Q TWO
Razor’s Edge
The most common thematic concern in these works is love and romance, the very things that historically have been withheld from gays and lesbians. (Then again, these themes are also the most common among heterosexual artists.) Insecurity, abandonment, and isolation are recurring motifs. In Cindy Caruso’s delightful “Some Love,” two women sitting in a lesbian bar forge an intimate friendship based on people they both hate. When one moves to a different city for no particular reason, the other is left stranded and alone. In Reader critic Achy Obejas’s pointed “The Measure of Grace,” the narrator’s ex-lover, with whom she is still achingly in love, shows up in the middle of the night to tell her all about a new tortured love affair. In Nicholas Patricca’s eloquent “Frankie,” a young man ruminates on the unacknowledged AIDS death of a gay next-door neighbor and childhood acquaintance.
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Certainly I am not suggesting that gay art has to include or address a straight world in order to be good. But the most successful piece of the evening, Barnes’s disarmingly clever and insightful song entitled “God Hates Fags,” uses a gay sensibility to open a window onto a much larger world. In a campy send-up of right-wing extremism, an archetypal church lady sings, “God hates queers / They stick their weenies in each other’s rears,” while two accompanying choir boys behind her exchange flirtatious looks. Granted, religious fundamentalism is an easy target. But Barnes homes in on the more psychologically complex issue of erotic hypocrisy. The church lady catalogs a diverse spectrum of gay acts and attributes that God abhors. If this woman is so repulsed by gay life, why does she expend so much energy chronicling its sordid details?
Playwright Max Pearson captures the campy essences of these mythic Hollywood figures, but his play isn’t bold enough for them. The plane-crash premise seems rife with possibilities, but Davis and Bankhead spend almost the entire play trading insults and telling stories of Hollywood deals. Very little moves this play forward, and after 20 minutes all of its trump cards have been played. The kind of potboiler plot that typified Hollywood in the Davis-Bankhead era is sorely needed. Conover and Wald are engaging performers, but without a star vehicle they seem lost.
