Not so long ago a “memory” post appeared on my social media page. It was a gushing review of Theatrical Tendencies’ 2011 production of Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed at the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center. Since then, MGAC was gentrified out of its Walker’s Point storefront and TT is on hiatus while it searches for a compatible venue. Both entities focused on bringing relevant art to the LGBTQ community. Today, although mainstream theaters produce works by LGBTQ playwrights (it’s really impossible not to) or with some gay angle, they are geared to mainstream audiences.
In that vein, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater opens Thornton Wilder’s Our Town this weekend. Although there’s nothing specifically gay about it, there’s great satisfaction in knowing the playwright is one of our own. Then there’s the upcoming revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre. Written in the shadow of the bombshell news of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal, Doubt pits a nun against a presumably gay priest she suspects of molesting a young African American boy.
I left the Milwaukee Rep’s production, back in 2007, thinking the guy was innocent but wondered what doubt the straight theatergoers experienced. And, what would they have felt had the play’s little black boy been a little white girl? Would the audience have been appalled at the notion? How would they have endured being the accused rather than the judge? And, would Doubt have won a Pulitzer and a Tony had it suggested we are all suspects rather than the easily demonized gay priest?
Shanley, who is apparently straight (two divorces, so who knows), understood it was a safe bet to place the plot’s twist in a homosexual context because that’s good box office. It’s always easier to question the morality of “those gays” rather than one’s own.
But another piece currently on the marquee better represents what LGBTQ theater should be. At Inspiration Studios, a 50-seat West Allis black box, Erico Ortiz, who is gay, has taken on the challenge of directing the Village Playhouse in his own translation of The House of Bernarda Alba by gay Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. Lorca was executed by fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and his works were banned in Spain until the death of dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Today he’s celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world as its greatest 20th-century literary master.
This searing production transcends its community theater limitations and capably addresses timely issues not only in matters of women’s rights but of social justice in general. Ortiz successfully maneuvers his cast of 17 women through the play’s sadly familiar maze of repressive social mores and the contradictions of constricted patriarchy. It is an unhappy world, in which, after the death of her husband, the matriarch Bernarda sentences her five daughters to eight years of mourning in the confines of their household (an inadvertent reference to the possible eight-year term of the current regime, perhaps?). Sexual tension, anger and angst ensue.
Meanwhile, 2018 is the 50th anniversary of The Boys in the Band and still no word of any local productions in the offing.
