It’s only July, and we’ve already embarked on the 2018-19 theater season. I just attended Optimist Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park production of King Lear. It was a rudimentary period staging. But one thing was particularly awkward. The character Oswald, the servant to Goneril, Lear’s childless and eldest daughter, had a peculiar affectation. Traditionally, Oswald, a bad guy foil, may be played gay or as the daughter’s boy-toy. Not surprisingly, the director opted for the former. In fact, Oswald was really gay, really really gay, fey gay, demonstrably and eye-rollingly nelly gay. I get it. It’s cheap, easy and requires no insightful creativity or nuance to direct or play a screaming queen.
I tried to find exaggerated foppishness in the text. I couldn’t. Oswald is certainly the target of verbal attack for all his flaws, but an anachronistic gay stereotype he is not. Now, interestingly, the cast was otherwise diverse (“color blind,” as they say. It is 2018, after all) and they all performed leadenly just as actors in a traditionally set and costumed Shakespearean staging are wont to do (save for Jonathan Wainwright who offered real personality as Edmund). Oh well…I would have liked to have enjoyed the play in the context of our current political discontent but couldn’t get past cringing whenever Oswald pranced across the stage. Well, it is a tragedy, I suppose.
Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s flyer for its upcoming season arrived. One play, Junk, sounded promising. Alas, it turns out to be junk as in junk bonds, not junk as in one’s “stuff.” As riveting as a Wall Street drama might be, it doesn’t seem particularly gay. But otherwise, the Rep’s season does have its inclusive moments. There’s a brown play and a black play and, opening in September at the Stackner Cabaret, there’s LGBTQ appeal in the American premiere of Joanna Murray-Smith’s Songs for Nobody. It features “legendary divas and the everyday women whose lives they touched,” the former being Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday and Maria Callas.
Obviously, Garland is our anointed patron saint with her anthem “Over the Rainbow” (try Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s rendition for a real tear jerker). Patsy Cline, although apparently not lesbian herself, is, according to author Mary Dugger, “the rarely disputed goddess of lesbian hair in the universe.” Now you should have a vision of lesbian couples coiffed a la Cline slow dancing to “Crazy” (an anthem unto itself). Then there’s French chanteuse Edith Piaf, who allegedly had an affair with Marlene Dietrich, who had an affair, allegedly, with Tallulah Bankhead, who apparently did have an affair with Billie Holiday. Maybe the author should have included Dietrich as a link in the lineup. Anyway, last but not least, is Maria Callas, who was also rumored to be lesbian but otherwise touched many a gay opera buff’s heart. I have to retell the tale of my first visit to a German leather bar where, rather than being amid a herd of hunky Tom of Finland types, I found myself eavesdropping on a pair of rather rotund, much older leather guys in complete monture gaily gushing about their bootlegged Callas recordings.
In any case, I’m looking forward to Songs. I expect that night will offer nothing to regret.
