It wasn’t so long ago that gay people in plays were tragic figures who were struggling to come out or battling AIDS or sassy wiseacres who provided comic relief. But we now live in a different pop- cultural world, where a growing number of high schools have gay-straight alliances, rock stars like R.E.M’s Michael Stipe are openly gay and perhaps the most beloved character on the cult HBO crime drama “The Wire” was Omar, a stick-up artist, equally devoted to robbing drug dealers and romancing his male lovers.
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a different kind of gay character popping up in new plays too. From Clarice Bernstein, the beleaguered presidential speechwriter played by Laurie Metcalf in David Mamet’s November; to Howie, the teenager who is totally unself-conscious about his sexuality in Stephen Karam’s Speech & Debate, these gay characters are the most stable and self-assured people in their shows. And now comes Adam Bock’s The Drunken City with two gay characters who are not only the anchors for their flighty friends but also of this meditation on love and marriage among today’s tewentysomethings.
I got a kick out of Bock’s last play, The Receptionist, and so I decided to see this new one without knowing a thing about it. My buddy Bill, always game for a theater adventure, met me at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, one of the new spaces that Playwrights Horizons operates on 42nd Street, where The Drunken City is playing through April 20. The one-act show, which centers around six young singles who meet, hook up and fall out on a drunken night on the town, is slight but appropriately giddy and Bill and I had a good time.
Bock specializes in snappy dialog that sounds like the kind of thing that people, or at least I, always wish they had said. The performances by the good-looking, interracial cast, lead by Cassie Beck's amusingly conflicted bride-to-be, is yet more proof that New York City is currently overflowing with a bumper crop of talented young actors. And David Korins’ clever set design, aided by Matthew Richards’ nimble lighting and Bart Fasbender’s smart sound design, create an evocative cityscape.
But what really struck me is the way the gay guys are portrayed. They don’t have swishy, stereotypical jobs—one’s a dentist, the other a baker. They’re comfortable hanging out with straight friends. Their concerns are ones we all share: how to care for our friends, where to find love and how to be true to one’s self. Having gay people portrayed just as people, now that's truly intoxicating.
Politics, or at least political satire, makes particularly strange bedfellows as foul-mouthed David Mamet and frolic-making Nathan Lane have teamed up to create November, a comedy about a bumbling White House incumbent trying, by whatever means necessary, to be reelected president. And I made an uneasy voyeur of their goings-on.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a Mamet fan. I even once had “a date” with him. An old boyfriend gave me the phone number of a playwright pal of his when I moved to Chicago for a short time in the early ‘70s. I called and the pal offered to show me around town one evening, introducing me to the Art Institute of Chicago and the deep-dish pleasure of the original Pizzeria Uno on Ohio Street. I never saw him again after that; I was stunned when I later saw Sexual Perversity in Chicago and realized it had been written by my tour guide.
Lane is even more beloved in my household. My pit-musician husband K played in the orchestras of the 1990s’ revivals of Guys and Dolls and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Lane’s onstage antics in those shows, particularly in Forum, cracked K up almost every night and we have made a point of seeing just about everything that Lane has done since then. But K decided to pass on November. That seemed strange to me at first because K is also something of a political junkie. But, after seeing the show, it occurred to me that may have been why he passed on it.
November tells the story of Charles Smith, a hapless and unpopular president whose poll numbers are “lower than Gandhi's cholesterol.” He and his adviser, a wry Dylan Baker, scheme about how they can stay in office and their plan ropes in Laurie Metcalf’s comically earnest speechwriter Clarice Bernstein, a lesbian with a bad cold and a good cause; a representative of the turkey industry played by Ethan Phillips and a disgruntled Native American played by Michael Nichols. The seemingly ubiquitous director Joe Mantello puts them through their paces nicely and the equally ubiquitous set designer Scott Pask recreates a recognizable, and yet amusing, version of the Oval Office. As one would expect from Mamet, there are lots of undeleted expletives and no political correctness—every group and every political issue gets skewered. And as one would expect from Lane, there are lots and lots of laughs.
And yet the whole thing seemed kind of pointless to me. It wasn’t that the situations were so ridiculously silly; I loved “Wag the Dog,” the equally silly 1997 film satire that Mamet co-wrote about a president who tries to divert attention from a sex scandal by invading Albania. And it wasn’t even that so many of the jokes were predictable in a Borscht Belt kind of way; Mel Brooks was sitting across from me and although he was clearly aware that people were looking at him to gauge his response, I caught him nodding his head a couple of times in apparent "ta-da" recognition of the shtick. I think it was that the show’s underlying messages that politicians can be puerile and that democracy is important seem superfluous coming in the midst of an historic campaign.
Mamet has been campaigning hard for November, giving almost as many interviews as Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama or John McCain and even maintaining a blog in the voice of his presidential character (click here to read it). But for me, there’s no contest: November can’t compete with the drama, the inspiration or even the humor of the real thing.
There are so many holiday-themed shows running between Thanksgiving and New Years that you wouldn't think a play centered around a chubby middle-aged woman who answers telephones for a living would be the choice for a multi-generational family outing during Christmas week. Yet sitting behind me at the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of The Receptionist were a grandmother and her three grandkids, who looked to be between the ages of 12 and 19. And, for the most part, they also looked to be having a pretty good time.
Perhaps they were primed for the show by its seeming similarity to "The Office," the NBC sitcom about an obnoxious boss and the poor saps who work for him. Or maybe they were simply amused, as I was, by Jayne Houdyshell's pitch-perfect performance as the good-natured busybody familiar to every workplace. And I suspect that the now-notorious twist in the play may have appealed to the sense of the macabre that, if the current popularity of horror movies is any indication, seems to excite lots of young people these days. "I wasn't so sure about this at the start," I overheard the grandson say during the curtain call. "But then things started getting interesting." Finally, I imagine that the play's running time may also have played a part in their enjoyment. The Receptionist runs just 70 intermission-less minutes.
I'm a big fan of one-act plays. Unlike the opera, where you get a comfortable 30 minutes or so of intermission, the 10 to 15 minute breaks during plays always strike me as stingy and a waste of time and effort. By the time you shove your way into the lobby, it's time to shove your way back to your seat. Which is why I rarely leave mine. I also like the fact that a short performance gets you out at a decent hour so that you can go somewhere afterwards and linger over dinner talking about the show or, if you choose, find a cab home easily since the other shows haven't yet let out. But 70 minutes kind of startled me.
The brevity of The Receptionist seemed to take the rest of the audience by surprise too. When the stage lights went out, signaling the end of the show, it took a few seconds for the applause to start and even then it was tepid, although people had laughed and, in some cases even gasped, out loud during the performance. I think we all felt cheated.
Going to the theater obviously isn't like renting a car or seeing a shrink, you don’t pay for it by the hour. But the regular ticket price for The Receptionist, which ends its run this weekend, is $75, and that works out to more than a dollar a minute. I don't bear any resentment towards Houydshell and her co-stars—Josh Charles, Robert Foxworth and Kendra Kassebaum—who were all terrific. Or towards playwright Adam Bock, whose play deftly captures these distressing times; or director Joe Mantello, who paced the work perfectly; or sound designer Darron L. West, who created just the right undercurrent of menace. But shouldn't someone at MTC have made the call that asking folks to pay more than a buck a minute for a performance is, well, distressing.
Luckily, other theater companies and producers are looking for ways to make theater more affordable for more people. Playwrights Horizons has a number of programs including Hot Tix, which sells $20 tickets to people who can prove they’re 30 or under; and LIVEforFIVE, an online lottery that offers $5 tickets for first preview performances (click here to see all of its discount programs). And earlier this month, the producers of August: Osage County, The Homecoming, and November announced a package deal to see all three for $199 (click here for more details on that offer).
I don't know how often the young people who sat behind me at The Receptionist go to the theater. But I think seeing it may have persuaded them that a live show can be just as enthralling as a movie at the Cineplex. Alas, it may also have made them think that going to the theater is something that you can only afford to do when an indulgent, well-heeled grandmother takes you.
It wasn’t so long ago that gay people in plays were tragic figures who were struggling to come out or battling AIDS or sassy wiseacres who provided comic relief. But we now live in a different pop- cultural world, where a growing number of high schools have gay-straight alliances, rock stars like R.E.M’s Michael Stipe are openly gay and perhaps the most beloved character on the cult HBO crime drama “The Wire” was Omar, a stick-up artist, equally devoted to robbing drug dealers and romancing his male lovers. 
