The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
If contemporary gay playwrights are to be believed, every gay man’s coming-out story is the same: innocently gender-confused childhood, heart-stopping stolen kiss in high school, parental reprimand and disapproval, escape to a liberal urban mecca, indulgence in residual self-loathing acted out in numerous sexual escapades, sober confrontation with the Plague, and finally pride, acceptance, a raised fist, a “Silence=Death” T-shirt, and inclusion in “the tribe.”
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David Drake’s one-man play The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me–a runaway New York hit–fits squarely into this genre. There Drake was, splayed shirtless across an enormous billboard in Greenwich Village. There he was, onstage in a jockstrap deriding the zealous pursuit of the body beautiful. There he still is, buffed on the cover of the published script. His play sticks to the not-straight but narrow confines of queer agitprop, with abundant quantities of righteous indignation, personal confession, and homoerotic celebration. The script is surely a great bit of consciousness-raising for those gay men who still need reassurance that gay is good. But theatrically it comes dangerously close to pure pastiche of Tim Miller, Michelangelo Signorile, and ACT UP press clippings.
Like many solo actors in Chicago, Coronado gets so bogged down in acting that he doesn’t genuinely connect with his audience. In the play’s opening moments, for example, he watches an imaginary production of West Side Story, putting his focus well above the audience’s heads before he’s even established a rapport with them (Drake’s script specifies that the performer “watches the show unfold, describing it as he speaks,” but there’s hardly a playwright alive who’s his or her own best director). Coronado spends much of his time trying to relive the stories he tells rather than simply telling them. I have no doubt that Coronado’s experience in the production is very real for him–his performance is admirably candid and heartfelt–but his job is to make it all real for the audience.
