John Clum's Theater, Music, Film and Media Reviews

Like many historical television series and films, the STARZ series Mary and George trades historical accuracy for sensationalism; but with Julianne Moore and the beautiful, talented Nicholas Galitzine in the titles roles and Tony Curran offering a volatile, fickle, dissolute version of King James I, it is great fun, soap opera on steroids.

                  The basic facts of the series are true. Mary Villiers, a minor aristocrat with ambition that rivals Lady Macbeth’s, knew that for her to have any power, she had to get it through the men in her family. She found money to send her beautiful son George to France to learn courtly skills, then plotted to get him in front of King James so that he might become the King’s favorite. James, who seems to have been bisexual or homosexual obviously was smitten with George, whom he made Duke of Buckingham and Lord High Admiral. George, his mother and his half-brothers greatly benefitted financially from his power. When James died in 1625 and was replaced by his son, Charles I, George stayed in power until he was murdered in 1628. The upstart, ruthless Villiers always had a lot of enemies and were not popular with the public.

                  The real King James was a complex person. His upbringing was turbulent. His father was murdered and his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was removed from the Scottish throne shortly after James was born. We know what happened to her. James became King  of Scotland when he was thirteen months old.  During his childhood, the country was actually ruled and he was raised by a series of noblemen. He was quite a scholar and wrote important books from an early age and commissioned the great translation of the Bible that bears his name. He had prudent ideas about foreign policy and was eager to unite England, Scotland and Ireland. James believed (even wrote a book on) the divine right of kings. Unfortunately, he had terrible relations with parliament, which he regularly dissolved. He loved hunting and elaborate entertainments, which strained the treasury of the realm.

                  His reign gave us some of the greatest literature England has produced. He was the patron of Shakespeare’s company from 1603. Ben Jonson wrote the texts for some of James’s court entertainments. John Donne was in his prime.  

                  The James of the series is a totally dissolute hedonist who spend most of his time in the company of semi-clad or unclad young men. Once in a while, he shows flashes of Machiavellian guile, but usually takes the advice of his male lovers, whom he elevates to positions of great power. Tony Curran manages to create a mercuric, unpredictable, totally selfish James, sort of a gay 17^th century Donald Trump. 

                  George, dependent on his mother’s guile and advice, is not as savvy as the historical George. In the series, he is a pretty boy out of his depth. This is because the writers have put the focus on Mary who ruthlessly rises through her sons. Mary’s sidekick, lover, and lady in waiting is a prostitute with a taste for homicide (no historical basis for that). Julianne Moore, star and Executive Producer, obviously is having a ball playing this monster whose ambition has no limits. She clearly thinks she is smarter than the men around her but must use them because women have no property or power. George both hates her and needs her. Nicholas Galitzine shows us a young man desperate to be independent of his mother, but not quite ruthless enough to survive on his own.  Essentially, he is placed in the position of women: his power depends on his sexual power over the King. 

                  Some of the moments in the series that seem most outlandish really happened. Mary did lock her son up overnight with Katherine so that her reputation would be so sullied that she would have to marry him even though her parents disapproved. George who has up to now been interested only in men, develops a close relationship with his clever wife.

                  There are a variety of murders that remind the viewer of all the murders in the plays of King James’s time. There are also lots of semi-clad and unclad bodies romping around. Sex and violence—what more can one ask from a slice of history?

                  Luca Guadagnino’s film, CHALLENGERS, is about two games: tennis and a three-sided love triangle that feeds the athletic and the sexual competition.

                  Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) have been inseparable best friends since tennis school. At a junior tournament, they meet the beautiful and fiercely competitive Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). Tashi becomes for them another competition. When she comes to their hotel room, she senses that the two boys are closer than they want to admit. “I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” she says. The result is a three-way kissing session in which the two boys end up kissing each other. Tashi tells them that she will accept the phone number of the boy who wins the game the next day. Patrick wins the game and Tashi—temporarily. After a nasty fight with Patrick, Tashi loses concentration in a game and injures her knee. Her way of staying in the game she loves is to coach Art, who becomes her husband and the father of her child.

                  Years later, Art is trying to get his Mojo back after an injury. Tashi has entered him in a small tournament in suburban New Rochelle, unaware that Patrick has also signed up for the tournament. Art only stays in the game because it means so much to Tashi, who quietly resents the fact that he isn’t as devoted to the game as she is. She also still has a turbulent occasional fling with Patrick, though she claims to despise him. 

                  All this has the makings of soap opera, but the three leads are so good and have such chemistry together that the eroticism sizzles. Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist sweat a lot, first in a scene in a sauna when Patrick tries both to reconcile with Art, from whom he has been estranged, as well as unnerve him before their big match; and, later, on the court when the camera closes in on their sweaty bodies. Tennis is as erotic in this film as the relationships between the three leads. At the end, we see the two men in a sweaty tennis court embrace as Tashi looks on cheering. She knows that the men need each other as competitors to play their best game and that they need each other as friends. 

                  Zendaya is an amazingly beautiful woman and a superb actress. She capture’s Tashi’s fierce ambition and her disappointment in the men she loves, who cannot match her ambition. There’s a touching scene before the big match when Patrick tells her that whatever happens, he will retire at the end of the season. His worry is that she won’t love him anymore. She embraces him, but the look on her face is one of loss. It is no wonder she has sex with Art in the back seat of his car. The two men couldn’t be better. Fair Mike Faist captures Art’s sweetness and dark-haired Josh O’Connor is the quintessential sexy bad boy.

                  Watching the film, I kept thinking of the writings of Gayle Rubin and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick about the role of the woman in what Sedgwick called homosocial bonds between men. Rubin and Sedgwick wrote about literature in which women have to offer the sex between straight men that they cannot have with each other, however attracted to each other they may be. Tashi plays the men against each other for the sake of the game and because she needs to live tennis through them. 

                  I found CHALLENGERS to be totally absorbing. The only thing that put me off was Guadagnino’s tendency to kill a scene with techno music so loud that the dialogue becomes inaudible.  And it’s the same music every time!      

                  In her first conversation with Art and Patrick, Tashi talks about the match she just played. She says that it wasn’t great except for fifteen seconds of volley between her and her opponent. For Tashi that volley was like love. The final moments of the film give us Patrick and Art, thirteen years later, turning a volley into that sort of love. No wonder they end up in a fierce, joyful embrace!

                  My first exposure to an Indigenous American was The Lone Ranger on radio. The Lone Ranger’s constant companion was Tonto, who referred to the masked man as “Kemosahbee.” Did even the Lone Ranger know what the word meant? It may have been a term of endearment or an obscenity. The comradeship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto was probably taken from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, written in the 1820s to 1840s, in which the hero, Natty Bumppo has an indigenous comrade Chingachgook. 

I can’t recall the name of the film, but my childhood memories also include being terrified by an Indian raid in some black and white epic. As was often the case, some nice white family was slaughtered and their home burnt down. Later I saw all the John Ford epics of battles between John Wayne and indigenous Americans. The Searchers, considered Ford’s greatest film turned the tables and presented Wayne as a fierce racist obsessed with revenge on an Indian tribe. Wayne’s Ethan Edwards saw his adversaries as sexual predators on white women. He was intent on killing his niece whose blood and maidenhood had been sullied by indigenous men. By the 1970s, films were turning the tables on the old tropes and presenting the American Indians as the good guys and the white guys as the enemy.

While most of the cinematic American Indians of the studio era were played by white men in redface, Tonto on the long-running television version of The Lone Ranger was played by an American Indian (well, actually, a Canadian Indian), Jay Silverheels (actual name, Harold Smith). Until recently there has been a shortage of American Indian actors because there have been few roles for them on screen and, even more so, on stage. Series like the excellent Dark Winds, created from Tony Hillerman novels, now use only indigenous actors. It would be as politically incorrect for a white actor to play an indigenous American as to play a Black or Asian person. 

Which brings us to the hilarious The Thanksgiving Play, now at Steppenwolf. Our history books tell us that the early settlers in Massachusetts had a feast of Thanksgiving with the Wampanoag tribe after the indigenous people provided food to the settlers during their first Winter in New England. In Larissa Fasthorse’s version, three small-town theatre folk and a Hollywood actress try to devise a politically correct drama of the first Thanksgiving to be presented to elementary school students and their parents. Logan, the director (Audrey Francis), is one of those serious theatre people who find themselves trapped in a situation unworthy of their talents (a public elementary school). Her fifth grade production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Comethled to a petition from parents to have her fired (I feel that way about professional productions of O’Neill’s overlong play). The Thanksgiving play will be her one chance at redemption. Her leading actor is her boyfriend Jaxton (Nate Santana), a local street performer and Yoga devotee who anguishes over being politically correct. They are joined by Caden (Tim Hopper), an elementary school teacher who is an aspiring playwright. Thanks to a grant, Logan has hired an American Indian actress, Alicia, based on a headshot of Alicia in Indian garb. Alicia turns out not to be indigenous, leaving Logan with the horror of an all-white troupe.

The Thanksgiving Play is a two-pronged satire. On one hand, it is a satire of political correctness gone awry, an indigenous version of the kind of white liberal P.C. inanity so brilliantly depicted in the recent film American Fiction. On the other hand, it is a comedy about the creation of theatre and a politically savvy farce—a contemporary version of classics like Noises Off, which will be revived at Steppenwolf next season. Though the focus is not always clear, The Thanksgiving Play is consistently funny, an antidote to the idiotic mess, Potus, that Steppenwolf served up a few months ago. 

The trick of farce is that the actors have to play their parts as seriously as they would in more serious fare. The humor in farce is that the characters often take themselves far too seriously. Under Jess McLeod’s direction, the four actors kept their absurd characters credible. As usual in farce events get crazier and more physical. 

Nothing is funnier or potentially more dangerous than extreme earnestness. The Thanksgiving Play is great medicine for our crazy times.

One of the fascinating aspects of jazz composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s relatively new career as an opera composer is that he has chosen to compose works that focus on the lives of real gay and bisexual men. Fire Shut Up in My Bones (libretto by Kasi Lemmons), based on Charles Blow’s memoir, is the story of the coming of age of a bisexual man. Champion (libretto by Michael Cristofer), is a candid and powerful depiction of the tragic life of queer boxer, Emile Griffiths, complete with scenes set in pre-Stonewall gay bars (‘Down the street with no name through the door with no sign”). 

 Before I review the brilliant production of Champion that was recently mounted by the Lyric Opera of Chicago (a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera), I want to place the work in the context of American gay opera, particular recent operas that represent queer heroes and martyrs. These very different works dramatically and musically feature historical figures whose lives either represent enforcement of or defiance of heterosexual masculine hegemony. In all of these works the librettist is given equal billing with the composer. I’m not a musicologist, but a theater person who has directed operas professionally and written libretti for operas., so I feel more comfortable focusing on the words more than the music.

In a previous entry, I discussed Fellow Travelers miniseries and as a fine opera written by composer Gregory Spears and librettist Fred Pierce. Here I want to place Champion in the context of another important previous work, the groundbreaking Harvey Milk by Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie. Champion and Harvey Milk are not the only operas that are based on real gay figures. Jorge Martin’s Before Night Falls (libretto by Martin with Delores M. Koch), is based on the life and work of gay Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas, and Rufus Wainwright’s opera based on the life of the Emperor Hadrian was produced at the Canadian Opera. Queer operas like these, as Alex Ross puts it, “certainly compensate for the long decades when gay people projected themselves onto an art form that failed to reflect them in return.”^[1] 

“Who are these men without wives?”^[2] fifteen-year-old Harvey Milk exclaims on his first visit to the standing room of the old Metropolitan Opera House in the first scene of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s opera, Harvey Milk. Wayne Koestenbaum has written the queerness of that location: “Two quintessentially queer sites at the opera are the line [for standing room tickets] and standing room: spaces of mobility, cruising, maximum attentiveness, spaces where one broadcasts commitment, desperation, patience; spaces where one meets other fanatics; spaces of rumor, dish, cabal.”^[3] Yet Koestenbaum was aware, even in 1993, that the opera queens who loudly responded to their beloved divas from the standing room were relics from another era: “We [contemporary gay men], consider the opera queen to be a pre-Stonewall throwback because we homophobically devalue opera as addictive behavior and as displaced eroticism. The opera queen is a dated species: very 1950s.”^[4] David Halperin observes that “gay men nowadays [2012], have a tendency to treat the Broadway musical—or Judy Garland, or Barbra Streisand, or grand opera, or any of the other cultural artifacts that supposedly encode similar forms of archaic gay male sentiment—with polite rejection, avoidance, repudiation.”^[5] In his book Opera in the Flesh, Sam Abel agrees that for closeted gay men of the past, opera was “the site for complex encodings of hidden desire. When homosexuality refuses the closet, when gay men insist on claiming our identity in public, this system breaks apart.”^[6] However, Abel finds a positive role for opera in gay culture: “Opera’s queerness, its undifferentiated sexual excess, makes it a channel for the expression of gay desire.”^[7] In Harvey Milk, the standing room at the old Metropolitan Opera House in 1945^[8] is a site of intense pleasure and transient freedom for the cheering, closeted gay men who inhabit it. 

During the performance, Harvey becomes attracted to one good-looking fellow standee and, after the performance, follows him to a gay cruising area in Central Park. Unfortunately, the young man is an undercover policeman and Harvey is placed in handcuffs. In a few minutes, we are given a picture of the life of closeted gay men before Stonewall: the exhilaration of grand opera where gay men cheer a larger-than-life diva who briefly triumphs over the brutal police followed by furtive brief sexual encounters with the concomitant threat of arrest and exposure. Young Harvey learns from his arrest that “Closets are a necessary fact of life . . . .This is the best we can hope for”(69). 

The first scene at the old Metropolitan Opera House begins with a distorted version of the opening chords of Puccini’s Tosca, representing the power of the brutal head of police, Baron Scarpia. Throughout Harvey Milk, the police and its representatives are the villains. The policeman who arrests Harvey is played by the same singer who portrays Harvey’s murderer, Dan White. Older Harvey is still handcuffed when we first see him and remains so until he accepts and celebrates his identities as Jew and gay man. In essence, accepting the closet is acquiescing to the authority of the police. The Stonewall Riots depicted at the end of Act I were acts of defiance of the police and the closet they enforced.

Although Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s Harvey Milk centers on the life and death of gay activist Harvey Milk, the large-scale work focuses as much on the changing dynamics of the gay community from the closet of the pre-Stonewall era to an out coherent, politically active gay community. Each act ends with an elaborate ensemble—Wallace and Korie’s version of the grand concertante moments in Verdi operas—depicting a crucial moment in gay history: the Stonewall Riots, the first San Francisco Gay Pride Parade and the giant memorial march after Milk’s death. At the same time, the police and the homophobes and gay bashers they protect are omnipresent. Harvey Milk becomes a representative of the changes in gay culture as Dan White, who murdered Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, represents the homophobic opposition. 

The first act of the opera spans the years between Harvey’s introduction to opera in 1945 and the Stonewall Riots in 1969. By then, Harvey was a successful financier but still closeted. He gradually learns during the act to celebrate his two minority identities, his Judaism and his homosexuality. 

Harvey Milk begins with a Kaddish. The sounds of a shofar and snarling low brass emerge from the orchestra as a dissonant chorus, reminiscent of Penderecki and Ligeti, sing the prayer for the dead as two moments in Harvey’s life are reenacted: his murder and leaving his Long Island home for his first visit to stand at the Met. Against the Kaddish and the sampled voice of Dianne Feinstein announcing Milk’s murder, we hear Harvey’s mother voicing her fears for Harvey’s safety—“Evil is out there everywhere/. . . . Golems appear from thin air”—and her warning about “men who are different” (64). Harvey’s mother’s warning about the Golems in essence comes true but the Golems are neither supernatural nor the memories of the holocaust that haunt her: the Golems are the representatives of a virulently homophobic society. Yet she also fears the gay men who might corrupt her son. This multivalent opening is one of the most effective moments in the opera. Two moments in time merge in different representational styles: docudrama and poetic representation.

As Harvey follows the plainclothes policeman into the park, his mother remembers the holocaust and admonishes her son: “Never forget who you are”(67). She is referring to his identity as a Jew but an older Harvey understands that celebrating both his Judaism and his queerness will central to his identity. In the original production,^[8] a pink and a yellow triangle merged behind the action to create a large Star of David as Judaism and homosexuality “overlap” for Harvey. As the act ends on Christopher Street, Harvey echoes his mother, “I am just one person but I have power./I remember who I am” (73). The verb “remember” is repeated throughout the opera.  

The catalyst for Harvey’s self-realization is his relationship with Scott Smith, a young radical who becomes Harvey’s partner. They meet shortly before the Stonewall riots. The opera highlights Milk’s and Smith’s romantic relationship but actually plays down Smith’s importance as the engineer of Milk’s political campaigns. In the love scene at the mid-point of the opera, Smith echoes Harvey’s mother’s early order: “Your strength is remembering./Remember” (84). Smith wants Harvey to remember the spirit of Stonewall, the fire that heated up gay pride. The entire opera is a memorial to a crucial period in queer history.

The second act introduces Milk’s antagonist and future murderer, Dan White, a young fireman who hates what has become of his neighborhood as a result of the invasion of hippies and homosexuals. White decides to fight the forces of change by running for the Board of Supervisors. The act ends with Mayor George Moscone welcoming Milk, White and the other supervisors onto a newly diverse board. The act’s finale is a reenactment of the first San Francisco Gay Pride Parade with Harvey and Scott at the center.

  In the third act, before the murder of Milk and Mayor Moscone by Dan White, Korie and Wallace offer another moment that combines different times and places, an operatic version of cinematic cross-cutting. Harvey and Scott enter the War Memorial Opera House to the cheers of the audience. At the same time, Dan White is airing his grievances as he loads his revolver. Harvey’s mother also appears, repeating what she said the night Harvey first went to the opera, “Come right home to Woodmere when the opera is over” (97). Harvey steps forward to sing what he wishes he could tell his mother. He remembers Stonewall, the night:

…The lies we told our mothers turned to shame

And shame to rage.

And rage to pride.

And pride to hope.

And hope will never be silent. (99)

After Harvey’s death is again reenacted, the opera ends, as it began, with a Kaddish, as the mourners parade down Market Street. If the opening Kaddish was strident, the final one is peaceful, elegiac. Harvey may have been murdered but the gay community is now a vital political force. The closet doors have been broken down. 

“What Makes a Man a Man”

Champion

On the eve of the fight that will change his life, champion boxer Emile Griffith reflects on the conflict between the code of masculinity represented by the boxing ring and what he feels. He has just been taunted viciously by his opponent, Cuban boxer Benny Paret, for being a “maricon.” When he tries to talk to his manager, Howie Albert, about his feelings, Howie shuts him down: “I don’t want to know.” For Howie, men loving men is the antithesis of the masculine code of boxing. When Emile doesn’t dominate the first rounds of his fight with Paret, Howie taunts him, “What are you doing? Dancing out there?” and reminds him that boxing is a manly killer sport. In a moment of fury, Emily fires off seventeen deadly blows to Paret’s head in seventeen seconds. Emile wins the championship and Paret, already suffering from headaches from a previous fight, dies. Inevitably, years later, Emile suffers from memory loss brought on by boxing injuries. The memory loss is exacerbated by the brain injury he suffers from a brutal gay bashing.

 Terence Blanchard and Michael Christofer’s Champion offers a musical-dramatic biography of Griffiths from his childhood to his old age. Born in the Virgin Islands, he and his many illegitimate siblings are abandoned by their mother who is hungry for a better life. He is raised by an abusive aunt who for punishment makes him hold a cement block over his head for long periods of time. When he comes to New York as a young man he wants either to play baseball, a conventionally masculine vocation, or make women’s hats. Thanks to his mother, with whom he is reunited, he gets a job at a millinery business, but the owner sees his potential as a boxer. As Emile gains success as a boxer, his mother is always there to take the money and skim off some for herself. Secretly, Emile spends his nights in a gay nightclub. 

 Act I of Champion ends with the killing of Benny Paret. Act II shows us the end of his long career. It focuses on older, guilt-ridden Emile’s desire for forgiveness from Benny Paret’s now grown son. Despite his success, of because of it, Emile tries to be what the world expects him to be by entering into a doomed marriage. Later, older Emile is cared for by his loving partner and adopted son, Luis. He finally experiences real love. Even in the fog of dementia, Emile is aware of the irony of his life—“I kill a man and the world forgives me. I love a man and the world wants to kill me.?.

 During the course of the opera, Emile is played by three singers representing three stages of his life. The opera opens with old Emile in his Queens apartment, unable to remember where he put one of his shoes. Much of the opera is older Emile’s memories of his life. We see him as a young boy in the Virgin Islands and as the brash young man who leave his homeland for a career in New York. At times the three Emiles are in dialogue with each other. Old Emile watches as the young Emile lands the punches that will kill Benny Paret.

Composer Terence Blanchard has turned Emile’s story into a musically powerful grand opera complete with powerful arias and ensembles. Even the less sympathetic characters like Emile’s greedy mother and ambitious manager get arias that allow the audience to understand them. The high point of the score is Emile’s long, moving “What Makes a Man a Man” in which he muses on the “Outside, Inside” conflict between the masculinity he must project in the ring and his true feelings. 

 At the Lyric, Justin Austin was a perfect young Emile musically and dramatically. Austin has a gorgeous baritone voice, reflecting the beauty inside his character. He is a superb actor who captures all Emile’s brashness and confusion.  Reginald Smith, Jr is deeply moving as the. dementia-ridden older Emile, still haunted by his killing of Benny Paret. In his meeting with Benny’s grown son, the climax of the opera, Smith captures Emile’s regret, but also his love of young Luis, who tenderly cares for him. Benny Paret, Jr. tells him that he must forgive himself and, in the final moment, older Emile forgives younger Emile. Smith has a powerful, booming baritone voice. The large supporting cast couldn’t be better. Veteran tenor Paul Groves (the only member of the Met cast in the Chicago production), offers a convincing Howie, who uses Emile to fulfill his own ambition. Fine young tenor Martin Luther Clark brings out the love and kindness in Emile’s caregiver, Luis.  The women’s roles are less well-rounded, but Whitney Morrison does what she can with Emile’s self-serving mother, and Meredith Arwady has fun with Kathy Hagen, the doyenne of the gay nightclub Emile frequents. This is the one case in which the Chicago performer paled in comparison with her Met counterpart, the veteran Stephanie Blythe, who made her brief appearances as Kathy star turns.

 James Robinson’s powerful production (sets by Allen Moyer; costumes by Montana Levi Blanco) was the best overall piece of musical theatre the Lyric has presented in years, perhaps since the three-quarters of David Pountney’s Ring cycle we got before Covid (will we ever see the Götterdämmerung?). It was a fitting contrast to the drabness of some recent productions. 

Masculinity and sexual orientation are the major issues in Champion. Still, this is an opera about a Black boxer in the 1960s when Black boxers were controlled by white managers and promoters. When Emile walks into a gay club, he comes into a place owned by whites. In the pre-Stonewall era, Kathy Hagen would be a figurehead for the bar’s invisible Mafia-related owners. The men Young Emile finds attractive are white. 

 Thanks to beautiful music, a strong libretto, and a dynamic production, the Lyric’s Champion is the grandest and strongest thus far of what might be called queer operas.

---

^[1] Alex Ross, “The Decline of Opera Queens and the Rise of Gay Opera,” The New Yorker (July 27, 2017).

^[2] Michael Korie, libretto to Harvey Milk (booklet accompanying Teldec album)(Hamburg: Teldec Classics, 1997), 66. Further references to Harvey Milk are to this edition.

^[3] Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993), 46.

^[4] Ibid., 31.

^[5] David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 98.

^[6] Sam Abel, Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 62.

^[7] Abel, 66.

^[7] Harvey Milk was born in 1930. He would have been 15 in 1945.

^[8] The original production, which had its premiere at the Houston Opera and was subsequently mounted at the New York City Opera and, with revisions, at the San Francisco Opera, was directed by Christopher Alden with sets designed by Paul Steinberg. 

         As I cheered Daniel Radcliffe’s performance of “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” in Maria Friedman’s brilliant no-frills production of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, I thought about what made the performance work so effectively. I have seen Radcliffe on stage in a variety of roles. For all his film fame, he is a charismatic stage animal. His big number, “Franklin Shepard, Inc.”, is one of those Sondheim word-filled patter songs depicting a character having a meltdown. Charlie, Radcliffe’s character, goes on a tv interview show with his songwriting collaborator and best friend, Franklin, and delivers a musical tirade on how Franklin has given up his art and is now only interested in money. The song is anger channeled into humor. It is also cruel—a public shaming of his closest friend. That’s a lot to capture in a three-minute song—a challenge for any musical theatre actor. Radcliffe nailed it and did so without ever getting up out of the chair he was sitting on. Everything he did was about and for Sondheim’s words and music. The result was a well-deserved deafening, prolonged ovation. One must also acknowledge Jonathan Groff’s performance as Franklin who was sitting next to Charlie, supposedly on national television, during this musical tirade. Without moving a muscle, Groff made us aware that the temperature was dropping in that room—that his friendship with Charlie is over. It’s a strange thing to say about a musical production, but the great thing about this production of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG is its economy. There isn’t an unnecessary gesture. All the focus is on the characters and on Sondheim’s words and music. 

            The night before I watched Annaleigh Ashford ruin number after number in Thomas Kail’s revival of SWEENEY TODD by turning everything into schtick. Case in point: “A Little Priest,” the witty number that ends Act I. Mrs. Lovett has just thought up a way to dispose of the corpses Sweeney is driven to produce. They will become the meat in her meat pies. Sweeney’s delight in her ingenuity (and amorality) give him his only moment of joy in the entire show. He and she imagine the various types they will kill and cook (for instance “Shepherd’s pie peppered with genuine shepherd”). Sweeney sings: “The history of the world, my sweet, is who gets eaten and who gets to eat.” He and Mrs. Lovett are like naughty children thinking up a prank. Of course, the song is both funny and horrifying. Josh Groban (the best Sweeney I have ever seen or heard and I’ve seen and heard a bunch of them beginning with the first, Len Cariou), tried to stay in character, which was difficult with Ashford turning the song into a schtickfest. With all her clowning around and efforts to make Groban laugh, it was impossible to pay attention to the clever lyrics. Ashfrd doesn’t really have enough voice to sing Mrs. Lovett and didn’t seem much interested in projecting a character. She just wanted to. make the audience  (and, if possible, Groban) laugh. If Groban was the best Sweeney I have seen, Ashford was the worst Mrs. Lovett. My undergraduate. Mrs. Lovetts had more of a sense of character. Yes, many in the audience loved her antics, but they had little if anything to do with portraying a character or a situation. Mrs. Lovett has to get frightening in the second act. Ashford couldn’t because she had worked too hard at being a clown. 

            Thomas Kail’s production looked pretty much like every other large-scale SWEENEY TODD. The large orchestra allowed us to savor Jonathan Tunick’s inventive orchestrations. Unfortunately, the lovers Joanna and Anthony were mediocre singers. Anthony’s big ballad “Joanna” is not easy to sing and some of the scoring is quite brassy. Obviously Sondheim and Tunick expected Anthony to have a strong voice. This Anthony sounded like he was in a high school production. Still, after a series of small-scale productions, it was exciting to see this classic given the kind of large-scale production it deserves.

            The high point of the new Stephen Sondheim-David Ives play with songs, HERE WE ARE, comes when David Hyde Pierce, playing a bishop, sings a song about how he wishes he were in any other occupation. The song is the last of Sondheim’s great patter songs. Pierce, another fine performer who knows that less is more, allows us in the audience to savor Sondheim’s wit. Pierce is the master of the light touch. I would love to have seen him in a Noel Coward play. He doesn’t have to work hard to be funny. He lets Sondheim’s lyrics do most of the work.

            HERE WE ARE is an adaptation of two Luis Bunuel films. The first act, based on THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, gives us a group of wealthy people trying to find someplace to eat. No restaurant seems to have any food. Waiters are surly or suicidal. At one eatery, a corpse is laid out on a banquet table. Is he about to become a meal for the guests? In the second act, based on THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, the group is invited to dinner by a sexy South American diplomat but for some reason they cannot leave the room. David Ives, a master of surrealism, has written a consistently funny script. Sondheim finished much of the scoring for the first act but, past an opening number, the second act is without songs. Thanks to a superb cast, clever direction by Joe Mantello and brilliant sets by David Zinn, HERE WE ARE is a constant delight despite being unfinished musically.

            With three productions running and SWEENEY TODD and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG breaking box office records, Stephen Sondheim’s day has come. The audiences at all three shows had a large percentage of under 30s. They were listening attentively and relishing the witty lyrics and beautiful tunes. Sondheim’s irony and bittersweet vision of human relationships seems more timely now that when his shows were first produced. And finally, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG has gotten a production that shows its richness.

Todd Haynes’ POISON, based on the relationship of notorious murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, is one of the classics of the period of “New Gay Cinema.” Since that time, Haynes has made a series of films focusing on female characters, that look back to the style of studio-era “women’s pictures,” particularly the glossy films Universal International produced in the 1950s and 1960s. Major actresses like Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett have been his leading ladies. 

Haynes’ films place women outside of their bourgeoise society, In Haynes’s FAR FROM HEAVEN, Julianne Moore plays Carol, an affluent, suburban 1950s housewives who gets caught up in the changes that are beginning to shake her complacent society. She discovers that her husband is gay, and she falls in love with Raymond, their Black gardener. Her relationship with Raymond ruins his business and her social standing. In CAROL, based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, THE PRICE OF SALT, the leading character is another affluent suburban housewife who happens to love women, particularly a young department store salesgirl. CAROL is also set in the 1950s.

MAY DECEMBER (now streaming on Netflix) is based on a famous incident that was fodder for the tabloid press and trash television. Thirty-four year old Mary Kay Letourneau, married and a mother of four, was caught having sex in a parked car with her twelve-year old middle-school student, Vili Fublaau. To make matters more scandalous, she was pregnant with Vili’s child. Letourneau was arrested for statutory rape.  After violating her parole by having sex again with Vili and becoming pregnant again, Letourneau was sent back to jail. When she finished her sentence, she and Vili married. They were divorced after fifteen years of marriage. 

Haynes’ film (screenplay by Samy Burch) does not show the infamous affair between the teacher and her young student. Instead it focuses on the couple twenty-three years later. Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), lives in a lovely house in Savannah (paid for in part by tabloid and television interviews), with her husband Joe Yoo, who is now at thirty-six the age Gracie was when she first had her affair with him in the back room of a pet store where they were both part-time workers. Joe (Charles Melton), is a radiology technician at a local hospital. Daughter Honor, born in prison, is now in college; twins Charles and Mary are about to graduate from high school. Joe is painfully aware that the imminent empty next will make changes in their relationship.

Gracie is a complicated character, to put it mildly. “I am naïve,” she says, “I have always been naïve. I think it’s a gift.” Later she asserts that she is “secure.” Her version of what happened between her and Joe is that he seduced her when he was thirteen and she was thirty-six. What we see of their dynamic suggests otherwise. In their first interaction, Gracie chides Joe for having a second beer. Later, in bed, she complains that he “smells of smoke” when he gets in bed after cooking on a gas grill. Gracie treats Joe like a child, but there are moments when he has to be parent to her inner child. Gracie is proud of being “secure” and in control, but she has moments of crisis that Joe has to deal with. We see Joe come into the house and hear Gracie crying upstairs. He curses quietly before he goes upstairs to calm her down. Joe adores his children who aren’t too fond of Gracie who seems indifferent to their son and cruel to their daughters (she gave one a bathroom scale as a high school graduation present). Her famous past has also had a negative effect on the children of her first marriage, particularly Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), who was a schoolmate of Joe’s when the affair took place.  

Enter another catalyst to crisis, actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman). Best known for her work in a sexy television series, Elizabeth is in town to do research for a film in which she will play a fictionalized version of Gracie. Elizabeth admits to a group of high school students that she sometimes loses track of the “lines” she is not supposed to cross. Elizabeth’s “research” is sometimes downright creepy. She has Gracie teach her how to bake cakes (Gracie’s side job), and to apply makeup. When she sees the area of the storeroom of the pet shop where Gracie had sex with young Joe, she imagines herself having sex with Joe. Later, she seduces Joe into sex with her. In the most bizarre scene, we see Elizabeth tearfully recites a letter Gracie sent Joe during their affair. “I’ve lost track of what the line is”[that she shouldn’t cross in her behavior with a student]. “Whoever draws these lines?” Is Elizabeth in tears because she too has crossed the line?

Elizabeth’s entry into the Atherton-Yoo family affects everyone. The children do not want more humiliating publicity. Gracie tries to keep on the mask of ideal wife and mother, but the cracks are constantly revealed. Elizabeth’s visit and the impending empty nest and forthcoming film make Joe see that he and Gracie have avoided facing the truth of their past. When after sex, Elizabeth calls what Joe has lived through “a story,” Joe screams, “This isn’t a story. This is my fucking life.” Deep down, Joe seems to know that much of his relationship to Gracie has been a performance: “If we really are as in love as we say we are, shouldn’t we be able to talk about this.” Focusing on the performance made it possible to avoid the big questions that have now bubbled to the surface: “What if I wasn’t ready to make these decisions? What if I was too young?” Gracie is fixed in her rationalizations of her past behavior: “I don’t care how old you were. You were in charge.”

There have been signs that Joe wants to escape. He texts back and forth with a woman who, like him, raises monarch butterflies as a hobby. At one point he suggests that they get together, but she reminds him that he is married. At his twins’ high school graduation, he is not with Gracie, but standing on the other side of a fence. Is he going to move on with his life? The symbolism of the monarch butterfly emerging may lack subtlety, but it is as fitting metaphor for Joe’s development.

Charles Melton’s performance as Joe is one of the great strengths of this fine film. He captures the sense that Joe has never fully grown up but is still a thirteen-year-old boy shouldering adult responsibilities. He seems lonely and sad. In his most revealing scene, he is on the roof with his son and smokes pot for the first time in his life. Rather than lead to euphoria, the pot leads to profound sadness as he tearfully tells his son that bad things can happen to kids. When his son says, “You don’t have to worry about me, Joe responds, “That’s all I do.” Of course, he would be worried about the dangers for a teenage boy. He lived a terrible adolescence as the co-star of a sensational sex scandal. One critic compared to Melton’s performance to that of Marlon Brando in ON THE WATERFRONT. I think it’s far more subtle and nuanced. Melton should get an Oscar for this performance.

What a meaty role Julianne Moore has, and she makes the most of the opportunities it gives her as an actress. Gracie is, first and foremost, an actress, trying to maintain an idealized version of herself. The mask slips, however, and we see why her children can refer to her as a monster. Hayne’s brilliant direction underscores the film’s emphasis on performance. In one scene, Elizabeth has accompanied Gracie and daughter Mary to buy a dress for Mary’s graduation. As Mary tries on dresses, we see Gracie in the center of the screen talking to Elizabeth and Mary and, on the right, Gracie reflected in a mirror. Two Gracies underscoring the difference between the manufactured image and the reality. Gracie blithely tells her daughter who has tried on a sleeveless dress, that she admires Mary’s status as a modern woman who is not ashamed to show her fat arms. Mary, used to such humiliation from her mother, cheerfully says that she’ll try another dress. Another performance. 

In the film’s final moments, we see the shooting of the scene when the film versions of Gracie and Joe are about to have sex. Elizabeth fondles a snake (Eve?), while seductively telling a conventionally handsome and obviously older than thirteen Joe that the snake isn’t dangerous. It’s a funny parody of the much more emotionally complex moment that Gracie and Joe experienced. We’re seeing Elizabeth projecting herself onto Gracie. The real story that is the substance of the film, is much more complex and disturbing. MAY DECEMBER is one of the best films of last year.

            I thought of the great films of Luis Bunuel as I watched Andrew Haigh’s unsettling and profoundly moving film ALL OF US STRANGERS, now playing at some Chicago theatres. Bunuel had the ability to blur the line between reality and dream. Watching ALL OF US STRANGERS is like experiencing a dream. 

            The setting is London, but it is only seen through Adam, the central character’s, window. Even then, the light seems supernatural, fitting for a film about ghosts of a sort—ghosts we conjure up. Adam is a screenwriter in his mid-forties who is supposedly one of only two residents in a high-rise apartment building. Is the building realty empty or is Adam, in his solipsism, oblivious to everyone else? We never seen him get beyond the first line of his screenplay, which is to be based on his suburban childhood. Instead, in states of writer’s block and depression, he lies on his sofa, eats, naps, and looks through mementos of his past. To get the creative juices flowing, Adam takes a trip back to his home town. He wanders out onto the heath and sees a man who turns and smiles at him. Is this the overture to some sort of sexual encounter (London heaths are sexually charged place, particularly for gay men.)? Later, Andrew and the man meet up outside of a liquor store. The man, it turns out is Adam’s father. Adam follows him back to his childhood home and reunites with his mother. Oddly, both parents are younger than Andrew and dressed like they belong in the 1980s. We also know that Andrew’s parents died in a car crash when Andrew was a boy. Clearly Andrew has entered an imagined time warp.

            At first, the communication between Andrew and his parents is a bit guarded. The parents seem more surprised to see Andrew than he is at seeing them. As Andrew seems to travel back and forth from London to his suburban home, from present to a merging of past and present, the visits get more affectionate, more intense. In one scene, forty-something Andrew, in a pair of red kid’s pajamas, asks to get in bed with his parents like a scared child in the middle of the night. Moments like this could be silly, but Andrew Scott and Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, who play his parents, act the moment with such conviction that we accept its emotional power as we question its reality. The film makes us accept that things can be emotionally real without being literally real. Tellingly, Adam asks his mother, “Is it real?” to which she responds, “Does it feel real?” Everything in the film feels real.

            Through imagination or dream, Andrew is given the opportunity to talk to his parents about the life he has lived since their death. Like a 1980s mother who has been told that her son is gay, she worries about AIDS and the fact that he will never have a happy domestic life. “Things are different now,” he responds. But Andrew is alone and not particularly happy. He also suffers from nightmares.

            Andrew’s other crucial encounter is with Harry, seemingly the only other inhabitant of the building. Harry, drunk, knocks on Adam’s door and offers drink and sex, which Adam politely turns down. Later Adam does invite Harry to his apartment, and they quickly establish a real intimacy. Harry is sweet, lost, and a bit mysterious. Adam is a sexual novice and shy about showing his body, but Harry introduces him to true physical and emotional closeness with another person. 

In 2011, Haigh made WEEKEND about two men who meet on a Friday night and quickly establish a powerful connection. Andrew and Harry make the same sort of connection. Under Haigh’s direction, Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal capture the intensity of the bond that develops.  

            SPOILER ALERT. The ending is bittersweet. Having said farewell to his parents, a closure he has needed since childhood, Adam goes into Harry’s apartment and discovers that the young man drank himself to death the night Adam did not welcome him into his apartment. Yet there is a living Harry standing in the kitchen. At the end, Adam is in bed with Harry. “Is it real?” “Does it feel real?” Can Adam transfer that love to a real human being?

            ALL OF US STRANGERS is filled with visual imagery. Mirrors play a crucial role. We often see Harry reflected in a mirror or through a window. Most of the film is indoors in confined spaces.    

            Andrew Scott has for a couple of decades been one of England’s and Ireland’s best stage and screen actors. He has the amazing ability to be funny and anguished at the same time. Few actor’s faces are as expressive as his. I can’t think of another actor who could capture the wide emotional range that the role of Adam demands. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are touching as Adam’s parents. Paul Mescal has a tricky role as a man who is deeply wounded but capable of love and joy. He and Scott make a great team. 

            At the end of the film, we hear Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s classic song, “The Power of Love.” The song celebrates romantic/sexual love. ALL OF US STRANGERS extends the meaning to the love of parents—even parents that have been gone for decades—as well as the love of a partner. It reminds us that we have to deal with our feelings for our parents before we can truly love someone else. This film will haunt you for a long time.

            There are no phantasms in Dan Levy’s Good Grief now streaming on Netflix. In fact, the film looks very much like a typical romantic comedy. The London and Paris settings are beautiful and opulent. The leading character is affluent enough to take his best friends to Paris. The leading character meets a handsome Frenchman who is immediately attracted to him. Levy takes the trappings of romcoms and gives them a different emphasis. Good Grief is about grief, of course, but it is more about the stresses and strains of adult friendships for a single gay man.

            The film begins with Marc and Oliver’s Christmas party at their beautiful Kensington home. The couple, who seem to be totally in love, have been together for fifteen years. Oliver is a best-selling writer of children’s books which have been successful enough to be turned into hit movies. Marc was an artist, but has devoted his career to illustrating Oliver’s book and helping to manage his career. Oliver had to make an early exit from their party because of an upcoming book signing in Paris. The cab he leaves in has a fatal accident.

            Marc’s best friends, Sophie (Ruth Negga) and Oliver (Himesh Patel) spend the next year helping Marc through overwhelming grief. Oliver and Marc were lovers briefly before Marc met Oliver, but have remained close friends. Marc still seems to be in love with Oliver. Sophie is ebullient, but feckless. She keeps sabotaging her relationship with boyfriend Sebastian because “it’s too safe.” At the end of a year of grief, Marc discovers that Oliver was going to take time off from their relationship to deal with his feelings for someone else and that Oliver had leased an apartment in Paris to meet with his new lover. Before the lease runs out of the apartment, Marc takes his friends to stay for a few days in the lavish apartment.

            The Paris weekend leads to many moments of truth for the three friends, whose relationships are altered by the experience. Marc gets to confront Oliver’s young lover and to spend a romantic evening with handsome Theo. If the friends are not as close after the weekend, Marc at least is able to start his life over.

            Grief makes one solipsistic and there are moments when Marc’s lamenting become tiresome. Still, Good Grief offers an interesting picture of a man who has to deal not only with the loss of his husband, but also with the loss of illusions about his marriage. At the end, he is able to turn his grief and his feelings about his friends into art.

            Dan Levy is producer, writer, director and star of his films, making him a kind of young Woody Allen. The script is too talky at times, but Levy’s immense charm as a performer keeps the film light. Ruth Negga’s hyper Sophie and Himesh Patel’s sometimes lugubrious Thomas are excellent foils for Levy. This is his first feature film as writer/director. It’s an impressive debut.

 In its three incarnations as novel, opera, and television series, Fellow Travelers is the story of a previous generation of gay men, before gay liberation. It’s the story of men surviving in a society where they are constantly under threat of losing jobs, families—even freedom. The repressive society of Fellow Travelers is one some elements in our society would like to bring back.

Thomas Mallon’s 358-page novel Fellow Travelers (2007), is the story of a gay relationship told against the background of Washington political machinations during the McCarthy era, particularly the wholesale purge of suspected homosexuals from the State Department and other branches of government. Historian Genny Beemyn writes, “With the appointment of Scott McLeod, a former FBI agent and an ally of Senate conservatives, to lead the State Department’s Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, in 1953, the purges were pursued with even more vigor. From 1951 to 1953, the department dismissed a suspected gay person at the rate of one every three days but from January to mid-September, 1953 [the year Timothy and Hawk begin their relationship], the average was one person every other day.”^[i] Any relationship between government employees at this time was fraught with peril.   

The on-again, off-again affair between Hawkins Fuller, an aristocratic, Harvard-educated functionary in the State Department, and Timothy Laughlin, an Irish working-class Fordham graduate, is decidedly one-sided. Though handsome, charming and masterful at seduction, Fuller has the selfishness and arrogance of the rich and entitled. He wants to fit in to the class and profession has been raised to be in, but he also wants sex with men, which is taboo. Laughlin, seven years Fuller’s junior, transfers his previous Catholic religious fervor to idolatrous worship of Fuller. He is too naïve to see that the loving relationship he wants to have with Hawk is impossible in their world. 

Shortly after their first meeting in Dupont Circle, once a gay cruising ground, Hawk arranges for Tim to have the job he wants as a speechwriter for a Republican senator Not long after that he shows up at Tim’s tiny apartment and gives him his first taste of sex. “Who owns you?” Fuller asks Timothy during their first night in bed. From that moment, the younger man surrenders his life to his love for a feckless man he fell in love with literally at first sight. Hawkins and Fuller are surrounded by a large cast of well-drawn historical and fictional characters, the most important of which is Mary, a young co-worker of Fuller’s from New Orleans who becomes a friend to both men. Mary faces her own romantic problems. 

            While Hawkins and Timothy are fictional characters, they are surrounded by historical personages. The novel contains detailed scenes of Washington politics during the McCarthy era. The most important historical character in the novel is Senator Joseph McCarthy: his henchman Roy Cohn is unseen but often discussed. These two dark figures in American history were closeted homosexuals perpetrating one of America’s most notorious witch hunts. While rooting out communists was their primary goal, they also worked to purge the government of “security risks”—homosexuals. Hawkins’ and Tim’s relationship begins on the day McCarthy marries one of his secretaries, perhaps to silence Washington rumors about his secret encounters with men and ends on the day of his funeral. As the young men pursue their affair, other men in government are being fired. After being reported by a jealous secretary, Hawkins is investigated but is clever or amoral enough to pass a lie detector test. 

McCarthy and Cohn are bizarre examples of the ways in which the closet operated in the 1950s. Everyone in Mallon’s version of Republican congressional offices jokes about Roy Cohn’s predilection for men but the ruthless young New York lawyer is still feared. McCarthy can be laughed at by the Washington elite but he survived—temporarily—because he knew so many secrets about his enemies. The Washington of Mallon’s novel is one of information peddling. Power comes from knowing others’ secrets and homosexuality is the most dangerous of secrets. Timothy is shocked when a power broker shares an intimate secret about his boss, Senator Charles Potter. Clearly Timothy will always be an endangered species in this world. Unlike his lover, he would never be able to bluff his way through a lie detector test.  

            Tim enlists in the army to try to cure himself of his obsession with Hawk, but two years later, he is back in Washington and having sex with Hawk in a love nest the now married Hawk has established to be able to continue his liaisons with men. Hawk has promised to help Tim find a government job that will allow him to work on his new cause, refugees from the Soviet takeover of Hungary but Hawk, feeling trapped by the demands of his double life, tells the State Department officer in charge of purging homosexuals that Tim is a security risk. The two men say goodbye on the day of McCarthy’s funeral. 

Mallon has surrounded Hawk and Tim’s story with a lot of detail about McCarthy era political machinations. Tim and Hawk’s romance is constantly endangered by the wholesale purging of homosexuals from government positions. Tim, ironically, is an admirer of Joe McCarthy’s anti-communism, though he becomes skeptical about his tactics. He begins as a devout Catholic, but cannot accept that his love for Hawk is sinful. One could say that he moves from faith to idolatry in his obsessive love for Hawk. During their first night of sex, Hawk asks Tim, “Who owns you?” Tim never gets over his love for Hawk.  

FELLOW TRAVELERS AS AN OPERA

In 2016, the operatic version of Fellow Travelers began its successful journey around American opera houses. Librettist Greg Pierce had the challenge of condensing a novel dense with historical detail into the two-hour chamber opera he created with composer Gregory Spears. The work, with only nine singers, some cast in multiple roles, and a small orchestra, is much more intimate, much more intensely focused on its central characters, than the novel. The libretto is a masterpiece of condensation. It begins with Hawkins Fuller speaking with Timothy after McCarthy’s wedding and ends with their final farewell on the same Dupont Circle park bench. The work is more sympathetic to Hawk, changing him from a feckless survivor to a man who is deeply conflicted.

            Mallon’s novel takes hundreds of pages to explore the dynamics of Hawk’s and Timothy’s relationship. Pearce encapsulates that relationship in a duet they have the first time they go to bed together, “Bermuda,” a lilting waltz. Hawkins suggests that they should go to Bermuda together but the lines they sing demonstrate their different initial attitudes toward their potential relationship. For Hawkins, Bermuda represents erotic license:

It’s a great big world.

Aw, you’d love it down there.

Bronze boys on the beach—

Biceps you wouldn’t believe.

Nights, a palm tree grove, I’ll show you.

You never know what might come your way.

You and me and the boys.

Paradise. ^[ii]

Hawk wants to introduce Tim to his world of sexual exploration of beautiful men in tropical palm groves. He doesn’t see such a trip as a monogamous tryst. “Skippy”, as he calls Tim, his conquest and protégé, has a more romantic vision:

Just you and me and the moon.

And the shells.

My head on your arm at the end of the day.

Paradise (26).

By the end of the duet, their voices are in unison. Hawk comes to feel more of the closeness Timothy is feeling. Yet after the duet, we hear ominous low brass. The dissonance of the ensuing orchestral interlude suggests that their relationship will not be as idyllic as the duet suggests. Hawk will always be torn between his powerful feelings for his “Irish tiger cub,” and his wish for freedom and safety.

            Much of Mallon’s novel is devoted to the relationship of Timothy’s total devotion to Hawk and his conflicted sense of his Catholicism, a religion that has no place for homosexual love. Since his love for Hawk reaches the level of worship, church has meaning for him only when he can temporarily renounce Hawk. Pierce distills Timothy’s conflict into his only formal aria in the opera, a poetic rendering of a moment in Mallon’s novel when Timothy thinks:

How many mortal sins had he committed last night? Did each separate act he and Hawkins performed constitute an individual transgression or was their entire three hours together . . . . a single offense? It didn’t matter, because either way, he, Timothy Patrick Laughlin, was dead. Mortal sin, said the catechism, kills the life of grace in our souls. That is why a sacrament of penance is called a sacrament of the dead. And one could not perform penance without making a confession, any more than one could make a confession without perfect contrition—which he did not feel.”^[iii]  

Timothy knows his experience with Hawk doesn’t fit into the framework of his Catholicism because he feels no need to be cleansed; for, “he had never felt so pure as he had last night” (Mallon, 72). Pearce turns this prose into poetry. After his first night with Hawk, Timothy goes into a church and remembers all the kisses, the sins he committed with Hawk “last night.” Instead of a prayer of confession or an act of contrition, he thanks God: “Thank you Holy Father for sending him last night./ Last night I died./Last night” (29).

            Timothy’s repeated “I died” in the aria is not merely the death of the soul Mallon’s Timothy remembers from Catholic doctrine. Timothy’s “death” relates as well to the traditional metaphor of the orgasm as a “little death.” Timothy looks forward to more such deaths even if Hawk’s embrace, “his arms, iron bars across my chest” (28), is welcome restraint as much as it is freedom. Timothy’s first night with Hawk is a kind of religious conversion, the old Tim dying, a new one born, totally devoted to Hawkins Fuller. “Last Night” is the longest, most passionate aria in the opera, becoming more ecstatic as it progresses. The phrase “Last night” soars higher as it is repeated. The other phrase that is repeated often is “How many.” Twenty-one of the fifty-one lines of text for the aria contain twenty-one questions beginning with “How.” 

How many more nights in his arms?

How many more mornings?

How many whispers?

How many sins last night? 

How soon can I see him again?

How many more nights? (27).

Even in church, Timothy cannot be penitent. He can only wonder at his experience with Hawk and wish for more. There is an obsessive quality to Timothy’s verbal and musical repetitions reflecting his total surrender to Hawk: “How did he know that I am his?” (27).

 Fellow Travelers works so successfully as an opera because Timothy’s love is so operatic, so obsessive, so total. He’s a gay male version of Puccini’s self-sacrificing heroines. It is fitting that he is given such a powerful aria to express his passion. When Hawk finally ends their on again, off again affair by reporting Tim as a security risk, an act of professional and personal betrayal, Timothy’s sense of self is erased, “I feel like I never existed” (59). While the novel fills the reader in on what happens to Timothy after the final break with Hawk, the opera leaves him in Dupont Circle, about to leave Washington for good. 

As in the novel, Hawk’s and Timothy’s romance is set against a society of snooping. Tommy McIntyre, whom Tim meets in his first visit to Senator Potter’s office, describes himself as a man who “likes to keep tabs on things . . . . Better be the first one to know.” It is Tommy who tells Tim about Potter’s secret illegitimate son. He also figures out Tim’s relationship with Hawk, another piece of information that might become useful later on. Miss Lightfoot, a secretary in Hawk’s office reads the inscription in the book Tim has left for Hawk (a thank-you gift for getting Tim the job in Potter’s office). She also reports Hawk to the investigators after overhearing a comment he makes at a party. Joe McCarthy boasts that he has files on everybody. Even Hawk, on his first visit to Tim’s apartment, looks through his shelves and reads a letter Tim has written to his sister. 

            The world we see in the scenes in the Senate offices, the world of McCarthy and his minions, of people who use secrets as keys to power, does not allow for the kind of love Timothy demands. Hawk, who manages somehow to pass an interrogation and lie detector test, who makes a “good marriage” to a well-connected woman, will always “pass” as straight. He will survive in the world of politics. While Hawk does not seem to have any political convictions, Tim, an ardent anti-communist, is a supporter of McCarthy’s anti-Communist investigations. 

            Composer Gregory Spears has set Tim’s lyric tenor voice against the baritones and basses who “fit” in the world of politics, the world of masculine power. His higher voice makes him an outsider.^[iv] Moreover, his more straightforward, melodic lyric lines contrast to the more staccato lines given to the men. Timothy’s vocal line captures his occasional stuttering, as when he first arrives at Hawk’s office. It also captures his excitement when he first meets Senator Potter. In his scenes with Hawk, Tim’s more forthright vocal line is a contrast to Hawk’s more ornamented lines suggesting his more flighty, seductive nature and, in his last aria, his upset and confusion. In his one appearance, McCarthy is given rapid, staccato song-speech while the orchestra keeps a tense, insistent pulse as it does through all the scenes involving political machinations.

In Mallon’s novel, Mary’s story is much more important, a picture of the personal and professional possibilities for a young woman in this political milieu. In the opera, Mary’s story is simplified; her primary role is as moral center and intermediary between Hawk and Timothy—she judges Hawk’s behavior toward Timothy and tries to soften the blows after Hawk’s betrayals. The only other women are Miss Lightfoot, another worker in Hawk’s office who, after overhearing Hawk’s comments about “my Irish tiger cub” at a party, reports Hawk to the investigators, and, briefly, Lucy, who becomes Hawk’s wife. 

            In a cinematic style, Pierce and Spears juxtapose two related scenes at crucial moments in the opera. As Timothy buys a book for Hawk as a thank you for getting him a position in Senator Potter’s office, Mary and Miss Lightfoot, in Hawk’s office, sing about the firing of a suspected homosexual. This juxtaposition underscores the dangers to which Timothy seems oblivious. The final scene in Act I^[v] begins in Mary’s kitchen where she tells Timothy that she is pregnant and is thinking of aborting the baby. “But that’s a sin,” Timothy quickly responds, oblivious to the irony implicit in his judgment (44). Mary begins an aria, not about her situation, but as a warning to Timothy about Hawk. She feels drawn to Timothy and doesn’t want to see him become another one of Hawk’s castoffs, “become one of those people and patterns” (45). As she repeats her warning, Hawk, knowing that it will end their relationship, tells Tim that he wants to add another man to their bed. The moment turns into an ensemble between Mary speaking to Tim in her kitchen and Tim and Hawk in his apartment. 

            Mary’s aria is in a condensed cavatina-cabaletta form. In the lyrical section, she describes how she, too, saw Hawk as “wonderful.” As she talks about the “people and patterns” in Hawk’s sexual adventures, her vocal line becomes more like a coloratura cabaletta, reflecting Hawk’s flightiness, his irresponsibility.

            There are at times flashbacks embedded in scenes as well as multiple scenes occurring simultaneously. When Hawk asks Mary to tell Timothy of his betrayal, the audience is given a flashback of Hawk telling the investigator that Timothy is a security risk. Hawk continues to talk to Mary as she goes to Tim’s apartment to tell him of Hawk’s betrayal.  

            Hawk’s one aria comes at the moment he decides to break off with Timothy once and for all. Two years after their first breakup, Hawk and Tim have gotten back together. Now married to a well-connected wife, Hawk has rented a turret room in an old house as a kind of love nest for his and Timothy’s trysts. Timothy is oblivious to anything but his love for Hawk. He doesn’t even mind the fact that by this time in the narrative, Hawk is married. In Mallon’s novel, Hawk quickly feels trapped between a heterosexual marriage that is a necessary arrangement and Timothy’s wish for domestic bliss: 

Skippy would be a grim safe harbor, one that would trap him in a domesticity even danker than the one across the river in Alexandria. The thrill of protectiveness and ravishment would be long gone, replaced by a cup of coffee and a slice of cake and an ongoing obligation to fuck the good little aging boy who had “given up everything”—the nelly clerks would start to tell him—for Hawkins Fuller” (Mallon, 319-20) .

Mallon’s Hawkins fears feeling trapped in two unhappy marriages. He wants the freedom to roam sexually. This is what he has for the rest of his life—a cool marriage with children and grandchildren and trysts with young men, sometimes leading to blackmail which, thanks to his wife’s money, he can afford to pay. Pierce’s Hawkins is more sympathetic, more worthy of the love Tim feels for him, than Mallon’s but he’s a man of his age who cannot conceive of an enduring loving relationship with a man. Nor can he accept that he’s “one of those”: “Squeals and aprons,/Dangling spatulas” (54). To him, gay men are effeminate. Neither he nor Timothy are “that”, so they can’t really be gay. All that is possible is an occasional, transitory connection: “That’s what we get” (55). That’s all their world allows. Hawks aria, which seldom rises above the low register of a baritone voice, is full of melisma suggesting his anguish at the decision he must make. There’s an orchestral climax after, “That’s what we get,” then a brief silence before he sings unaccompanied, “For an hour/Just for an hour” (55). Yet there is no question in the opera that Hawk feels deeply for Timothy. At their final parting, after Tim says, “I feel like I never existed,” Hawk sings his most passionate outburst in the opera, “You did, Skippy. You did. You and me both” (59).   

            At the end of Kevin Newbury’s production, during a poignant orchestral postlude, Timothy gets up from the park bench, picks up his suitcase and starts moving upstage. The rear wall fills with projections of the many gays and lesbians who were purged out of government during the Cold War. The moment presents Tim as one of many victims. He hasn’t been publicly exposed, imprisoned or driven to suicide like other victims we hear about during the opera. He can start over. In Mallon’s novel, Timothy never gets over his love for Hawk, while Hawk is content with a double life. 

Fellow Travelers is dramatically powerful because Timothy and Hawk’s relationship—the conflict between the young man’s steadfastness and the older man’s confusion—is so well drawn dramatically and musically. As in the novel, Timothy, consumed by love, cannot fit into the world of power politics. Nor is he willing to act the role of a heterosexual by participating in a marriage of convenience: “What’s the point?” he sings. Yet is there a place outside of the closet for men of his time?^[vi]

AND FELLOW TRAVELERS, THE SERIES

            This Fall, Fellow Travelers, morphed from a 358 page novel and a two-hour opera into an eight hour series (available on Showtime and Paramount +). The series, created and mostly written by Ron Nyswaner, who wrote the screenplay for the AIDS-era film, Philadelphia. The series moves way beyond Thomas Mallon’s novel in following the relationship of Hawk and Tim until Tim’s death of AIDS in the mid-1980s. Though they break up after Hawk’s betrayal of Tim in the 1950s, the two men keep coming back into each other’s lives and breaking up. 

            In the 1960s, Tim becomes associated with anti-war demonstrations organized by a radical priest modeled on Daniel Berrigan, Hawk hides this fugitive from justice in a cabin on his country property. Idealistic Tim comes to realize that, despite Hawk’s resistance,  he has to turn himself in and go to prison for his beliefs. A decade later, Tim goes to Fire Island to try to rescue Hawk who has descended into alcoholism and drug addiction after the suicide of his son. The shock of Tim cutting off their relationship once and for all, shocks Hawk back into his responsibilities. Finally, in the mid-1980s, when Hawk hears that Tim is suffering from HIV-related infections, he goes to San Francisco to take care of his former lover. Tim, always the radical, becomes a militant AIDS activist. 

            This Tim is very different from the one envisioned by Thomas Mallon. One of the characters in the novel says that Tim, “looks like a lovesick Donald O’Connor in Call Me Madam. Ryswaner’s Tim moves from thralldom to Hawk to fierce independence and political commitment. He seems stronger than Hawk, who is always terrified of full commitment to anyone or anything. It is only after Tim’s death that Hawk can come out of the closet and admit his deep love. 

            The series is filled with graphic sex scenes that define the changing dynamic of Hawk’s and Tim’s relationship. For Nyswaner, the change in sexual dynamic is a crucial part of Hawk’s and Tim’s relationship. At the beginning, there is a sado-masochistic quality to their sexual encounters. Hawk is always exercising master over Tim, who is turned on by his submissive role. As Hawk falls in love with Tim, he becomes willing to be the submissive partner. 

            Hawk’s wife Lucy is barely a character in the novel, but Nyswaner has expanded her role. Unfortunately, her scenes as the betrayed wife of a gay man who is in love with someone else have been played many times before. Lucy’s two scenes with Tim are typical wife-mistress confrontations. “This isn’t a contest,” Tim says to her when she visits him in the hospital. “Yes, it is,” she responds, but she knows she has lost. Ultimately Hawk, really the weaker partner, cannot make up his mind—his wife and lover have to do the deciding for him. Hawk’s and Tim’s friend Mary becomes in the series a lesbian who is forced to renounce her lover in order to keep her job.

            Nyswaner has added a parallel romance. Marcus Hooks, like Hawk, is a closeted gay man, more concerned with his position as a Black man in a racist society than he is with gay politics. He falls in love with Frankie, a drag queen. It takes Marcus a long time to have the courage to move to San Francisco to be with Frankie. Like Tim, Frankie is the politically committed one. 

            Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey make the viewer believe totally in Hawk’s and Tim’s turbulent relationship. Bomer has always been a problematic actor. He is one of the handsomest leading men, but also has been too bland to carry leading roles. Here he comes into his own, particularly in the later scenes when he faces real crises. Bailey is too good-looking to be the Donald O’Connorish Tim of the novel, but the Tim of the series is a different beast altogether, constantly growing in confidence and resolve. Even dying of AIDS, he refuses to be a victim. The series gives both men great acting opportunities, and they take full advantage of them. They play off. Of each other brilliantly. Without their clothes on, they both look like gym-buffed twenty-first century gay men. I doubt that men in the 1950s had such six-packs. 

            I found the series moving and totally engaging. I didn’t want to believe Mallon’s version of Tim—a man who basic lives a totally limited life after Hawk betrays him. Tim deserved more development than Mallon gave him. Nyswaner’s version of Hawk Fuller finally grows up and comes out—a more positive ending, if not a totally convincing one.

---

^[i] Genny Beemyn, A Queer Capital: The History of Gay Life in Washington, D.C. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 155.

^[ii] Greg Pierce, libretto to Fellow Travelers contained in booklet accompanying the Cincinnati Opera recording. (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Opera, 2017), 26. Further references to Fellow Travelers are to this edition.

^[iii] Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers (New York: Penguin Random House, 2008), 71-2. Further references to the novel Fellow Travelers are to this edition.

^[iv] Mallon’s novel mentions that Tim has an Irish tenor voice and is a good singer.

^[v] In the original production in Cincinnati and on the recording, Act I ends with the scene in which Hawk gives Timothy his initialed cufflinks. As is typical of the mixed messages he often gives, Hawk ends the scene by telling Tim of a clarinet player he has had sex with. In a later Chicago production, Act I ended later with this first parting of Hawk and Timothy.

^[vi] In the novel, Tim moves to Providence and works as a bookseller until he dies of bone cancer at age 59. He never has another relationship after Hawk. 

When I first started working at a certain Southern institution of learning in the mid-1960s, there was a traditional Spring ceremony called “The Order of the Chair.” The chair was a toilet placed on the main quadrangle in front of the chapel. There on a warm Spring day, members would be inducted into the order as a recognition of some particularly disgusting act they performed at some fraternity party or other public event. These acts involved vomit or other body fluids or some virtuosic act of public sex. The Order of the Chair didn’t last into the politically active late 1960s. Indeed, the young woman who seemed most actively involved in the ceremony morphed into one of the leading campus firebrands. The order of the chair was intended to elicit laughter through its tastelessness and shock value. 

I thought about the Order of the Chair as I watched Sarah Fillinger’s farce POTUS: OR, BEHIND EVERY GREAT DUMBASS ARE SEVEN WOMEN TRYING TO KEEP HIM ALIVE at Steppenwolf. Fillinger was twenty-eight when she wrote the play. Unlike most plays, POTUS moved to Broadway without the usual tryout period in a regional theatre or Off-Broadway. The producers had such faith in the play’s commercial potential that they moved it into the 1400 seat Shubert, which is usually the home of musicals. Susan Stroman, best known for musicals like THE PRODUCERS, directed a cast including veteran comediennes Julie White, Rachel Dratch, Lea DeLaria, and Vanessa Williams. Despite this star power, POTUS lasted only 121 performances.

 Why did Steppenwolf choose this Broadway flop? Perhaps the powers that be wisely saw an audience hunger for comedy in our terrifying times. Perhaps someone thought POTUS was good political satire. What bombs in New York doesn’t necessarily bomb in Chicago. POTUS has been a hit for the financially troubled theatre. 

In my six years of Chicago theatregoing, I have come to understand Steppenwolf’s style. Subtlety and elegant wit are out: they prefer the bludgeon to the rapier, shouting to rational dialogue. We certainly see this in their production of Selina Fillinger’s POTUS: Or, Behind Every Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive (running through December 17). Actually, the title is a misnomer since the seven women almost manage to kill the president. If Fillinger’s thesis is that idiot males need bright, competent women in order to function, her play suggests otherwise. These seven foulmouthed women are incapable of constructive action.

We never see the president, an adulterous idiot with peculiar sexual tastes. We only see the women in his circle: his not-so-loving wife, his pregnant young mistress, his drug-dealing sister, his chief of staff, and his personal secretary. Also in the mix is an ambitious journalist who spends much of her time pumping large quantities of breast milk. As the detail suggests, Potus is full of tasteless anatomical jokes. The play is a farce, so it has lots of people running in and out of doors. Director Audrey Francis has wisely kept it at a breakneck pace. There were two understudies on at my performance of a play that requires tight ensemble work. There was lots of shouting and running around, but it seemed a bit sloppy. Farce requires clockwork precision.

There are some funny moments in the play, but on the whole Potus struck me as a theatrical version of The Order of the Chair. Most of the big laughs it elicited from the audience were from the shock value of its crude, sexual references. The first word of the show is a four letter word beginning with C repeated a number of times. The humor descends from that low point. It’s the kind of play an undergraduate might write after a few too many beers plus some other chemicals.

The young people in the audience with me loved its crass language. We are much in need of humor in our troubled times, but POTUS is a stew of cheap, tasteless gags.

THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT, a clever, absorbing adult comedy now at TimeLine Theatre in Chicago, also had a limited run on Broadway despite the starriest cast possible (Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale). In his New York Times review, Jesse Green called the play, “terrifically engaging but not as smart as it thinks.” That may be a fair assessment, but the play is like a breath of fresh air, especially after POTUS.

The Lifespan of a Fact (written by Jeremy Kareken, David Murrell, and Gordon Farrell), is based on a 2012 non-fiction book by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, who are also its central characters. In what we call “real life”, Harpers Magazine commissioned an essay from D’Agata on a Las Vegas teenager who jumped to his death from the top of a hotel. D’Agata presented this suicide as an expression of Las Vegas culture. Harpers turned down the essay because of D’Agata’s many divergences from the facts. He then submitted it to a small San Francisco-based journal, The Believer, who assigned a young college graduate intern, Jim Fingal, to fact check the essay. The fact checking and Fingal’s arguments with D’Agata went on for years. D’Agata’s and Fingal’s book on the experience, which prints D’Agaga’s essay with Fingal’s corrections and, in the margins, their arguments over the corrections, is an extended argument on fact vs. art. D’Agata claims that he doesn’t write articles (mere journalism). Because he sees himself as an essayist in the tradition of Thoreau, George Orwell, and Mary McCarthy, he claims a right to stretch the facts. Fingal believes that facts are facts. In our age of Fox News and “alternative facts,” the argument can be extended to journalism in general, particularly political journalism. We won’t get into what has happened to truth in politics in the age of George Santos. 

 The play condenses this extended argument into ninety exciting and amusing minutes of theatre. In addition to the D’Agata, a cynical and defensive writer who believes that a good story is more important than the details, and Fingal, a young Harvard graduate intern eager to prove his editorial ability, the play gives us an editor, Emily Penrose, who is intent on keeping her magazine alive in an era of dwindling, aging readership and declining ad sales. She believes D’Agata’s essay will bring in new, younger readers, but is also sensitive to the legal implications of D’Agata’s disregard of facts. 

I always worry about plays written by committees, but this one is constantly engrossing and full of genuine funny moments. THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT is more situation comedy than serious drama. Only D’Agata has a backstory that fleshes out is character, and given his talent for stretching the truth, one wonders if the backstory is even true. Fingal and the editor, Emily Penrose, don’t seem to have any life outside of the play.  The writers have wisely kept the play to ninety minutes, so it doesn’t stretch longer than the situation can bear. Some may find the non-committal ending frustrating.

The acting couldn’t be better. Timeline artistic director PJ Powers as the acerbic D’Agata and young Alex Benito Rodriguez as the eager beaver fact checker are equally matched adversaries. Juliet Hart is passionate as the editor caught in the middle of their argument. THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT is excellent entertainment. It reminded us writers of the love-hate relationship we have with the Jim Fingals of this world.