black raincoat (David Johnson) waxing eloquent on the charms of an exotic dancer (Joe Curnutte).

The usual dynamic of the watcher and watched is flipped, however, in Christine Whitley's strangely tender and moving Peep Show, in which a woman (a beautifully vulnerable Laura Desmond) pays for the privilege to be ogled and objectified by a brusque but oddly tender man (Robert Buckwalter).

Various kinks that help people grow closer to or stay distant from their erotic fascination are explored in John Yearley's Whenever You're Ready, about an artist's nude model (Tracey Gilbert), and in Matthew Freeman's The White Swallow, about a radio announcer-voiced husband (Matthew Trumbull) with a strange predilection picked up from watching snakes swallow their prey on Wild Kingdom.

But the most successful pieces, appearing last in the evening, poke gentle fun at our yearning for connection. Boo Killebrew's winsome Pulling Teeth imagines a suburban coffee klatch at which a fey Easter Bunny (the talented comedian Phillip Taratula) tries to convince his pal the Tooth Fairy (R. Jane Casserly) to stop turning tricks to earn money and assuage her loneliness. In David Johnston's Yes Yes Yes, a nerdy reader of James Joyce (Jim Ireland) finds surprising shared interests with a literate go-go boy (again, tow-headed Joe Curnutte, providing pitch-perfect irony in his portrayal).

Presented by Blue Coyote Theater Group and Access Theater at Access Theater, 380 Broadway, 4th floor, NYC. Feb. 12-March 1. Tue., 9 p.m.; Wed.-Sat.., 8 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.

The Wild Party
February 12, 2008
By Christopher Murray

"Queenie was a blonde/And if looks could kill/She'd kill twice a day/In vaudeville." So begins the opening song in Andrew Lippa's musical version of the literally banned in Boston 1928 poem by Joseph Moncure March.

The jazzy, sung-through score concerns a crisis in the troubled relationship of Queenie (a platinum blond-wigged Nicole Sterling) and her comedian boyfriend Burrs (the cherry-cheeked Jonathan Hack). Queenie has decided that "I'll raise my skirt and make him hurt" by publicly humiliating Burrs when they throw a bathtub-gin party for all their eccentric friends, including a love-weary lesbian (the delightful Tauren Hagans), a pugilist and his moll (Theis Weckesser and K.C. Leiber), and two flamboyant piano-playing brothers (Justin Birdsong and Zak Edwards). Things get violent when Queenie's attentions are caught for real after their friend Kate (Julia Cardia) brings a dapper newcomer, Mr. Black (Michael Jones), to the wild party.

The Gallery Players revival of this 2000 Off-Broadway musical (not to be confused with George C. Wolfe and Michael John LaChuisa's Broadway version from the same season) features what has become standard for this group, a distinct and committed ensemble cast that seems to be having a terrific time. The leads are the workhorses in this piece, driving the slight plot forward while the mayhem swirls around them.

The company's vocal talents aren't quite up to the demanding score, but their enthusiasm in evoking a cartoon of Roaring '20s debauchery is infectious, especially in Summer Lee Jack's sexy and stylish if somewhat overaccessorized period costumes. Director Neal J. Freeman and choreographer Brian Swasey provide clarity, a sense of mischief, and clockwork precision in moving the 18-member cast around a postage stamp-sized stage.

Presented by and at the Gallery Players, 199 14th St., Brooklyn, NYC. Feb. 2-24. Thu. and Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com or wwwgalleryplayers.com.

Recent Backstage Reviews

2008-02-11T18:16:00.000-08:00

War
February 11, 2008
By Christopher Murray
Rattlestick Playwrights Theater's powerful American premiere production of acclaimed Swedish playwright Lars Norén's War, sensitively directed by the capable Anders Cato, explores the impact of ethnic cleansing on an individual family in an unnamed conflict. Nontraditional casting of a multiethnic company increases the resonance of the portrait as a global parable of destruction.

With her husband presumed dead, a mother and two daughters have done what is necessary to survive as the fabric of life has unwound around them. Suffering the horrors of poverty, hunger, rape, and torture, they live in a delicately balanced unit, alternating between indulging in fantasies of romance and leaking excoriation and despair that reveal how the violence of war seeps remorselessly into the domestic sphere.

At one moment, the daughters, Beenina (Ngozi Anyanwu) and Semira (Flora Diaz), can be playing like children, full of giggles and shared secrets; the next they are threatening each other in language of startling brutality. "Remember, she's a child," the mother (Rosalyn Coleman) cautions, to which Beenina chillingly replies, "There are no children here."

The family's fragile stability, with Beenina prostituting herself for money to keep food on the table and her mother keeping her soul alive through the companionship of her missing husband's brother (Alok Tewari), threatens to fall apart when the father (Laith Nakli) returns, disabled and embittered by his time in a forced labor camp.

Nakli gives a devastating performance as a haunted yet still furiously hopeful man who doesn't realize that his family has already been destroyed. The other four actors are equally excellent in this intermissionless 90-minute play that can seem relentless in its depiction of the collision between the quotidian poetry of family life and the horrors of war. The characters' faces seem drained of emotion, as if exhaustion and hopelessness have blunted their ability to express the tumultuous feelings inside them.

Presented by and at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater,
224 Waverly Place, NYC.
Feb. 11-March 2. Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.

Under Milk Wood
January 28, 2008
By Christopher Murray
"From where you are you can see their dreams," recites one of the two narrators in Dylan Thomas' lyric paean to small-town life. Originally created as a radio play and performed at the 92nd Street Y two months before his death in 1953, Under Milk Wood is a loving evocation of a fictional small Welsh town called Llareggub, which is "bugger all" spelled backwards.

Following the reminiscences, daydreams, and petty foibles that make up the "salty individuality" of the town's characters, the piece begins before dawn one day and has the flavor of Our Town in its gentle humor. Captain Cat (John Mervini) falls into reveries about his seafaring days; Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard (Amanda Kay Schill), twice widowed, doesn't let death stop her from bossing around the spirits of her two husbands; and Reverend Eli Jenkins (Owen Panettieri) recites his original poems to the rising and setting sun.

The narrators (Lyle Blaker and Elizabeth Bove) move among the townspeople reading the lyrical language that binds the piece. In Intimation Theatre Company's production, directed by Michelle Dean, the absence of Welsh accents flattens the poetry. The actors, each playing several of the townspeople, rely instead on funny voices and silly walks to draw out the humor. Despite their obvious affection for the humanist portraits, the company members lack the ability to get under the skins of the various townsfolk, and the result is caricature.

Presented by Intimation Theatre Company at Theater 3, 311 W. 43rd St., 3rd floor, NYC. Jan. 25-Feb. 10. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.

Save the World
January 22, 2008
By Christopher Murray
Accurately described in press materials as "a superhero adventure play," Save the World by Marvel comic-book author and playwright Chris Kipiniak is slavishly loyal to its genre, following the crackup of a self-appointed cadre of heroes called the Protectorate and replete with nifty electronic sound effects.

Formed in response to an extraterrestrial threat to the city of Denver (shown in flashbacks), the group finds itself in danger of self-destruction, plagued by betrayals, petty squabbles, and character flaws that match its superpowers in magnitude. A series of attacks on international cities proves to be a setup to eliminate the group's leader and deliver a fatal blow to the team's hubris in appointing themselves overseers of Jerusalem and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Irony is not entirely absent in the comic-book universe, nor is it in Save the World. Musing on the potential of a coordinated attack, the group's administrator, Stagger (the mannered but likable Stephen Bel Davies in a candy-apple-red suit), says, "Great. That means a super villain. Of all the days. I better put on a pot of coffee."

But the theatre is perhaps less well-suited to a literal translation of the superhero sensibility than the movies. The intricate but still somehow mundane backstories and gee-whiz intensity of the characters is wearying and instigated some titters in the audience. That being said, the company makes its way through the plot's machinations and manipulates the silly plastic prop weapons without winking and with considerable energy. Kelli Hutchinson stands out in dual roles as a disaffected member of the team and a cynical television reporter.

Ultimately, this study of the breakdown of a team hews too closely to the conventions of the comic-book form even as its ultimate resolution hints at dissatisfaction with any artificially superimposed ethos.

Presented by the Roundtable Ensemble at the American Theatre of Actors, 314 W. 54th St., NYC. Jan. 19-Feb. 9. Thu. and Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 3 and 8 p.m.

Havana Pics

2008-01-15T20:08:00.000-08:00

1. Capitalo
2. Airles Perez and me
3. Me with the old Presidential Palace, now the Museum of Bella Artes in the background
4. Nice building in Vedado, the neighborhood I stayed in
5. Me in front of a cool car in Guanabo, a little beach town east of Havana
6. Airles and Jamie Rauchman, the artist and documentarian

Recent Backstage Reviews

2008-01-14T16:02:00.000-08:00

Pinocchio
January 14, 2008
By Christopher Murray

In its United States premiere, Italy's Teatro Del Carretto brings a revelatory theatricality to the tale of an innocent beset by scoundrels who survives by dint of his capacity for whimsy and wonder.

Never mind that the production is entirely in Italian. Carlo Collodi's fable of a puppet turned into a boy and then turned out into a terrifying world is the stuff of mythology, and director Maria Grazia Cipriani creates a unique and somehow familiar dream world of great intensity and beauty with the help of inspired scene and costume designer Graziano Gregori. On a half-circle stage, a small troupe of commedia dell'arte performers in black, white, and red costumes and masks use simple, repetitive, almost palsied movements to convey not only specifics of character but also the impact of surviving through traumatic experiences.

Giandomenico Cupaiuolo, who almost never leaves the stage during the 75-minute piece, presents Pinocchio as a classic clown in a tour de force physical performance. He mewls and cowers before his tormentors at one moment and then the very next is playing with abandon and glee, his skinny legs splayed out at crazy angles. He brays when turned into a donkey under the whip; tumbles out torrents of excited words to his protector, the Blue Fairy (or Fata, as she is known in Italian, played by Elsa Bossi); and puffs with exasperation in a wonderful Chaplinesque scene in which he is caught between two tasks: polishing shoes and delivering glasses of milk to his offstage father.

What makes this production so amazing is the expert use of ancient theatrical tools such as color, gesture, lighting, and sound. For many audiences, the performances of Cirque du Soleil are perhaps their only exposure to a heightened theatricality of undeniably great emotional power. Pinocchio brilliantly presents such techniques in the service of an exploration of what it means to be fully human and of the mystifying impact of swinging from one adventure and mood state to another with dizzying if often exhilarating speed.

Presented by Watson Arts and La MaMa E.T.C.
at La MaMa E.T.C., 74A E. Fourth St., NYC.
Jan. 13-27. Thu.-Sun., 7:30 p.m.
(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com or www.lamama.org.

Journey to the End of the Night
January 14, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Director Joshua Carlebach and adaptor Jason Lindner have ably transformed the best-known novel and life story of controversial mid-20th-century existential writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline into a compelling one-person show featuring the talented actor Richard Crawford. This idiosyncratic and often lyrical monologue, spoken from behind a book-cluttered desk, alternates between the deceptively chatty reminisces and recriminations of Céline and the tall tales of the writer's anti-hero, Ferdinand Bardamu.

At once a timely warning of the constrictions of knee-jerk political correctness and an exploration of the dangers of distorting personal or cultural histories, Journey to the End of the Night makes good use of first-rate work from set designer Anna Kiraly and lighting designer Anjeanette Stokes. Laurels, though, go to Zach Williamson for a brilliant soundscape that begins with scratchy emanations from speakers around the audience and includes evocations of atmosphere such as a bicycle bell or the sound of bedsprings straining under the weight of bodies pressed together in sex.

Crawford, all tweedy joviality and bushy eyebrows, is wonderful as Céline as he chortles and leers in a plummy British accent, cracking dirty jokes and working up to rehearsals of his pet prejudices and standard apologies for his presumed anti-Semitism during World War II. The detail and intelligence of the swirling worlds created around the seated actor allow Crawford to fully and confidently embody the convoluted contradictions of a man who likely was both a self-deluded cad who blamed others for his limitations and a writer who understood the essential self-interest of humankind that often leads us to behave as if we were vermin.

Presented by the Flying Machine Theater
at the Gene Frankel Theater, 24 Bond St., NYC.
Jan. 13-26. Tue.-Thu., 7:30 p.m.; Fri. and Sat., 7:30 and 10 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (No performance Tue., Jan. 15.)
(212) 352-3101 or 866 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com.

Recent Backstage Reviews

2007-12-03T08:24:00.000-08:00

Black Nativity

December 03, 2007

By Christopher Murray

The Classical Theatre of Harlem's new adaptation of Langston Hughes' 1961 gospel version of the birth of Jesus Christ imagines what it would be like if Mary gave birth in the middle of Times Square in the sordid days of the early 1970s. And that's a pretty good conceit. But a better one is, What if the adult Jesus Christ had the strut and flash and twinkle of Broadway's veteran showman André De Shields? Now there's a theological question worth pondering.

Decked out in a blood-red suit with black-and-white calfskin high-heeled pointy-toed shoes, DeShields as the Narrator/Pastor locks the audience in his mesmeric gaze and doesn't let go for the 90-minute breakneck revue of songs that follows. He's a crowing rooster delightfully full of both himself and the spirit of the Lord as he plays pater familias in this exciting and often moving holiday presentation.

That's not to say that the ensemble isn't rocking as well — they are. There is ample showcasing of some wonderful young vocal talent, including in particular the angel-faced and -voiced Melvin Bell III and a dulcet Nikki Stephenson. The tiny members of Nairobi's Shangilla Youth Choir make up in cute for what they forgivably lack in pitch.

The production is a feast for the eyes as well as the ears; costume designer Kimberly Glennon must be the hardest-working member of her profession this season, decking out the ensemble in a cornucopia of fantastically colorful '70s outfits made of what the three wise men probably would have brought in 1973: upholstery, spandex, and polyester. The wigs and platform shoes deserve to be credited as full members of the cast.

But ultimately it's De Shields' world; the Heavenly Host is just allowed to share it with him. After playing Caligula and Lear for CTH, De Shields cements his fruitful collaboration with the company, sharing with it a muscular, intelligent, and fearsomely entertaining sensibility.

Presented by the New 42nd Street at the Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W. 42nd St., NYC.Nov 30-Dec.30. Tue.-Fri., 7:30 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 1 and 6 p.m.(646) 223-3010 or http://www.dukeon42.org/.

A Christmas Carol

December 03, 2007

By Christopher Murray

Vortex Theater Company rounds out its ambitious 2007 season having explored the ghost of musicals past (H.M.S. Pinafore), musicals present (Kiss of the Spider Woman), and now a vision of the kind of musicals yet to come with director Kris Thor and composer Joel Bravo's intense and satisfying new version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Set in North Carolina during a holiday heat wave, this collaboratively created Carol re-imagines Scrooge as an ethically challenged environmental entrepreneur of the Bill Gates ilk. As played by downtown music-scene icon Jason Trachtenburg, Scrooge is an über-nerd cipher, his flat delivery and ironic sangfroid enough to bring a chill to the humid Southern air.

Richly layered scenic elements, including Super 8 home movies screened by the ghost of Christmas past (here called the Archivist and played by a cheery Kelly Eubanks), surround the audience, as does the cast before the show starts. The hipster vibe sometimes verges on preciousness when the company seems a wee bit full of in jokes and uncommunicated backstory.

The gist of the updating, however, is that Scrooge lost his love, Belle (Tracy Weller), to his mentor Jacob Marley (Joe Ornstein) and now returns home on the occasion of the mysterious sickness of the Carolina ash tree he planted in memory of his mother.

"People don't change; they tend to stay the same. That's just the way we work," states one of the lyrics to the haunting and catchy guitar-based songs. The music subtly captures the thematic concern of the piece: If we rush through life consumed with ambition and work, do we forget to have regrets?

Trachtenburg leads an intelligent and charming company of actors and musicians working in true ensemble fashion in a complex and thought-provoking show that harnesses some of the philosophical wistfulness many find in the holiday season.

Presented by Vortex Theater Company at the Sanford Meisner Theater, 164 11th Ave., NYC.Nov. 29-Dec. 22. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m. (No performances Sat., Dec. 8, and Sun., Dec. 9; additional performance Mon., Dec. 17, 8 p.m.)(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or http://www.theatermania.com/.

The Sordid Perils of Actual Existence

December 03, 2007

By Christopher Murray

"I'm finally ready to take the next step," declares the young man. Marriage? Nope, bigger: real estate. David (co-playwright Andy Reynolds) is looking for a little emotional support from his real estate agent, Carla (Crystal Field, Theater for the New City's founder and doyenne). She's happy to oblige, dispensing grimaces and advice in equal measure in this slight new comedy.

David, who works in the accounting department of Unabible (a company looking to translate the Bible into every existing language), had thought he was dying of a brain disease, but, oops, he's not. So now he wants to get busy with living, buy a co-op, and settle down with his caustic girlfriend, Daphne (Laura Wickens, who also plays Carla's amanuensis, Polish immigrant Zoya). But Carla has other ideas.

You see, Carla does have a fatal disease: twinkle-eyed, zany, oddball wisdom. This sort of illness used to be epidemic in plays like Herb Gardner's A Thousand Clowns and many of the comedies of Neil Simon. Carla's a loveable meddling yenta who knows from whence she speaks with her injunctions to carpe the diem: She lost her beloved husband several years ago — never mind that his slightly bemused ghost (Dick Morrill) keeps popping out of closets for conversation and cuddles.

The Sordid Perils of Actual Existence does have some serious fish to fry in questioning stock beliefs such as religious faith or cynicism that people hold on to in order to anchor themselves even at the cost of their own happiness. But this is an uneven, overly speech-laden, sentimental play in an uneven if well-intentioned production directed by co-playwright Tom Gladwell.

Presented by and at Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave., NYC. Nov. 23-Dec. 2. Thu.-Sun., 8 p.m. (212) 254-1109 or www.theaterforthenewcity.net.

Home James

November 19, 2007

By Christopher Murray

The Secret Theatre opened in September in the Long Island City Art Center as a new center of operations for the Queens Players. Until then, the formerly peripatetic company relied on a series of restaurant event rooms for performance space. The plucky little group's second production, a picaresque comedy called Home James, was directed and adapted by Artistic Director Richard Mazda from the original British production in which he acted, as he does here.

The play follows young Jamie (the deadpan and droll Robbie Rescigno) as he comes to New York from Poughkeepsie to stay with his kooky cousin Crystal (the likeable Christina Shipp) following the death of his beloved father from bowel cancer. He meets a number of eccentric types in a series of vignettes that switch locale from New York to Tijuana and back.

The play is rescued from cliché by a very charming and game group of comedic actors in multiple roles. Each character seems to have a brilliantly individual laugh, from a bark or a chortle to a giggle or a scream. It's kind of delightful.

BarbaraAnne Smilko is amusing as a subway poet-panhandler but really nails a caricature of a bored phone receptionist imitating a voice mail message. Robin Cannon, Ali Silva, and Yarida Mendez also bring idiosyncratic zest to their parts. Richard Mazda, wearing all his various hats (including a really shocking canary green and yellow sombrero at one point), wisely keeps the production values simple and the pace muy rapido.

Robbie Rescigno brings more than a dash of Buster Keaton to bear as he gloomily observes all the mayhem around him. But his fey portrait of a young man's grief drawing him towards adulthood is alternately moving and quite funny. He's somewhat miscast in this role, but an actor to watch.

Presented by the Queens Players at the Secret Theatre, 44-02 23rd St., Long Island City, NYC.Nov 14-Dec. 1. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m.(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com.

Gay Psychic Interview

2007-12-03T08:04:00.000-08:00

Dishing Out 'Tuff Love'
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
11/29/2007

With psychic Hank Hivnor, it's all good, so put away the garlic.

If you are terminally hip and need some advice on whether to move forward on that kooky installation project you've been planning or just give in and become a corporate drone, maybe you should take a break one Wednesday night and head out to Williamsburg's Sugarland where Thain Torres hosts the weekly Tuff Love party. There you can slurp up some Pabst Blue Ribbon for cheap, ogle the go-go boys, and consult with the event's resident psychic, Hank Hivnor.

Thirty-nine years old but still with the enthusiasm and spunkiness of a recent art school transplant to the city, Hivnor, who actually grew up here, offers advice and insight based on his being "in tune with the infinite" as Professor Marvel told Dorothy Gale. Hivnor is also the creative force and writer behind "Emerald Crest," a serial performance event in the mold of Jeff Weiss' "Hot Keys." Originally performed at the Art Land Bar and Dixon Place, the soap opera is in development for its next series of episodes.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: So what does the resident psychic at Tuff Love actually do?
HANK HIVNOR: I read auras, energy. People always ask me where are the cards - no cards here! I just read people, It's so much fun doing readings at parties because it feels like a party when I'm giving readings, it's a happy affair. I help people to focus on their passions and find clarity, so that's my intention. Aside from that, I can look at your former lives, and make predictions. I'm also a medium, I can talk to the folks upstairs!

CM: How did you realize you were psychic and how is your track record?

HH: You know what? I didn't realize I was psychic, I realized how to control the energy, because I just thought I was hyper-sensitive and crazy. I luckily met some great mentors who taught me how to ground my energy and make my gifts available to myself and others. My track record is good because people come back and say, "It did happen like you said and, oh yes, my grandmother did have three red dogs that were always with her," and lots of details like that.

CM: Is a gay psychic different from a straight one?

HH: I think that many gay people are more psychic than straight people, you have to be. I grew up in a pretty straight world and it's not just about finding action, like with gaydar, it's often about survival and recognizing danger. But regardless of your sexual orientation, the process is the same, and the spirits wouldn't judge, they are just loving energies that provide information.

CM: What's the one thing that gay hipsters want most to hear a psychic say to them?

HH: I don't tell people what they want to hear, I answer their questions, and that's usually better. I will tell you what the majority of people are concerned about - love and career - and my intention is matched with a very loving universal energy that desires that they completely succeed and have the best of everything.

CM: What's the scene like at Tuff Love? Is it tawdry and louche?

HH: Hold on, my mom gave me a dictionary for my birthday. Louche? Maybe when it gets cold enough we can do some louching off the roof deck. Tuff Love is a really fun scene, it reminds me of the East Village of the '90s - fun, wild, and weird - a place you can be yourself in. It's not boring, and you know New York has gotten a little boring!

CM: Do people drink beer while they are being "read," and isn't that dangerous, like they could get possessed or something?

HH: No, no, only possessed with the desire to dance naked on the bar! It's all good. I create a sacred space and uphold that energy. Bars can be ghost magnets but I've never felt anything strange at Sugarland, and who has the time? We're there to have fun! Sometimes people project what they think a psychic is supposed to be at me and freak out when they find out I'm just me. Look! It's me Hank, and I have these abilities and this is a cool resource for you, so put away your garlic and relax!

CM: What's up with the soap opera and when is it coming back?

HH: "Emerald Crest?" It's in the shop but it's going to start again soon. That's kind of you to mention that. Yes folks, I also write comedy!

CM: You come from a Salinger-esque family here in New York. Your dad was a code breaker for the Brits during World War II and then a playwright and there were snakes and raccoons running around the house when you were a kid. Then you grew up and marched in the Mermaid Parade last summer as a giant jellyfish. Now you are a Williamsburg gay psychic and comic auteur. So are you a complete creature or a just down-home kinda guy?

HH: I'm kinda all over the place, I'm happiest when I'm involved in a creative project with other loonies, but at the end of the day it's really nice to snuggle on the couch with a movie and a buddy. I'm really pretty normal, but I had thought of being a cactus or sea anemone for Halloween!

You can consult Psychic Hank at the Tuff Love Performance Salon and Party on Wednesdays from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. at Sugarland at 221 North Ninth Street between Driggs and Roebling Streets, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For more information, go to www.myspace.com/tuffloveparty.

©GayCityNews 2007

Crime and Punishment review

2007-11-18T09:06:00.000-08:00

Crime and Punishment

November 07, 2007

By Christopher Murray

Chicago's Writers' Theatre brings its rightfully celebrated 2003 production of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment to 59E59 Theaters as part of the GoChicago! Festival. Distilling a 718-page Russian novel into a 90-minute theatre piece for three actors is quite a coup de théâtre in and of itself — the taut and vibrant adaptation is by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus — but that it makes for moving storytelling and bravura acting is something special.

Raskolnikov (Scott Parkinson), the intense and idealistic student who has taken his ideas about progress and potential to destructive extremes, enters through the same door as does the audience, signaling the relevance of this pre-revolution tale to our own time. The production plays out on Eugene Lee's simple plywood set of doors under the averted gaze of a life-size statue of Christ on the cross — signaling the transforming power of redemption — and the harsh downward flood of Keith Parham's six large lighting instruments that create the impression of a mechanized high noon. Theresa Squire's simple costume elements — a cap, a fringed shawl — economically signal shifts between characters.

The small-boned, blond-haired, red-bearded Parkinson is all tortured tics, wringing dirty hands, and wet, red-rimmed eyes. The actor was nominated for a Jefferson Award back home for his portrayal and well he should have been. In a tour de force performance in which he never leaves the stage, Parkinson powerfully conveys both the arrogance and enormous compassion of Raskolnikov. John Judd and Susan Bennett bring specificity and depth of feeling to their embodiment of several roles, including Raskolnikov's wily interrogator and Sonia, the poor daughter forced into prostitution. Bennett's wary, uncomprehending stare is particularly memorable.

Michael Halberstam's fine direction movingly calls the audience's attention to the hands of the actors as they reach out to each other for understanding and forgiveness.

Presented by Writers' Theatre as part of the GoChicago! Festival at 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St., NYC. Nov 7-Dec. 2. Tue.-Fri., 8:15 p.m.; Sat., 2:15 and 8:15 p.m.; Sun., 3:15 and 7:15 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentralcom.

William Finn Interview

2007-11-16T09:59:00.000-08:00

THEATER
Exposing Oneself for Musicals

Off-B’way revue celebrates lyricist/composer William Finn

By Christopher Murray

Friday, November 16, 2007

William Finn, known for his richly emotional and idiosyncratic musicals, is a master at evoking both shocked guffaws and choked-up sobs from audiences. A new revue of songs by the composer/lyricist of the beloved “Falsettos” trilogy—about a gay male couple facing intimacy and AIDS—was presented two summers ago in Hartford, Conn., by Finn’s frequent director Rob Ruggiero, and the revue, titled “Make Me a Song,” is now at New World Stages. Five cast members make their way through more than 20 of Finn’s quirky, insightful songs.

Finn, 55, splits his time between the Upper West Side and a place in his home state of Massachusetts with his partner of over a quarter of a century, Arthur Salvadore. He’s riding high from the ongoing success of his latest Broadway show, the lighthearted “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” while plans are still murky concerning “The Royal Family of Broadway” a collaboration between Finn, playwright Richard Greenberg and director Jerry Zaks. He spoke about the new revue and the way in which his identity as a gay man shapes the stories he tells.

How did “Make Me a Song” come about?

[Director] Rob Ruggiero asked if I wanted a revue and I said, “Absolutely not!” Since he’s a dog with bone, he just did it. I saw it, and I loved it.Why do people respond so viscerally and emotionally to your work? I try to write from a place that demands a certain response. I can’t predict what that will be, but it’s a place I find interesting.

You’ve defined your writer’s voice as that of a “New York gay Jewish man.” How is your sexual orientation reflected in your work now, as opposed to when you were—what? 23—and wrote “In Trousers,” the first part of the “Falsettos” trilogy?

In order to find a voice, I used to read four or five poems of [gay New York School poet] Frank O’Hara. I liked his slangy, hip chatter. Then I’d forget that and find something in my voice. It’s a weird thing, finding a voice.

O’Hara was big on the idea that poetry should have the immediacy of an emergency midnight phone call between intimates. Your writing has that charge. Do you see your work in a gay literary tradition?

It starts for me with Walt Whitman. I used to musicalize him all the time. I welcome being included in that tradition. I always thought that theater music lyrics were very conservative and a little classical. They rarely referred to oneself; they rarely were about the writer. There was all this confessional poetry going on at that time—O’Hara and Robert Lowell, all these guys, exposing themselves. I thought it was time that started happening in the theater.

Much of your work has had grief and loss as a major part of its subject.

I don’t think most of my stuff is predicated on grief and loss. It’s predicated on what happens in life. Of course, with AIDS and as a gay man, that’s all I saw back then. The question was how could I find something life affirming? How can I write about this and not be Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm but also not say, “This is the end of our world”? That sort of nihilism doesn’t appeal to me.

Does it frustrate you that some people view you as a writer solely about grief?

It makes me a little crazy. It’s not how I see myself at all. It’s convenient for people to think of me that way, but it’s also a way to dismiss my work.

Which songwriters do you admire?

Apart from some of my wonderful students? I teach down at N.Y.U. and it’s funny, some classes are like gay bars, others are straight, straight, straight. Both have a lot to recommend them. I always liked Randy Newman and Paul Simon as songwriters. The Wainwright guy, that Rufus, I enjoy listening to him, too, but not because he’s gay, particularly, but because he has an open heart.

Do you ever blanch at the overlap between the intimate and the artistic?

I remember when I wrote “Whizzer Going Down,” a song about a guy giving a blowjob. Andre Bishop [artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater] thought it was about a guy going down to Florida. I thought, “This is the end of your non-existent career. How could you possible write this?” But I also thought. “Have a little balls.” Apart from the fact that a lot of people didn’t know it was about a blowjob, which makes it okay, I was looked at a little differently by some.

You’ve been with your partner more than 27 years. Do you find that unique in the gay male world?

Not at all. Lots of people have been together ridiculously long times.

Does it inform your work?

It must somehow. I don’t know how.

What’s one of your favorite things about the nexus of homosexuality and musical theater?

Just the fact that it exists.

“Make Me a Song,” at New World Stages, 340 W, 50th St, for more info and tickets, visit makemeasongthemusical.com.

New York Blade article featuring Rainbow Heights Club

2007-11-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

NYC Gays Twice as Depressed

For first time, city plan looks at LGBT mental health
By Dustin Fitzharris

Friday, November 02, 2007

Rates of depression among New York City’s LGBT community are nearly double that of its straight population, according to the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOH). The findings were noted in the DOH’s 2008 Local Government Plan for Mental Health Services, released Oct. 22. Although the information confirms what LGBT mental health experts have known for years, this marks the first time that the city health department included the LGBT population in its plan.

“Before last year, the words ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ never appeared at all in [the Government Plan for Mental Health Services],” said Christian Huygen, Ph.D., executive director for Rainbow Heights Club in Brooklyn, the only government-funded support and advocacy program that caters to the mental-health issues of LGBT patients.

Past DOH plans focused on the mental hygiene of the elderly and children as well as on various sub-categories, such as mental retardation, developmental disabilities and substance abuse. Upon evaluating its own Community Health Survey—a random telephone survey of 10,000 adult residents of New York City conducted in 2006—the DOH confirmed the rates of depression in LGBT individuals was nearly double the rate of depression compared to non-LGBT individuals. LGBT people were also more likely to benefit from mental health care. “It’s very difficult to live as a second-class citizen,” Huygen said in response to the data. “We are in a minority that is still OK [for others] to bash on many different levels. There is also the fact that we can’t marry the person of our own choosing. So it’s not surprising that would take a toll on our mental and emotional health.”

Christopher Murray, a counselor at The LGBT Community Center in the West Village, agrees. “LGBT people are at a greater risk for negative health outcomes,” said Murray who was worked at The LGBT Center’s mental health program for the past four years. “There are different factors that lead to that—homophobia, being at risk for HIV, being kicked out of your community, and being a target for different kinds of violence—all of these things swirled together can lead to folks being a greater risk.” A 2006 report titled “Living on the Edge: Gay Men, Depression and Risk Taking” by the Medius Institute, a gay men’s health group in New York City, found that 17 percent of participants had active symptoms of depression—twice the general population. In addition, that report noted that depressed gay men were at increased risk of having unsafe sex and using drugs.

The DOH also acknowledged last month that gay patients face daunting challenges in getting proper care. The Local Government Plan stated: “Recent studies indicate that many mental heath providers’ attitudes toward LGBT consumers are not always constructive or positive. The result is that many LGBT consumers, having entered treatment, leave prematurely.”

“Often, even today, therapists and psychiatrists think of LGBT persons as a traumatized or underdeveloped version of a heterosexual person,” Huygen said. “When clients go to their care providers and talk about LGBT issues, the care provider assumes being LGBT is what the client wants changed.”Disclosure can also cause a problem with LGBT individuals who seek treatment. Murray explains: “If a person isn’t comfortable; then he or she won’t disclose. If a physician is not comfortable with gay people, he or she won’t ask.”

With the recent acknowledgement, the DOH will make more treatment options available. The Rainbow Heights Club, with a grant from the New York Community Trust, has developed P.R.I.D.E. training (Promote Respect for Individual Differences through Education). The program offers a range of training programs with the goal of working collaboratively to help other organizations—health professionals, human resource departments, administrators—to create a safe and welcoming environment for LGBT patients and staff. “One of our major goals with our P.R.I.D.E. training,” Huygen said, “is to make sure people get that competent care, which the Local Government Plan now said is so important for them to get, within mainstream psychiatric centers and hospitals.”

Huygen says nearly everyone who comes to Rainbow Heights Club has at one time been hospitalized. Every year, the Rainbow Heights keeps 90 percent of those individuals out of the hospital and, in return, saves New York taxpayers a lot of money.“It’s unfortunate that aspects of our identity that we celebrate actually come with challenges that put us at greater risk,” Murray said. “We have to admit it and make sure there are services to help support people.”

Getting those services to the community takes funding. In the past, this was a burden that threatened to take away the very programs that were in place for treatment. “The Rainbow Heights Club almost shut its doors a couple years ago because of a funding crisis,” Murray said. “So, having the Department of Heath say, ‘Yes there are these disparities’ is going to be directly related to having a successful program like Rainbow Heights staying in existence and continuing to help people.”

For information on Rainbow Heights Club and The LGBT Center, visit rainbowheights.org. and gaycenter.org.

Harlan Pruden Interview

2007-11-08T19:22:00.000-08:00

(Harlan beading with the best of them.)

Two Spirits Better Than One

By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
11/08/2007

Native American activist Harlan Pruden can move instantly from a furious passion to heartfelt tears as he discusses the challenges of trying to educate people about the needs and struggles of members of his community who identify as two-spirit, or queer. He can spout off facts and figures about the risks for falling into alcoholism or drug addiction, a subject he can talk about from personal experience, having been sober for more than two decades and worked at the LGBT community Center to develop innovative programs for people in recovery.

But he can also discuss the history of treaty law and how Papal Bulls from hundreds of years ago are still invoked to encroach on native rights today.

As co-founder of the NorthEast Two-Spirit Society (NE2SS) here in New York City and a board member of the homo-friendly American Indian Community House, Pruden, 40, has made it his mission to sound the call of alarm for the dangers of crystal meth addiction for two-spirit Indians and the Native American population across the country.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: Please explain what two-spirit means to Native Americans.

HARLAN PRUDEN: Two-Spirit is a contemporary term that connects today's experience with the traditions from within our cultures. Certain individuals were considered to have a specific blessing through their diversity, which was manifested in many cultural responsibilities. The modern connection with LGBT Indians is that traditionally these people often had sex with members of what the Western world considers the same gender. Of course, each tradition that prescribed to it had its own word in their language. In my Cree language, I'd be known as an aayahkwew - this should not be mistaken as a sexual orientation but rather a separate and distinct gender not necessarily related tosexuality or sexual genitals.

CM: What role have two-spirit folk traditionally played in native communities?

HP: In many traditions, two-spirit people served their community as mediators, social workers, craftspeople, name-givers, shamans and/or medicine-givers. These roles were something that only a two-spirit person could fulfill - that's why they were viewed as another gender.I find it very interesting that this tradition came into being for a number of reasons. It is an obvious manifestation of native peoples' practice of preserving and considering diversity sacred. For many [native] nations there was always room at the table for everyone - it was the belief that differences were a strength and were needed for the community to thrive. The other major distinction for today's world was indigenous people viewed everyone as equal. Therefore, it was not a threat or unusual for a male to act like a female or a female to act like a male or in any manner on a broad spectrum.

CM: Is that still the case now?

HP: I wish I could say that it was that way today! One of first things the colonizers did when they got to this land was to attack and kill the people that didn't conform to their rigid two-gender system. There is a famous lithograph in the New York City public library depicting two-spirit people being ripped apart by the conquistador, Vasco Nunez de Balboa's dogs - all done of course in the name of Christianity.

CM: What's the big event on November 15?

HP: November is National Native American Heritage Month, and NE2SS is hosting a community forum to increase the visibility of the Native American community that will examine the topics of gender, sexuality, and our elders. Heavy on the elder stuff - 'cause we are all going to be old one day! We Native Americans have a well-defined and working elder system. At the forum we are going to share some of the inner workings of that system, for we believe that the LGBT community has much to learn about the treatment of older people.

CM: What don't most gay people realize about two-spirit people?

HP: The name itself is somewhat misleading and confusing. Two-Spirit was agreed upon when the movement was revitalized in the early 1990s. Even then it was considered imperfect but we were searching for something that connected us to our cultural tradition, while still acknowledging the contemporary differences as a result of being LGBT peoples. The importance to today is not so much the idea of two spirits within one person - I think we all have that to some extent - but rather that there is a diversity amongst community members, that that diversity is a valuable and respected thing.

CM: When you look at issues like HIV/AIDS or crystal meth addiction in the native community, and compare the need to address them to other issues, like drug and alcohol abuse or native rights, reparations or possible genocide, how can you possibly prioritize advocacy and community organizing projects?

HP: You don't. That's why the idea of constant vigilance and self-discipline is critical in serving your community. You are responsible. You would never hear a native person following tradition say, "Oh, that's not my job." I hear that all the time here in New York and go kind of crazy. Of course it's your job. It's everybody's job. That being said though, it goes back to that respect for diversity. Each of us has a special gift. The community will help you discover that gift and then those are the issues or responsibilities that one pursues.For example, my interests are focused around community organizing and building alliances. So, with NE2SS, that's what I do. Other members aren't even interested in the more political aspects of our work. But they are interested in music or art or theater and that is considered as important as anything else. Diversity, diversity, diversity. It all boils down to that. Nonetheless, our work does suffer from an absence of resources and pure numbers of people facing some of the most overwhelming issues. We are the poorest people in North America and many of our reservations have the same statistics today on poverty and marginalization that existed in the townships of apartheid South Africa. We receive only about .003 percent of philanthropic grants for community work. Because of the sheer magnitude of the genocide committed by Euro-Americans against our people, it is easier to pretend we don't exist than to actually examine the issue.

CM: How do you think being Canadian Indian and a gay man has shaped your perspective and your relationships in the gay community?

HP: Being Cree and gay - while growing up was at times very difficult - has proven to be one of the best gifts bestowed upon me. For at my core I have always felt like an outsider. Being an outsider has its benefits for critiquing and challenging preconceived notions of the dominant society. I think that in the LGBT fight for equality, many LGBT, non-native people forget to ask critical question of "Equal to what?" If we are fighting to be a white-male dominated oppressive movement where money talks and we are all straight-acting and we want to get married - you can keep that equality - for that system has not been kind to my people for the past 515 years!

CM: What does the two-spirit community need from the greater LGBT community?

HP: First of all, an acknowledgment that we exist - and not for just one week or one month a year. According to the US Census, New York City is home of the largest population urban Indians in the country, if we were a reservation we'd be the third largest in the country.Next, we need to always be at the table. You need to learn about our differences and respect them. Last month, a very important survey on LGBT issues was being distributed by a well-known community program with whom we have worked for many years. Nonetheless, they left out any reference to "two-spirit" or "Native American" in the little boxes you check in those things. It's kind of astounding.But I think the most important thing that any community or movement can learn from us is to respect the diversity - again! We don't always see that even in the LGBT and/or other people of color movements and it is critical to our survival. We know all about assimilation. White people have been trying to assimilate us since the 19th century. "Kill the Indian, save the man" was a popular phrase amongst 19th century progressives. Melting pots and assimilation are not good. We want the greater LGBT community to recognize and respect that is not only what we believe but also how we will act.

CM: Are all gay Indians as sexy as you?

HP: Because we are so diverse; we are all very sexy!

"Gender, Sexuality and the Role of Elders" will take place Thursday, November 15 from 6-8 p.m. at the LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street. For more information, go to www.ne2ss.org .

©GayCityNews 2007

2007-11-06T20:05:00.001-08:00

Turn of the Screw

November 05, 2007

By Christopher Murray

"I'm rather easily carried away, I fear," says the nameless governess in the Wake Up, Marconi! production of Turn of the Screw, Henry James' classic ghost story, here in a clever two-actor adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher originally presented by Portland Stage. Both actors — the attentive, prim, and expectant Melissa Pinsly as the governess and the cadaverous and chameleonlike Steve Cook in a host of roles — are disciplined and intelligent in their portrayals but, alas, don't ever really get carried away themselves.

And Don K. Williams' fine-tuned direction in conjunction with Mark Delancy's sparse raked-platform set and Karl Chmielewski's elegant and economical lighting can't do by themselves what is the sine qua non of a ghost story: raise hackles on the back of your neck.

The story of a governess, barely more than a child herself, sent to a lonely estate to take care of two precocious children is well-known for it's exploration of innocence betrayed by craven carnality. Who is actually corrupted in the tale is part of the theme as James explores the trauma of moving into the haunting knowledge of adulthood with all its potential for depravity.

There have been plenty of adaptations, including the 1954 Benjamin Britten-Myfanwy Piper opera and the 1961 Truman Capote-William Archibald-John Mortimer screenplay for director Jack Clayton's The Innocents starring Deborah Kerr. Hatcher's relies heavily on the audience's ability to empathize with the terror of the governess and her intense drive to protect her charges from supernatural enmity.

It also requires the actor playing all the other roles — a housemaid; the little boy, Miles; the uncle; and the narrator — to switch characters instantaneously and recognizably, which Cook does well.But, ultimately, the precision of this production leaves little room for the inexplicable and, as the governess says — and it applies to audiences as well — "What children want is a mystery."

Presented by Wake Up, Marconi! at Bank Street Theatre, 55 Bank St., NYC. Nov. 3-17. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (Additional performance Sat., Nov. 17, 2 p.m.) (212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatremania.com.

2007-11-04T04:49:00.000-08:00

Drum of the Waves of Horikawa

October 27, 2007

By Christopher Murray

There's a real feast for the senses going on at Here, where the Theatre of a Two-headed Calf is presenting its punk Kabuki version of Monzaemon Chikamatsu's 17th-century revenge play Drum of the Waves of Horikawa. A 12-feet-by-12-feet mat defines the central playing space (designed by Peter Ksander), cordoned off by plungers acting as stanchions and hung with decapitated brooms. On either side are two drum sets; there are also a DJ booth and a keyboard for composer Brendan Connelly, who spends a lot of time whacking a horseshoe with a spike and acts as an ironic and laid-back master of ceremonies. "The next break will be more of a party. Is my mother back?" he asks the audience as he announces the end of one of the short intermissions.

Winsome touches define the visual elements of director Brooke O'Harra's production, including the wonderful blend of traditional Japanese apparel and makeup with the leather, boots, and more-is-better war paint of 1970s punk (costume design by Emily Rebholz) and a great variety of practical and scenic lighting instruments (designed by Justin Townsend with assistance from Christopher Kuhl).

It's unfortunate, though, that while the eyes are delighted, the ears are beat into senselessness by the crashing eponymous noise generated, oddly enough, by two Ph.D. candidates (Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg on drums). Maybe it's my 40-year-old ears that don't have tolerance for the conceit of using punk mannerisms to tell an old tale of the dishonor of infidelity. It's not that I don't get the idea that punk thrashing and shouting could be just as stylized and ritualized as the grimaces and contortions of traditional Kabuki performance. It's more that I couldn't connect to a story whose emotional core was buried under layers of pretentiousness posing as intellectual theatricality.

Presented by the Theatre of the Two-headed Calf and Here Arts Center
at Here Arts Center, 145 Sixth Ave., NYC.

Oct. 27-Nov. 17. Thu.-Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m.(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com or www.here.org.

2007-11-04T04:42:00.000-08:00

Gay in the Age of Paranoia
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
11/02/2007

Celebrated gay author Christopher Bram's critically acclaimed last novel "Exiles in America" comes out in paperback November 13, quite an achievement for a literary-quality, queer-themed book.

Bram, who lives in the West Village with his long-time partner, the filmmaker Draper Shreeve, is no stranger to success. His first novel, the coming out story "Surprising Myself" (1987) wowed critics and his novel "Father of Frankenstein" (1995) was made into the film "Gods and Monsters," starring Ian MacKellen, Brendan Fraser, and Lynn Redgrave and for which director Bill Condon won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

Bram tells compelling stories about complicated queer lives with rare intelligence, wit, and compassion. "Exiles in America" explores the relationship of a gay male couple, a college art professor and a psychiatrist, whose lives are turned on end by their blooming friendship with a charismatic Iranian painter and his wife. The story, in part, explores post-9/11 paranoia, justified and not, and is as well a critical examination of the suitability and meaning of the marriage paradigm in the context of a gay relationship.Bram sat down recently to discuss the book and how queer stories are catching up with cultural and political events.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: How did the story evolve for you? What compelled you to write it?

CHRISTOPHER BRAM: Initially I just wanted to write a novel about a gay couple in a long-term relationship. It's surprising how few novels there are about gay marriages. Most gay fiction is about first love or doomed love, not domestic love.Early on I decided to give my couple an open marriage, in part because nobody writes about that either, but also because it would guarantee some kind of drama. Then I added another couple, an Iranian family with children. They too have an open marriage, necessitated by the fact that the husband, Abbas, a painter, is primarily gay.And I set it the eve of the Iraq War, which was when I wrote the book. I knew something would happen in the Middle East, but didn't know exactly what. After that I just let my characters loose, all the while looking over my shoulder at current events.

CM: Why did you choose to write about a cross-sexuality, cross-cultural love quadrangle?

CB: I always enjoy mixing things up. I've done it in all my books. Whether bisexuality really exists or not -- and I think it does - it's a gift for a novelist. It complicates things wonderfully. Homosexuality is a gift for fiction, too. It brings together different classes, nationalities, religions. The cross-cultural mix here enabled me to explore Islam, which intrigued me long before 9/11 made it important to more Americans. And since Abbas is married, I was given a major female character to develop, his wife Elena. One frustrating thing about gay male stories is the limited number of roles for women. But bisexuality changes that. Elena was the character I most enjoyed writing. She's more aware than the other protagonists, the one in the trickiest position. And she will say almost anything; she is fearless.

CM: Do you get hot and bothered writing sex scenes like the ones in "Exiles in America"?

CB: Not really, strange to say. I enjoy writing sex scenes. I'm certainly not afraid of them. I hope readers get hot and bothered. But for me sex in fiction is always about emotion, even if it's just friendliness. Something personal is being expressed, otherwise I'd skip a line and say, "Afterwards they smoked cigarettes."Daniel and Abbas begin as fuck buddies but the relationship becomes more emotionally complicated. So I had to make clear how important sex was to both men without giving a full catalog of their encounters. And I needed to find fresh metaphors and ways of describing sex, which is difficult after nine novels. I don't like to repeat myself. But I enjoy the challenge.

CM: What was the original reception to the book like?

CB: Pretty good, for the most part. It won this year's Ferro-Grumley Prize. Gay men in couples certainly appreciated it. As one friend put it, "My god, a gay novel where the couple argues and it doesn't mean they're doomed?" And many reviewers understood the mix of sex and politics and why it was there. But I also got some of the strangest reviews I've ever had. A couple of critics, presumably single, couldn't understand why Zack and Daniel were still together.Yes, they share a house and a dog and endless conversations, but they don't share a bed anymore after 20-plus years, so they must not be a real couple. More troubling were the reviewers who couldn't understand why the police and politics suddenly appear in the story. They blamed me, as if it were something I did just to juice things up. I don't know if they don't follow the news or if they wanted to hear only about boyfriend problems, but they resented the story for acknowledging that people's liberties are at risk in this country.I thought readers would be impressed that here was a novel about gay open marriage and the Homeland Security Act.

CM: I hear you and your partner the filmmaker Draper Shreeve are working on screenplays together too. What's up with that?

CB: Ever since we met we've talked about movies -- it's one of our great bonds. We even made a couple of short films. He would direct and photograph and edit. I would write and act and even serve as script girl.Then we started writing feature screenplays together, which can be tricky but not as dangerous as you might think. We learned how we work best together. And it's a great thing to share. Some couples raise children together, others renovate houses. We write screenplays. None have been filmed yet, but one was optioned and a new one was commissioned, so we sometimes make money from it.

CM: What are you working on now?

CB: Draper and I finished a new draft of a script about Tallulah Bankhead, which is being developed for Patricia Clarkson. There's also a kinky romantic comedy we're working on together. Meanwhile I've made a solid start on a new novel set in the 1880s, all about a theater troupe that comes to a factory town in Pennsylvania and becomes involved with the family of the Presbyterian minister. It's like a Victorian companion piece to my New York theater novel, "Lives of the Circus Animals."

CM: How do you avoid the trap of being pigeonholed as a "gay" writer for a limited audience?

CB: I don't. I can't. The culture we live in, book culture in particular, is so nervously heterosexist that the presence of a major gay character will almost always peg your book as gay. The fact that I try to mix things up more than Edmund White or Andrew Holleran, say, doesn't mean I don't get lumped with them. David Leavitt and Michael Cunningham both recently published novels with no sexually active gay men, but their books are still seen as gay novels. Which wouldn't be bad if it didn't mean we were treated as completely "other" and of interest only to a limited audience.I don't know what we can do about it. It's frustrating that 38 years after Stonewall we're still seen as exotic. Which might be one of the reasons for the strange reviews of "Exiles." "Hey, this is a gay novel. Why is he bringing in the war in Iraq?" As if we're too exotic to care about the important issues that trouble everyone else.

CM: What's one of the best things about being a gay writer?

CB: I'm tempted to be sarcastic and say, "The millions and millions of gay dollars." But the best thing about being a gay writer is gay readers, who are often very smart and very committed. I wish there were more of them. But they're a kind of compensation for being pigeonholed or ignored by straight readers. Real gay readers read steadily and hungrily, and not just the bestsellers or the big name books. They are very curious, and always looking for something new.

CM: How are the stories we are telling about gay lives changing these days?

CB: We don't have to do Homosexuality 101 anymore, so we are free to tell any kind of story we want. The writers, editors, and readers all want something new. Despite my complaints about the state of gay fiction -- and I complain as much as anyone -- there is always a new book that surprises me with news I haven't heard before.For example, last year there was a very fine novel by Aaron Hamburger, "Faith for Beginners," about a mother and her gay son visiting Israel on the eve of the Second Intifada. It had everything: family, politics, religion, sex with a Palestinian. There was also a terrific novel by John Weir, "What I Did Wrong," a sort of weekend-in-the-life account of a gay English teacher in Queens; it deserves to be compared with the best of Saul Bellow. This year there was a wonderful novel by Brian Malloy, "Brendan Wolf," about a gay man who becomes involved in the scamming of an anti-abortion rally in Minneapolis. It starts as a noirish story, but opens up into something bigger and richer.That's only three books, but should make clear that our best work is now all over the map, which is very exciting.

CM: If you could have sex with one famous writer of the past, who would it be and why?

CB: This week I would have to say Leo Tolstoy. I'm re-reading "Anna Karenina" and have fallen in love with the author all over again. Tolstoy was basically straight, of course, although he admits in his diaries to having warm feelings for men but not knowing what to do with those feelings. It'd be interesting to share a bed with him, especially in his late 30s, around the time he was writing "War and Peace." I don't know if we'd actually have sex. But it'd be fun to see him in a nightshirt -- I understand he had great legs -- and we could have good long conversations about religion and history and harvesting wheat, although he'd probably do most of the talking.

©GayCityNews 2007

2007-10-27T12:08:00.000-07:00

She does Channing, Garland, Merman, and LuPone, but remarkably Maggie Graham is no drag queen.

Ain't No Drag
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
10/25/2007

CAROL CHANNELING

Starring Maggie Graham

The Triad158 W. 72nd St.

Sat. 9 p.m.

Through year-end

$25 plus two drinks

212-868-4444 or smarttix.com

As I was leaving Maggie Graham's entertaining cabaret "Carol Channeling," an elderly audience member turned to her companion and asked, "Was she a drag queen?"

Well, no, she's actually a beautiful and talented young woman with a powerful set of pipes who in her 70- minute act impersonates Carol Channing channeling various living and deceased divas of the Great White Way from Garland through LuPone to Chenowith and Menzel. But she could learn a trick or two from a good drag queen.

Graham has a super voice and can bang out a brassy number with the best of them. Wearing her frowzy ash blond Channing wig and a red sequin drop hem dress with fringe, she plants her legs like fresh saplings on the stage and leans slightly forward in the best ex-chorus gal turned Broadway belter style.

The ridiculous and unnecessary conceit of the show, something about Carol going to the dentist for a loose tooth and suddenly becoming a kind of radio receiver for her musical theater colleagues, is just an excuse for Graham's homage to the ladies who munch scenery and dine out on catchy melodies and zippy lyrics. She obviously loves all these gals and she sings some of their biggest hits straight, with no embellishments or topically changed lyrics. Her voice is all throaty gravel when she does Channing's signature "Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend" and brilliantly captures LuPone's nasal electric syrup tones for "You're the Top." Less effective , or recognizable actually, is her Doris Day doing "I Have a Secret Love" or Angela Lansbury singing "If He Walked Into My Life" from "Mame."

But where the drag queen tutoring could help Graham is in recognizing that impersonation is based on significant and comedic exaggeration, a rule she follows only intermittently. Still, the trio version she does of LuPone (really her most dead-on imitation), Bernadette Peters, and the Merm doing "Rose's Turn" is worth the 25-buck cover and two-drink minimum.

"Carol Channeling" is a really fun evening and Graham has the zest and verve to pull it off, especially in the caring hands of her cutie pie musical director and pianist Aaron Beck. While the framing device and inane patter should just be scraped, what's great about Graham is her real stage presence that shines through the impersonation. I mean it as a compliment that the act made me crazy curious to hear how she would sing, just her, not through the lens of anyone else's style. I'll bet it would be something to see and hear.

©GayCityNews 2007

Backstage review of Kosher Harry at NY Deaf Theatre

2007-10-16T18:45:00.000-07:00

Kosher Harry

October 16, 2007

By Christopher Murray

British writer Nick Grosso's absurdist Kosher Harry is more a collection of bilious racist rants than a play. As such, it would seem an odd choice for the ultra-liberal Nicu's Spoon or the disability- and difference-savvy NY Deaf Theatre. But it turns out that ambition is the calling card of these two collaborating companies. They have much method to their madness in giving this play its U.S. premiere.

Kosher Harry's is the name of a deli catering to the often wealthy, often Jewish residents of swanky nabe St. John's Wood in London. The normal harmonies of regulars chatting up the waitresses while sipping tea or munching cheese knish are sent into discord by the arrival of a genially provocative young man played, as are all four of the play's characters, by two actors, one speaking and one using American Sign Language in a fascinating stereophonic style (Andrew Hutchinson speaking, Kimberly Mecane signing in this case).

It only takes a minute to adjust to the double casting, and one quickly merges the two simultaneous performances, much like the two images in a pair of binoculars meld into one. That the actors occasionally comment on or interact with their doppelgangers is more than just a practical stage device for an audience composed partially of the deaf or hearing-impaired. It becomes a perfect cracking open of the wrenching thematic content about how we split ourselves in two when we indulge in fostering divisions between our experience and that of those we label "other."

A kooky waitress with tortoise-shell glasses and dangling lemon-and-lime-colored earrings (S. Barton-Farcas speaking, Jennifer Giroux signing) starts out flirting with the young man but quickly begins a screed against her unseen fellow server, who emigrated from the former Soviet Union. "All they do is gossip about you," she says hypocritically. "Sowing the seeds of conflict."

But the waitress' sexual jealousies and blatant xenophobia only set the stage for similarly casual arias of attack by a cabbie (Alvaro Sena speaking, Michael DiMartino signing) and his charge, a widowed grand dame supposedly half deaf herself and confined to a wheelchair (Wynne Anders speaking, Shira Grabelsky signing).

The speaking actors appear to have more stage training than their signing counterparts. Anders' old woman is exceedingly touching in her wistful bemusement, and Sena's cabbie makes a kind of ballet out of his foul-mouthed leering and swagger. And while the staging (Barton-Farcas and Aaron Kubey share directing duties) is mostly stagnant, the two-hour barrage of vitriol becomes overwhelming.

The lesson of Kosher Harry is exceedingly timely and apt: hatred is most dangerous when embedded and normalized into the daily rituals and conversations of our lives.

Presented by Nicu's Spoon in association with NY Deaf Theatre at Nicu's Spoon, 38 W. 38th St., 5th floor, NYC. Oct. 12-28. Wed.-Sun., 8 p.m. (212) 352-3103 or www.theatermania.com.

Two recent reviews for Backstage

2007-10-14T19:23:00.000-07:00

Vengeance

October 11, 2007

By Christopher Murray

This past summer, enterprising Stagefarm commissioned 10-minute plays on the theme of vengeance from five talented playwrights as a response to "the heightened climate of retribution in this country and the world today," according to a program note from Artistic Director Alex Kilgore, who also directed the first and last entries, with Ari Edelson taking on the other three.

The quickly written results, which might have benefited from a little additional time to ripen, are nevertheless provocative and impassioned and highly energized by a talented cast of five young actors.

Gina Gionfriddo's Squalor starts the evening with a duo whose job it is to lure supposed pedophiles from chat rooms into law enforcement snares. Marnie (Carrie Shaltz) is all venom and certainty in carrying out her mission, her back arched like a cobra's as she commands her underling, Pete (David Wilson Barnes), to read out the chat room conversations: "You be the perv; I'll be the prey." Pete expresses empathy toward a lonely man (the creepily endearing David Ross) primed for entrapment and in doing so reveals his own isolation and the difficulty inherent in maintaining moral superiority without giving way to viciousness.

In Julian Sheppard's Skin & Bones, Jesse (Lisa Joyce), intent on revenging the murder of her parents, has joined some sort of paramilitary vigilantes, but a crisis of faith in the brutal mechanisms of vengeance leads her to a betrayal of her green-gloved and blood-splattered partner, Alex (Michael Mosley), even as he hacks up the offal of her latest dismembered victims.

Giftbox by Francine Volpe concerns two sisters whose lives have taken markedly different directions, with slacker chick C (Shaltz) coming in crisis to ask for support and money from her as yet unwed and pregnant sister A (Joyce), who has renegotiated many of her goals and dreams.

Ron Fitzgerald's Rats has Ray (Ross) being held hostage by a bathrobe-wearing, pistol-toting dropout of an ad copywriter, Tom (Mosley), who wants him to explain the solicitation letter he wrote for a "Save the Children" campaign.

The last piece, Neena Beber's Specter, imagines the final conversation between weirdo music producer Phil Spector (an inspired Barnes, all stooped and twitchy) and his doomed paramour, Lana Clarkson (Joyce).

Each of the plays exhibits the use of exciting and quirky language to pose engrossing questions about the corrosive cost to the soul of retaliatory rage. Each of the actors shows great facility and charisma in alternating between flat, throwaway affect and high-octane buffo caricature. Barnes and Joyce stand out, however, for the range and depth of their characterizations.

Presented by Stagefarm at the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce St., NYC.Oct. 6-20. Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.(212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.Casting by Calleri Casting.

The Revenge of the Space Pandas or Binky Rudich and the Two-Speed Clock

October 08, 2007

By Christopher Murray

David Mamet's charming children's theatre piece is making a reappearance as part of the Atlantic Theater Company's Atlantic for Kids program. The show concerns three friends: 12-year-old budding scientist Binky Rudich (Chris Wendelken), his enthusiastic pal Vivian Mooster (Nicole Pacent), and their slightly stuffy 1920s-golf-outfit-wearing friend Bob the Sheep (Michael Piazza).

A boring lunchtime avoiding Mom's calls to casserole is transformed when Binky's project, a two-speed clock, hurls them 50 light years away from Weekhawken, Ill. The friends must figure out how to get back home while at the same time avoiding the space panda security force of King George Topax (Dave Toomey), who has the ditzy ruler thing down pat. His Royal Retainer (Hannah Miller) calls him "your righteous indignation" and attempts to capture Bob the Sheep so the king can get wool for the letter sweater he wants more than anything else in the world. Sounds stupid? It is. The plot is the loosest of pretexts for puns, high jinks, and reinforcement of the message that friendship and loyalty are as valuable as excitement and adventure.

Among the student actors, Wendelken and Piazza have developed the most comedic confidence to throw lines away and so don't wind up laboring their bits as much as everyone else. But the esprit de corps among the actors is palpable, and because they are having such a good time with Mamet's wonderfully kooky lines — such as "When I grow up, all I want to be is flexible" — so does the audience, kids both little and big.

Presented by Atlantic for Kids
at the Atlantic Theater Company,

336 W. 20th St., NYC.Sept. 29-Oct. 14. Sat. and Sun., 10:30 a.m.

(646) 216-1190 or www.atlantictheater.org.

The second of two articles on The Ritz on Broadway

2007-10-14T19:08:00.000-07:00

(Kevin Chamberlin, starring in The Ritz and William Ivey Long, five time Tony award-winning costume design, inset)

A Cartoon from the '70s
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
10/13/2007

The theater is very gay, they say, but it just doesn't get any gayer than the Broadway revival of Terrence McNally's farce The Ritz opening October 11 at Studio 54. The playwright, the director, the costume designer, the musical director, the lead actor, and much of the cast are all at the top of their field and they are all gayer than geese.

Originally produced in 1975, the play was embraced by straight audiences and became a hit on Broadway. It was subsequently filmed as a movie with its stars Rita Moreno, Jack Warden, and Jerry Stiller, successfully making the leap from the stage to celluloid. The play has languished since then, as its depiction of pre- AIDS sexual hijinks in a fictional Manhattan bathhouse was deemed in poor taste with HIV ravaging the gay community."

It's a celebration of pre-AIDS sexuality," said McNally. "I think we can enjoy that now without minimizing what has been suffered though the AIDS epidemic."

Joe Mantello, Broadway's current hottest director - he helmed the musical "Wicked" which remains the Great White Way's highest grossing show, as well as "Three Days of Rain" with Julia Roberts and "The Odd Couple" with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick - always wanted to bring "The Ritz" back. He suggested the idea to McNally who had worked with actress Rosie Perez on a revival of his play "Frankie and Johnny."

They thought she'd be perfect for the role of Googie Gomez, the bathhouse'sin-house chanteuse who has more ambition than singing talent."She's tremendously hardworking as an actress," said the play's star, out actor Kevin Chamberlin. "

This is the most strenuous play I've ever been in, just physically. With farce, you need to be at the top of your game and Rosie is just terrific."Chamberlin received kudos for his role as Horton the Elephant in "Seussical The Musical" and playing Mae West in drag in "Dirty Blond." "I've been nominated for two Tonys in plays where the fat balding guy gets to be the romantic lead, can you believe it?"

The handsome Chamberlin is highly regarded by his peers for his acting chops and is starring with Lily Taylor in the Lifetime series "State of Mind" that debuted this year. In "The Ritz," he plays a straight, Midwestern schmo who married into a Mafia family and hides in the bathhouse to escape the homicidal wrath of his brother-in-law. "It's really a wonderful ride," Chamberlin said. "Sometimes you do plays and the mood in the cast set by the lead actors is a not so good, but Rosie andI knew we wanted this to be fun and the entire cast is a joy to work with."

That cast is made up of some top talent, including Broadway musical maven Seth Rudetsky, who was a writer for the Rosie O'Donnell show and masterminded the popular Broadway Backwards fundraisers for the LGBTCommunity Center. He has a hilarious moment as one of the bathhouse clientele who enters an amateur talent show and sings "Magic to Do" from the '70s musical "Pippin." Rudetsky pulls double duty as the revival's musical director and put together Googie's '70s montage musical number that brings the house down. The comic actor Brooks Ashmanskas, last seen stealing scenes from Martin Shortin "Fame Become Me," plays the bathhouse's most flamboyant denizen wearing a flowing purple kimono into the steamroom. Eighties porn legend Ryan Idol is also in the cast, adding a big helping of daddy flavor to the group of mostly young actors who make up the mosteye-catching of the bathhouse's patrons.

All the this plays out on the stage of the notorious Studio 54, another survivor from the '70s, on a set that is like a Chinese box of doors, perfect for a farce that is all about entrances and exits. The costumes are designed by William Ivey Long, who has created the outfits for more than 60 Broadway shows and won five Tony awards. Long cites the '70s gay magazine After Dark as a prime source of inspiration for the sidepanel underwear, tight pants, and polyester quiana shirts.

Long recently reminisced about moving to New York in 1975 and living in the Chelsea Hotel at the time that he snuck into the second act of the original production of "The Ritz."Asked how gay men's presentation of self through clothes has changed since then, he said, "Gay men's bodies have changed. They are much more muscular now.The director was very careful with his casting of the patrons of "The Ritz" to not have men be too built up. I was able to use a lot of vintage clothes inthe show, so what you are seeing is straight from the '70s, including that purple kimono that Brooks wears!"

The representation of gay life from that period is very much skin deep in what Chamberlin called the "cartoon" vision presented in a farce like "The Ritz." But both McNally and Ivey, who both lived the New York gay life back at that time,are quick to point out that the piece has evolved into a comic homage to a time more innocent and certainly one full of wonderful sexual celebration for gay men.

First of Two Preview Pieces on The Ritz on Broadway

2007-10-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

Paean to the Tubs
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
10/04/2007

Kevin Chamberlin, star of the revival of Terrence McNally's "The Ritz," seen with Matthew Montelongo, in chaps, in rehearsal.

THE RITZ

Studio 54254 W. 54th St.

Tue.-Sat. at 8 p.m.,Wed., Sat., Sun. at 2 p.m.

In previews, opens Oct. 11 Through Dec. 9 $30-$95;

Roundabouttheatre.org or 212-719-1300

Playwright Terrence McNally sat down in his Village apartment recently to discuss the revival of his play "The Ritz" about a straight garbage company owner hiding from his homicidal Mafia brother-in-law in a notorious gay bathhouse. The farce was a hit when it first appeared and the film version with Jack Weston and Rita Moreno is a cult favorite.With the hottest director on Broadway, Joe Mantello, at the helm, and Rosie Perez and Kevin Chamberlin taking the lead roles, hopes are high for the Roundabout Theatre's production at Studio 54, now in previews and set to open October 11. But is the time right to mount a pre-AIDS play that revels in a spirit of sexual hedonism or have we lost our sense of humor about ourselves in the 32 years since the play first appeared?

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: How did the revival come about?

TERRENCE MCNALLY: Joe Mantello has wanted to do it with Rosie Perez for several years ever since she did my play "Frankie and Johnny." We agreed she'd be wonderful for it. It's taken several years for all of us to be available at the same time and for it to make sense for the Roundabout Theatre to produce. I'm really glad we are doing it at Studio 54. I think it's a great space for it because you are going into a notorious place from the '70s to see a play about a notorious place from the '70s. Then Kevin Chamberlin came along to join us and the time finally seemed right.

CM: How is the time right in terms of our culture?

TM: A good comedy is always welcome and if the play works at all it's as a sex farce and a funny one. You don't need a time in your culture to enjoy a good comedy, but I think it's the right time now to look back at that whole period of liberation that was the story of the '70s. It's very much a pre-AIDS play. At the height of the plague certainly the play couldn't be done, but I think we can look back now and celebrate what was wonderful about the sexual liberation and revolution. We had to wait this long to do it again.

CM: Were there any changes that you made?

TM: No, if people don't get all the references, well, I saw "King Lear" at BAM the other night and I didn't get all the references Shakespeare included but you get the sense of it. The year the play was written New York had like ten competing bathhouses, the Everard, Man's Country, etc., and my fictitious Ritz. But we didn't update any of that since there aren't ten big bathhouses operating in New York any more so that would be inaccurate.

CM: There were a couple little changes made to language that could be interpreted as references to AIDS?

TM: There was a line about wearing slippers because of not wanting to get athlete's foot, and someone says you'd be lucky if that's all you caught. We removed that because it would just make the audience uncomfortable or think of AIDS. I wasn't even thinking of AIDS when I wrote it of course, I was thinking of syphilis or gonorrhea. But that's all we've done.The play was written at the height of "this is great, this is fun" and heterosexuals were doing the same thing. Plato's Retreat was going strong. So it wasn't just a gay phenomenon. A lot was happening in New York in that period and I think it's nice to look back at and celebrate it.

CM: Did you think about how the play might reflect on our new repressive era, like for example the whole dust-up about poor Senator Craig and his toe-tapping in the men's room?

TM: The play is about homophobia and its defeat at the hands of liberation, so that's there, but I didn't rewrite anything to reflect current times, there's not a new line in the play.

CM: Do you think audiences will be thinking about current events like the Senator Craig thing when they see the play now?

TM: Well, there is an entrapment in the play, but it's so comic. There's the dumb, straight arrow detective and the violent homophobe Mafia guy wanting to come up with grounds to kill his brother-in-law but they are such figures of absurdity, which I guess you could say the senator is, too. Those identifications are parallels an audience may make, but I've not done anything to make them. The self-loathing homosexual, like the senator I assume is, is really not addressed in the play. It's about homosexuals who are really happy and comfortable being who they are, including being chubbychasers and all sorts of other things. There's no one in the bathhouse who doesn't want to be, let's put it that way.

CM: In the play, everyone at the Ritz is celebrating their homosexuality in a way that we don't so much now. People in bathhouses and sex venues these days are engaging in very serious performances of their persona now.

TM: To my knowledge there's nothing like the clubs of the '70s now.

CM: I was hoping you would tell me that the whole cast of "The Ritz" had gone on a field trip to a bathhouse during rehearsals.

TM: Maybe they did! That's their business! I don't even know the sexual proclivities of all the cast members. It's a big cast, as many as we had originally. The trick was finding enough bodies that didn't look too perfect as so many gay men today seem to project such physical perfection with abs and all. That wasn't true in those days. It was more the drugs and the sideburns and the Afro you were proud of.Mark Spitz was a body ideal at the time of this play. There was this famous poster of him that everybody owned even if it was inside a closet door. You look at it now and it's this skinny little guy with long hair and he was a sexual fantasy, it shows how much we've changed.

CM: How do you think that the stories that we as gay men need and want to be told have changed since the '70s?

TM: It's nice to be reminded of a time before AIDS. The younger generation doesn't know of that time. It's a celebratory play, not a cautionary play. I think a healthy society can look at itself at any period in its evolution. Some are less enjoyable than others.To pretend AIDS didn't happen would be as irresponsible as pretending the sexual revolution didn't happen and the early days of Stonewall. The play is very much in the same time as Stonewall. I mean Bette Midler sang at the baths with Barry Manilow as her accompanist and she sang after the first Gay Pride Parade in Washington Square.

CM: Where you there?

TM: Yes, it was amazing. She sang "Friends" to thousands just a couple blocks from here. I saw her at the baths, too! Those kinds of performances are where the idea for the Googie Gomez character that Rosie Perez is playing now came from. The entertainment was just at a much higher level than Googie is! I was even at the Continental Baths the notorious night when Eleanor Steber gave an opera recital and Leonard Bernstein and his wife were there! It was the era of radical chic, a crazy time of drugs and a lot of sex and a lot of laughter. People didn't stay home, they went out every night. I went out every night, but that was 30 years ago!

CM: You once called "The Ritz" a subversive play.

TM: I said it was subversive and I was surprised it was on Broadway. I was surprised it ran for a year and that straight audiences would come and enjoy this sex farce. It just says gays can make as much fools of themselves trying to get laid as straight people can.

Recent Backstage Reviews

2007-09-27T19:56:00.000-07:00

Unlock'd
September 20, 2007
By Christopher Murray

The talented team of composer Derek Gregor and book writer-lyricist Sam Carner has followed the musical unities in Unlock'd, a loose adaptation of Alexander Pope's early-18th-century mock-heroic poem "The Rape of the Lock." Much as Pope exploited the heroic ode to ridicule social convention, Gregor and Carner adroitly utilize the building blocks of the musical form to tell a satiric tale of petty squabbling among young British aristocrats. In doing so, Unlock'd makes for a gentle and often pleasing entertainment.

Beautiful Belinda (a pixyish Sarah Jane Everman) is envied by her step-sister Clarissa (an intense Jackie Burns), who plots to take her down a peg by inducing a playboy baron (the rich baritone Jim Weitzer) to collect a lock of her hair as a fetishized trophy of amorous conquest. The interventions of the baron's bookish brother (Christopher Gunn) and a sextet of virgin sylphs (Alison Cimmet, Maria Couch, Mary Catherine McDonald) and plodding gnomes (Darryl Winslow, Christopher Totten, William Thomas Evans) ensure plenty of intrigue and comic mayhem just perfect for singing about with whimsy: "Hair, hair, elegant hair/Without it my head would be bare."The songs, expertly orchestrated and played, are enjoyable if not memorable, one of several exceptions being "Off to the East," a charming and wistful duet fantasy of escape to exotic, faraway places. Under Igor Goldin's direction, lovely costumes and an elegant, simple, and well-manipulated set add to the overall effect.

The uniformly fine cast makes every effort to imbue the material with passion and lighthearted joie de vivre, but their professionalism and zest can't overcome what is essentially a highly polished confection that has neither quite enough wit nor heart to rise to the level of an Into the Woods or Candide. But for what it is, an admirably executed example of an adaptation from classical material, Unlock'd is undeniably charming, unpretentious, and lovingly created.

Presented by La Vie Productions as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival at TBG Theater, 312 W. 36th St., 3rd floor, NYC.September 17-30. Remaining performances: Fri., Sept. 21, 4:30 and 7 p.m.; Sat., Sept. 22, 1 p.m.; Sun., Sept. 23, 8 p.m.; Sat., Sept. 29, 1 p.m.; Sun., Sept. 30, 1 p.m.(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 www.theatermania.com or www.nymf.org.Casting by Stephen DeAngelis.

A Global Dionysus in Napoli
September 21, 2007
By Christopher Murray

La MaMa E.T.C., the stalwart Off-Off-Broadway performance venue, is known as a home away from home for international theatre artists looking to present their works in the United States. The OPS Project has arrived for two weeks to present its 2004 performance piece A Global Dionysus in Napoli.

The modern Dionysus in question is Marcello Colasurdo, a former factory worker from Pomigliano in Southern Italy near Naples whose folk songs helped organize worker protests in the 1970s. Colasurdo, a waltzing bear of a man with full cheeks and many necklaces, bangs and flutters his fingers on his traditional tambourine as he sings his lugubrious a cappella laments. One can imagine the power of traditional music to focus the outrage and stiffen the resolve of farmers-turned-activists whose employment in cities, initiated under grandiose economic development plans, had all but sputtered out.

The current piece, conceived by a trio of theatre artists who were just being born in the mid-'70s, is a performance-arty lionization of Colasurdo, proposing him as the ultimate folk artist of impeccable ethical and artistic credentials who has managed to have a global impact without selling out. With a hip-hop DJ (Marco Messina) spinning on stage to provide contemporary street cred, a Londoner (Vernon Douglas) acts as narrator while Colasurdo slumps in a padded chair waiting for his cue to lift his hefty frame and promenade Zorba-like around the stage.

In between Colasurdo's songs, a series of projections -- think updated civics-class educational slide shows -- provide background on the impact of globalization on the Naples region, from Mussolini's obsessive factory openings in 1938 through today's "medialized numbness."

While it's interesting to try to understand the impact of national economic forces on local citizenry across the globe, the presentation of Colasurdo as a sort of singing savior of the people wears thin even within the swift 50 minutes of this piece.

Presented by and at La MaMa E.T.C.,74A E. Fourth St., NYC.Sept. 21-30. Fri. and Sat., 10 p.m.; Sun., 5:30 p.m.(212) 475-7710 or http://www.lamama.org/.

Gemini the Musical
September 24, 2007
By Christopher Murray

Playwright Albert Innaurato has transformed his successful 1977 Broadway roman à clef into a high-spirited musical about a young Harvard student returning for the summer to his South Philly neighborhood, with Charles Gilbert, Innaurato's colleague at Philadelphia's University of the Arts, providing music and lyrics. Filled with kooky, outsized characters and a generous if often salty live-and-let-live spirit, Gemini the Musical, like its lead character, has a lot of heart but is still struggling to find its voice.

Fran (a smooth and affable Joel Blum), the Italian-American pater familias, starts things off by crooning out "One Big Family," which makes clear that in this neighborhood "we kiss, we cuss, we kick up a fuss." However, both the story and the score, while bouncy, tend to lurch a little. Gilbert relies to a surfeit on monosyllabic rhymes, and the majority of the songs are solo numbers, odd in a piece that is all about family and interreliance. Still, Linda Hart (from Broadway's Hairspray) kicks up a delightful self-dramatizing fuss as Bunny, the aging harlot next door, and her second-act showpiece "I'm Gonna Jump!" is the high point of the show, sung from high atop a street pole.

Innaurato's love for his idiosyncratic characters remains strong even 30 years after their initial introduction to the stage, but revising his main character Francis' (recent Boston Conservatory graduate Dan Micciche) struggles to come out as gay to conform to contemporary sensibilities may not have been the right decision for this musicalization.

What's clear is that the game actors performing the piece are still struggling to make their characters more than cardboard cutouts under Mark Robinson's somewhat slapdash direction. As much as Dana Kenn's two-dimensional flats accurately convey the brick-faced row houses of South Philly, the creative team needs to continue working toward showing the three-dimensional lives of the characters who inhabit Innaurato's world.

Presented by the University of the Arts as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival at the Acorn Theater, 410 W. 42nd St., NYC.Sept. 18-Oct. 1. Remaining performances: Tue., Sept. 25, 8 p.m.; Sat., Sept. 29, 4:30 p.m.; Mon., Oct. 1, 8 p.m.(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com or www.nymf.org.Casting by Stuart Howard Associates.

Austentatious
September 24, 2007
By Christopher Murray

Avenue Q's Stephanie D'Abruzzo plays Sam, the stable, stage-managing center of the storm in Austentatious, a new backstage musical farce. "Guys," she implores with pencil stuck into her hair, "we have a play to rehearse; this is not the time for drama."

But, of course, it is the perfect time for the fragile egos involved in the Central Riverdale Amateur Players updated production of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to let loose all their insecurities and mad grabs for power and applause. Emily (Stacey Sargeant) wrote the extremely loose adaptation and insists on adding interpretive dance sequences, including a movement duel with clogs bizarrely set among windmills in Amsterdam. She's also been cast as the star because she's romantically involved with Dom (Stephen Bel Davies), the abstracted and grandiose director with the obligatory scarf tossed around his neck.

Much of Austentatious treads ground familiar from shows like Noises Off and A Chorus Line, but this crowd pleaser makes the satire of community theatre winningly fresh again by dint of superb and drum-tight direction by Mary Catherine Burke and a wonderful cast, each member fully invested in the delightful peculiarities of his or her character.

The jazzy music and witty lyrics by Matt Board and Joe Slabe focus mostly on the private thoughts of the players as they struggle toward opening night while demonstrating that "somehow the Austen got lost in translation." My other favorite rhyme matched "hunky dory" to "purgatory."

The book is credited to the songwriters and three other collaborators (Jane Caplow, Kate Galvin, and Luisa Hinchliff), but too many cooks prove just right for the Feydeau farcical elements of Austentatious. Sometimes, however, the manic silliness overtakes the emotional core of the piece and the sung inner monologues of people struggling for acceptance and validation. Regardless, Austentatious is a charming and winningly presented highlight of the New York Musical Theatre Festival.

Presented by From the Top Productions as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival at the Julia Miles Theater, 424 W. 55th St., NYC.Sept. 18-29. Remaining performances: Tue., Sept. 25, 4:30 p.m.; Fri., Sept. 28, at 11 p.m.; Sat., Sept. 29, 4:30 p.m.(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com or www.nymf.org.

Backstage Review of Danny Hoch's New Play

2007-09-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

Till the Break of Dawn

September 14, 2007

By Christopher Murray

Best known for his high-octane solo shows, Danny Hoch is the undisputed master of the urban male rant. Words spew out with a shotgun rapidity mixing cultural references, languages, fury, and wit in equal measure.

Till the Break of Dawn is Hoch's first attempt at a full-length play, and there are plenty of arias of angst delivered by a variety of characters that still sound suspiciously like him. Indeed, characters don't talk to each other as much as at each other, which is a shame, because they have a lot to say.

Gibran (Jaymes Jorsling), an Internet technogeek and wannabe radical, has cooked up a junket to a Havana hip-hop festival for his friends with the help of Adam (Matthew-Lee Erlbach), a smalltime record producer from Queens. Once there, they meet an ex-Black Panther in exile (Gwendolen Hardwick) who challenges their oversimplified vision of Cuba as a sociopolitical utopia.

The lion's share of the play consists of the characters lambasting each other with analyses of race and class, which may sound deadly but is mostly a heck of a lot of fun. Hoch is a born satirist, and his cast for the most part has a field day with his vivid language and passion for ideas. Hoch also directed the play, mostly admirably, with the tremendously appealing actors secure in their well-delineated characters, though they do tend to overdeliver on that well-known maxim "louder, faster, funnier."

Dominic Colon knocks one out of the park with his portrayal of Big Miff, who in his canary yellow velour sweat suit is a caricature of the already larger-than-life gangsta rapper Fat Joe. Colon never winks as he deadpans lines like "You people are depressing yo. You talk too much."

Overly loquacious they may be, but even with a portentous Sept. 11 tie-in at the end, Hoch is still one of the freshest and most exciting theatrical voices in town.

Presented by Culture Project at the Abrons Arts Center, Henry Street Settlement, 466 Grand St., NYC.Sept. 13-Oct. 21. Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 2 p.m.(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com or www.cultureproject.org Casting by Billy Hopkins, Suzanne Smith, and Kerry Barden.

"Macbeth" and "Murder and Mayhem on Main Street?" Reviews

2007-09-13T20:05:00.000-07:00

Macbeth

September 13, 2007

By Christopher Murray

When stoking his intent to kill a king, Macbeth reflects that he has "only vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself." Much the same might be said of ShakespeareNYC's production of the Scottish play. Ambition is certainly not lacking in the company's stated goal of producing the bard of Avon's entire canon, but Macbeth, curse aside, is a difficult play to perform effectively, with its unrelenting progress toward ever more bloodshed and horror.

Under the direction of Beverly Bullock, James Beaman as Macbeth begins with a strong attack. His sturdy baritone speaks verse well and with good clarity, and his haunted eyes reveal depth. Unfortunately, he is unable to sustain a coherent interpretation of the role in a production weighted down with clumsy blocking, poor lighting that often keeps actors' faces in shadows, and an overemphasis on costuming and posturing at the expense of clear storytelling and illuminated conflict.

The witches' early appearance as harbingers of prophecy also forecasts the production's weaknesses, thanks to their masked faces, Halloween capes with pointed hoods, poor diction, and cascades of shrill cackles unconnected to any textual meaning. When they doff their crone's disguises and emerge as seductive beauties in party dresses, one with plastic mice running up the front, one's fears are only confirmed.

Another significant problem is Brandon Giles' set design: A false proscenium divides downstage from upstage with a series of light cloth curtains that are unable to sufficiently mask scene changes either visually or aurally.These issues and others serve to obscure the potentially interesting work of actors like Jim Jack, whose stately Banquo is every inch the professional soldier and loving father, and Susanna Harris, who even in her Disney villainess costumes strives to reveal the invidious essence and tortured inner life of Lady Macbeth.

Presented by ShakespeareNYC at the Beckett Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., NYC.Sept 7-22. Thu., 7 p.m.; Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.(212) 279-4200 or http://www.ticketcentral.com/.

Melodrama and Mayhem on Main Street?

September 13, 2007

By Christopher Murray

Women Seeking... is a 10-year-old theatre company dedicated to presenting works that showcase women artists. Its current production harkens back to the work of three early-20th-century female playwrights who broke new ground in dramatic form while crashing through gender barriers.

Journalist Susan Glaspell and playwright-producer Alice Gerstenberg both helped found innovative theatres — the Provincetown Players for the former, the Chicago Little Theatre and the Playwrights' Theatre of Chicago for the latter — while Louise Bryant may be best remembered now for Diane Keaton's portrayal of her as John Reed's lover in Warren Beatty's film Reds. Bryant was a dedicated community organizer and saw drama as a powerful way to influence events, including women's rights.

Melodrama and Mayhem on Main Street? comprises six one-acts: three by Bryant — including the world premiere of From Paris to Main Street, unearthed from the archives at Yale University — two by Gerstenberg, and one by Pulitzer winner Glaspell. All of the plays examine the transitioning role of women in the years leading up to World War II.

The evening's opener, The Game, penned by Bryant, is a discourse between personifications of life and death as they roll dice for the fates of two young people, who represent beauty and poetry. It's not really a dramatic situation but an argument. Bryant is exploring archetypes for their relevance in everyday lives. Unfortunately, it creaks a fair amount today.

But some of the other pieces still pack a punch, particularly Trifles by Glaspell, in which the residents of a small rural community try to understand a wife's murder of her husband on the couple's lonely farm. Gender perspectives are movingly demonstrated: While the men look for evidence of motive, the women reluctantly stitch together a tale of cruelty from the quotidian details left behind. The beginnings of a patchwork blanket and a jar of preserves reveal telling clues to the murder, clues that the men just don't have eyes to see.

Some of the actors are stiff and amateurish, but their devotion to the material is infectious. Hannah Ingram as a newly married Parisienne and Anna Malinoski as a society matron's long-suffering daughter stand out.

Presented by Women Seeking…at the Kraine Theatre, 85 E. Fourth St., NYC.Sept. 5-29. Tue. and Wed., 7:30 pm; Mon. and Sat., 3 p.m.(212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.

"Rites of Privacy" Review for Backstage

2007-09-01T20:18:00.001-07:00

Rites of Privacy

August 30, 2007

By Christopher Murray

David Rhodes' one-man show intersperses snippets of autobiographical disclosure in between five monologues with the linking theme of the price people pay for retaining their secrets. The idea here is that identity is often forged at the cost of integrity and can only be redeemed in the crucible of confession.

Such a profoundly Catholic premise would seem odd for a show where the author-performer and all the characters are Jewish, but our culture of self-aggrandizing victimhood trumps all lesser considerations.

Rhodes, clothing rack behind him, sits at a vanity with a lighted mirror as he casually and efficiently adds and removes makeup and costume pieces to embody in sequence an aging Southern belle, "the only Jew in Bethlehem, New Hampshire," an elderly émigré from Dresden, a garish Long Island physician, and a troubled Belgian club kid. Besides offering up a cavalcade of stereotypical accents, these portraits allow Rhodes ample opportunity to show off an unfortunately florid and overwrought acting style that brings to mind Hamlet's imprecation to the Player King not to "tear a passion to tatters."

Cool and elegant projections by scenic designer Greg Emetaz ripple on white curtains upstage in counterpoint to all the effort expended by Rhodes. His Chelsea-boy muscled torso, with twinkling naval ring and tattoos on his upper and lower back, glistens with sweat during costume changes and foreshadows the disclosure at evening's end of a personal secret he purports to have overcome.

There is, however, a transcendent moment early on in Rites of Privacy, when one of the characters mimes playing the harp while singing Noël Coward's syrupy anthem "I'll Follow My Secret Heart." Fingers twirling, voice aquiver with tremolo, caricature is transcended to reveal an inner essence with a ridiculous force, something artists like Charles Ludlam knew to be a pathway into pathos. It's a shame that Rhodes is so earnestly playing tragedy while a tragic clown is imprisoned inside him.

Presented by Moving Parts Theater at Urban Stages, 259 W. 30th St., NYC.Aug. 30-Sept. 30. Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.(212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.

Gay Latino Housecleaners

2007-09-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

Andres Hoyos and Migdalia Santiago run support groups for recent LGBT

immigrants in Spanish and English at the LGBT Community Center.

The Secret Lives of Elves
By: CHRSTOPHER MURRAY
08/30/2007

"I'm not quite sure how it came to be," said Barbara Roche Fierman, the owner of The Little Elves of New York, a high-end house cleaning company. "Like our customers, our staff comes to us mainly by word of mouth. It's just something that's evolved over time."

The word of mouth route Fierman takes advantage of to find her workers isn't based on their expertise in cleaning apartments with valuable art collections, nor on the professional sang froid they bring to dusting in the homes of bold-faced Hamptons clients including Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Instead, she's referring to the unusual demographics of her staff, who are all recent Latino immigrants and almost exclusively gay.

The Little Elves turns out to be a boutique service in New York that oddly enough has a kind of boutique New York workforce as well. Named best cleaning service by New York magazine for the last two years in a row, The Little Elves is more than 80 percent staffed by gay Latinos, estimates Fierman. In the ongoing stream of new Americans who come to our city and find their way, these elves are a case study in resilience, mutual aid, and community building.

There are many jobs that are associated with recent immigrants, like busboys, deli workers, and maids, and there have traditionally been strong links between certain jobs and immigrants from specific places, like Irish cops in an earlier period in New York City's history, or nowadays, the fact that a random dogwalker you see being pulled down a Manhattan block by a drooling pack of canines is more likely than not Brazilian.

Certain occupations have also long been associated with gay people, of course, like hairdresser or florist. But The Little Elves define a rare hybrid, where multiple identities combine in a specific job, for a specific company. And that can make for a strong sense of camaraderie among the workers, who as recent transplants, may be particularly grateful for a sense of community, wherever they find it, even scrubbing floors.

"When I came to this country, I was very lonely," said Pietro, 38, a native of Peru who came to New York four years ago. "I worked in a kitchen at a restaurant, but I was very unhappy. I thought seriously about returning home."

Pietro, like many immigrants, first found his social network among other people from his native country who had already made a place for themselves in New York. This can be complicated for gay people, noted Debanuj DasGupta, the immigration policy analyst with Queers for Economic Justice, since sometimes the culture of their country, replicated here, is intensely homophobic.

"I didn't want to tell my Peruvian friends in my neighborhood in Queens that I was gay, so I just hid that part of myself while I tried to get a job and get settled," Pietro said. That's why finding Little Elves has worked out nicely for him so far.

A recent Saturday night found Pietro with several co-workers who have become friends, sharing a beer at Atlantis, one of the string of gay bars that line a stretch of Roosevelt Avenue under the elevated subway line in Jackson Heights, Queens. That night there was Sergio from Argentina, Alejandro from Costa Rica, Maurice from Colombia, and Dolores from the Dominican Republic, all talking at once about work, school, ambitions, and love affairs.

"I met Pietro and he didn't have immigration papers. We grew close very quickly and I decided to marry him to help, even though I have a girlfriend," said Dolores. (Names have been changed in this story out of concern for the immigration issues facing some of those mentioned.)

It's not uncommon for recent gay arrivals to get around immigration laws by making a marriage of convenience with an established resident who has legal status, said DasGupta. But sometimes, people make compromises that aren't so innocuous or pleasant.

"Among younger gay male immigrants there can be an over-reliance on jobs in the shadow economy," he said, "like being filmed having sex for cheap porn sites, prostituting themselves, erotic dancing." This may be particularly true of Latino men who are often objectified and sexualized in gay male culture, he noted."In these ways of making money there are no protections, people are putting bodies on the line, chancing sexually transmitted diseases and risk for HIV."

"You do things because you have to survive," said Javier, a former Little Elves worker who hustled on the streets of Paterson, New Jersey when he arrived from Colombia at 19. "It's not because you love it. If you are lucky, you move on," he said.

One enterprising young Latino gay man named Juan has combined housecleaning and his sex appeal by advertising online for nude housecleaning services."I have been offering professional nude housekeeping services for over four years," he said in an e-mail. "I am probably the first to really find that there is a market for this and people never knew they would be interested. I am different because I don't use it as a front for prostitution or escort services and do a thorough professional job."

Although some people regard a stint as a little elf merely a steppingstone on the way to a different sort of employment, the job does have its benefits. Rates for the workers charged to the client are $33 per hour, $45 per hour for a supervisor, which is mandatory on jobs requiring more than two people. The workers' pay ranges from $8 an hour to just over $14. Fierman has also paid for some workers to take English lessons and loaned money when times were tight.

But the elves work hard for their hourly rates. The job is physically intense and moves at a fast pace. Javier remembers lugging carpets from one floor to another with the help of that day's client, Julie Andrews, who wore a kerchief on her head and worked up quite a cleaning sweat of her own. (And, yes, she sings while she cleans, said the starstruck Javier.)

But there are also tensions working for customers of a certain social standing. Though widely divergent in terms of design and décor, almost all the homes of the ritzier clients have one thing in common, according to Pietro - cameras in every room, recording every workers' every move. That sense of having to watch their step is intensified for gay immigrants who may be trying to adjust to American mores - and also learning how to be gay for the first time in a much more open environment than they came from.

Tensions of this sort are often discussed at the support groups for gay immigrants run at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center each month. Andres Hoyos, a Colombian immigrant himself, works as the director of Center Care Recovery at the Center, where he initiated immigrant support groups in both English and Spanish.

"The goal of the groups is to build community," he said. "People are managing their sexuality, racial/ethnic identity, and their immigration status all at the same time, which can be very stressful. Identity is more complex than what people see on the outside. They are bringing their country of origin's way of relating to sexuality and race with them and adding that to their cultural context here in New York."

Daniel, who works independently as a housecleaner and is both undocumented and HIV-positive, said his choice of work makes for greater isolation than if he worked for a service but is safer for him than the risk of running afoul of immigration policy in a more structured work environment. "A lot of people are surprised to see guys cleaning instead of a cleaning lady," he said. "They don't necessarily know you are gay the first time you come, but they figure it out."

For Pietro and his friends hanging out at the Atlantis, working at Little Elves has provided a stable source of both income and community based on multiple shared identities."It's nice to know we're not alone," Pietro reflected at he enjoyed an evening beer. "We can work and relax together and know we all share a similar experience."

The LGBT Community Center's Center CARE program runs biweekly support groups for LGBT immigrants in Spanish and English as well as individial counseling in Spanish and free English classes. For fall starting dates and more information, call Migdalia Santiago at 212-620-7310 or e-mail msantiago@ gaycenter.org.

2007-09-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

Shame-Based, Shame-Based, Shame-Based
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
08/30/2007

This news cycle's public flaying of Republican Senator Larry Craig for soliciting "lewd conduct" in a Minneapolis airport restroom gave me no pleasure. I like to think of myself as first in line for a big helping of schadenfreude, especially at the seemingly endless parade of fundamentalist conservative hypocrites getting what's coming to 'em, but it just isn't so.

Seeing the related piece on CNN this week about "The Secret World of Gay Men's Hookups" and the descriptions of "creepy," "disgusting," and "dirty" public homosexual male sex was embarrassing and completely uncomfortable for me. All that horrible detail about secret foot-tapping signals under bathroom stalls. Ugh. Note to the senator - foot tapping is so old school, get your fine self on craigslist, gurl!

But in all seriousness, I loathe having our community's dirty laundry aired in public. I hated all the "gay men in three-day crystal meth-fueled fisting parties" newspaper stories. I hated all the "bug chaser seeks load after load of HIV-infected semen" magazine articles. I hated all the "black men on the down low are giving our women AIDS" episodes on daytime television talk shows.

Seeing and hearing all these exposes triggers all my internalized homophobia since I am completely and utterly shame-based. I was one of those kids you could point at in the lunchroom and say "Red!" and within 30 seconds my whole face would light up in Technicolor scarlet. I lived in fear that someone would discover the colored bikini underwear I stole from my mother's best friend's sexy boyfriend with the '70s moustache. And now I still have my secret shames.

We homos take such pains to separate ourselves so definitively from the Reverend Haggards, Congressman Foleys, and Senator Craigs of the world, don't we? But the truth is that almost everyone lives some kind of double life. We walk around pretending we aren't going to go home and jerk off to some sleazy Internet site or that we don't want to get jiggy with the greasy building superintendent.

Well, you are as sick as your secrets, the saying goes, and as Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." So, here goes. Mom, close your eyes. I've had sex in public restrooms and parks, thought it was hot AND been concerned about my sexual compulsivity. I've had awesome sexual experiences on meth AND gotten freaked out by the destructive force of that drug. I've flirted with unprotected sex, been totally aroused by barebacking AND felt tremendous anxiety about our community norms around it.

Whew! I feel better, don't you? Admit it.

Of course, I'm an out gay man, not a closeted hypocrite who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. But I'm not sure that distinction really means too much to me emotionally. I know there is a difference between Senator Craig and me - I'm not deceiving a spouse nor voting on far-reaching national legislation, but still, I'm hardwired to crumple at my own or any one else's public pie in the face, even if they deserved it.

Guess what, maybe it's about coming out even more, even for all us out loud and proud types reading this newspaper.

By the way, I think that hair-trigger shame is partially where gay men's extraordinary emotional intelligence comes from. The empathy that fuels our artistic sensitivity or the supportive insight we are known for emanates from the inner knowledge that develops long before we ever suck a dick that we are somehow, innately wrong.

Some of us are able to overcome the paralyzing force of that shame to lead productive and loving lives. But make no mistake, as mainstreamed as MTV and CNN and USA Today and often we ourselves insist we are, gay men - and for that matter, all sexual minorities, our lesbian, bi, and trans sisters and brothers included - still pay a heavy price. We struggle mightily with direct outcomes of that shame - in our difficulty managing intimate relationships, and also in patently self-destructive acts like substance abuse, over-eating, and unsafe and otherwise dangerous sex.

So, stagnant, self-hating, denialist Senator Craig, my erstwhile fellow traveler, take a page out of the book of your much maligned compatriot Jim McGreevey and come out, come out, wherever you are. I won't say the water's just fine - it runs hot and cold - but it's fresh and it's pure and it's cleansing. See you in the steam room.

Williamsburg! The Musical - Fringe Festival Review

2007-08-22T20:24:00.000-07:00

August 21, 2007

The phantom of the L train
By Christopher Murray
for The Brooklyn Paper

Picture credit: Jonathan Grey

Each August, the New York International Fringe Festival is overrun with new plays hoping to become the next Broadway mega-hit. This year, the festival’s 11th outing, is no exception, with over 200 shows in 19 venues over two weeks of steamy summer weather.

Adding some additional this week is the delightful concoction “Williamsburg! The Musical,” that satirically skewers Brooklyn’s bastion of hipster cool.

Billyburg is ripe for mocking, of course, with its pretentious young fops, dandies, cool cats and tough chicks running around what some people call “the campus” wearing torn t-shirts and black mascara, daring anyone over 30 to divine their actual gender.

"Williamsburg! The Musical” doesn’t miss a trick in skewering every aspect of the nabe, from the Polish grandmothers pushing pierogies to the Puerto Rican bogeda owner acting as handyman to the ‘hood.

The musical’s plot line follows a Romeo and Juliet story in which a new denizen of “the coolest neighborhood in America “ named Piper (Alison Guinn), in a tantrum over her daddy cutting off her trust fund, is stopped from throwing herself over the Williamsburg Bridge by Schlomo (Evan Shyer), the Orthodox Jew who runs the local dry cleaners. Sparks fly as the subway rushes by and Piper is entranced by Schlomo’s old world chivalry.

Meanwhile, a crazy real-estate broker is buying up the area’s last remaining deals, charging newbies exorbitant rents, oh, and turning unsuspecting youth into hipster zombies to do her evil bidding.

Sound crazy? It is, and also a heck of a lot of fun. Like its more serious and darker older sibling, the musical “Rent,” this show is driven by the exuberant energy of its young cast. Each member of the ensemble of 14 actors is giving it his all, doing broad bits of shtick and sending up stereotypes of his own generation.

The songs, by Kurt Gellersted and Brooke Fox, are wordy, catchy, fast moving parodies with simple, witty lyrics like “All is takes is cash to look like trash” in the opening number “Welcome to Williamsburg” or in “Schlomo’s Lament”: “My father taught me how to steam and now I live this simple dream.”

Both the choreographer and director, Deborah Wolfson, and the designer of the droll and spot-on costumes, Jennifer Rogien, bring color and life to the proceedings.

Stand outs in the cast include the leads, Alison Guinn, whom Brooklyn theatergoers enjoyed playing a dizzy blond in Gallery Players’ recent “Victor/Victoria,” and Evan Shyer, whose beautiful voice and comic manner are perfect tonics to the hipster mayhem that surrounds him.
“Williamsburg! The Musical” may not light up Broadway anytime soon, but it is a clever, sweet-spirited show that will surely be a hit off- Bedford.

“Williamsburg! The Musical” has its last performance on Aug. 24 at the Village Theatre (158 Bleecker St., in Manhattan ). Tickets are $15. For information, call (212) 279-4448 or visit http://www.fringenyc.com.

2007-08-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

"The Merv Griffin Show" featured performances and interviews with a panoply of entertainers from 1969 through 1986. Griffin created the game show Jeopardy and evaded questions about his sexuality once telling a New York Times reporter "I tell everybody that I'm a quartre-sexual. I will do anything with anyone for a quarter."

I Just Lost My Merv

By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
08/16/2007

In 1979, I was living in suburban hell, but I was too stupid to realize it. I knew my parents hated each other. I knew I hated sports. I knew everything was boring and stupid. And all that I lived for was to get home in the afternoons and to settle in on the couch with a can of Fresca for my daily 4 p.m. chat with my best friend, Merv Griffin.

Merv was wonderful. He made everything better. He was kind, he was funny, and most of all, he was relaxed. Whereas my life was replete with anxiety at school (where Mark Ong called me spaghetti head and I peed my pants in gym class), and at home (where my parents had just opened up a giant hole in the earth by getting separated), Merv just laughed and laughed or bit his tongue and smiled at the same time when he was being naughty.

Merv was reliable, he was always there during those endless parentally unsupervised afternoons. While my sister was racking up extracurricular activities to put on her college applications and my brother was learning to inhale cigarettes and puke up beer, I was at home, alone, but luckily there were Merv and his cavalcade of celebrity friends.

My favorite guest, hands down, was Orson Welles, who was as big as a four-door sedan and usually dressed all in black with a big silk bow around his neck. He would perform these obtuse psychic magic tricks narrating his cleverness in that deeply sonorous voice. It thrilled me. And Merv knew just how I felt - he was thrilled, too!

Merv knew the coolest people, women like Charo, Hermione Gingold, Phyllis Diller, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. They defined glamour and sophistication to me. And he knew wonderful men, too. Not men like my father who was too loud and red-faced and always about to boil over, but smooth, classy men like Wayland Flowers (and his Madame), Dom DeLuise, Tony Randall, and that dreamy Anthony Perkins.

To me, Merv was an emissary to a world of endless chatter and friendship. It was exactly where I wanted to live - it was not my house. Not my house was filmed live in front of an audience of lucky ducks in a mystical place called Burbank. Not my house was brightly lit and funny, full of innuendo and wit with a couch that was big and long enough for everyone.

You never knew who might pop by not my house, like Endora popping by to visit Samantha Stevens. At my house, you knew exactly what was going to happen, the daily tensions, the fights over dinner, the long lonely days and nights.

Of course, back then, I didn't realize I was gay, but then - hey! - apparently, neither did Merv!

But like knew like. I knew Merv was in fact, my real father, the father I deserved. He was my first chosen gay father, pudgy, honey-voiced, soothing, and sassy, the anti-my dad who was mayor and master of ceremonies of not my house.

God, how I dreamt of leaving my house and somehow making my way to that wonderful air-conditioned Burbank studio. There I would laugh with Merv on the couch and live with Bill Bixby and he and Orson would do magic tricks, and my pals would be Mickey, Michael, Davy, and my favorite, the quiet Monkee, Peter. My Burbank bedroom would be like the inside of "I Dream of Jeannie"'s pillow-strewn bedroom in a bottle.

To tell God's honest truth, to this day, my sense of what is fun and funny and that gayest of gay commodities, entertaining, is predicated on what Merv taught me during those hazy '70s afternoons - become a master of the art of friendship, surround yourself with bright, funny people, and you'll never suffer from loneliness. Be gracious and expansive and kind and laugh your head off. Glitter. And be gay.

Merv Griffin died in Los Angeles this week at the age of 82.