Good Feelings About "The Temperamentals"

Six years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in Texas and ruled that consensual sex should be considered one of the liberties protected by the Constitution, a young gay colleague at work said it was no big deal. My colleague and his boyfriend live a totally open life, attending functions for spouses at one another’s jobs, alternating holidays and vacations with their extended families. “The ruling doesn’t change a thing,” he said.

My friend Phil was outraged. Phil, who is also gay, grew up during a time when men could be arrested for just holding hands in public, when even liberal parents routinely sent their gay sons to shrinks to be cured and when many gay people tried to hide their true natures, sometimes even entering into sham marriages to do so. The decision in the case known as Lawrence v. Texas meant a lot to Phil.

It would have meant a lot to Harry Hay too, had he not died a year before the decision came down. Hay was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, the first gay rights organization in the U.S. and the subject of Jon Marans’s touching new play The Temperamentals, which is currently running at the Barrow Group through Aug. 23. The day after I saw it, I called Phil, who now lives in California, and told him he should fly in to see it.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which are usually credited with starting the gay rights era, but Hay and the four other brave men who started Mattachine in 1950 were the true founding fathers of the movement. They named their group after medieval secret societies who wore masks when performing in public ceremonies but they tried to move gay life out into the open.

The Temperamentals, the title is a reference to a code word of the time for homosexuals, is both a docu-drama that chronicles pre-Stonewall gay life and a love story about the relationship between Hay, a card-carrying Communist who is married to a woman, and the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, who would later gain fame, and the cover of Time Magazine, as a leading advocate of unisex clothing and the designer of the topless bathing suit.

History plays can often be bloodless pageants but this one is full-bodied and passionate. There are lots of laughs to be had and some legitimately earned tears to be shed. It’s simply but smartly staged by director Jonathan Silverstein in Barrow’s small black box theater, which is flanked on both sides by the audience (seating is open so get there early and grab a seat nearest the door since most of the action is played in that direction).

The set is a bare stage with a few chairs the actors rearrange to suit scenes that range from the beach front home of the closeted director Vincente Minnelli (Liza’s dad) whom they vainly try to recruit for the group to a courtroom where one member is tried for indecency after an attempted entrapment by an undercover cop in a public bathroom.

The acting is uniformly superb. Thomas Jay Ryan is a marvel as Hay and Michael Urie, who has a role on the ABC sitcom “Ugly Betty”, is equally wonderful as Gernreich. Urie gets extra props for spending his summer break in a low-profile, off-off Broadway production that his agents probably told him not to take. But Tom Beckett, Matthew Schneck and Sam Breslin Wright are just as terrific, playing the other three Mattachine members (who range from nelly to butch) as well as a host of supplementary characters, both gay and straight.

But for me the most amazing thing about The Temperamentals is that it’s a reminder of how far society has come in treating homosexuals as full citizens and, of course in this age of Prop 8, how far it still has to go. It’s also a reminder that while American Communists may have been blind about Stalin, party members like Hays and Bayard Rustin were totally clear-sighted about the social injustices in this country and the ways to overcome them.

The play’s run has already been extended twice and I was delighted to find it attracting one of the most diverse audiences I’ve seen in a while. In addition to the usual middle-aged whites you see at the theater, there were blacks, a couple of Asians and a few Hispanics; straight couples and same-sex couples, a kid who looked like he might be a member of his high school’s gay-straight alliance and a few guys who looked as though they might have been eligible for charter membership in Mattachine.

About 40% of the audience was female, including a high-heeled and mini-skirted contingent who looked as though they might have been refugees from an old “Sex and the City” episode. “What are all these women doing here?” a grey-haired gay guy sitting behind me asked his companion. “They’ve got to be friends of the cast.”

Well, I didn’t know a soul in the show. I came because I’d heard it was good theater. I left thinking it was one of the most affective theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. I hope my former colleague sees it.