Looking for Billy Haines

Suzanne Brockmann and Will McCabe's debut dramatic effort, "Looking for Billy Haines," is utterly uninterested in finding him. That's a shame, because Haines' story—as anyone who has read "Wisecracker," William J. Mann's excellent biography of the MGM superstar, will know—is far more compelling than this wafer-thin tale of 20-somethings discovering themselves in New York City.

The authors use Haines—and a dancing Haines, no less—solely as a metaphor for romantic gay love. What appears to have set this idea in motion is the story of the actor, at the height of his film stardom in the early talkies, walking away from a lucrative contract rather than give up his lover, Jimmie Shields. The openly gay Haines told Louis B. Mayer he would give up Shields and marry a woman if Mayer also divorced his wife. We get a version of this scene, as well as one or two others between Haines and Shields, but that's all. Instead, we follow out aspiring actor-singer-dancer Jamie Hollis as he tries to make it in show business while romancing Harlan Cavanaugh, a closeted blue-blood lawyer already earning big bucks. Jamie, up for a film role as Haines, finds the actor's story inspiring and frequently dreams of or imagines him, leading to tap-dancing sequences that go on far too long and say far too little. For subplots, we have Jamie's roomies: Sugar LaSalle, who has anger-management issues and an absent actor-boyfriend; Lynn Cordero, a sunny would-be choreographer with a not-my-boyfriend on the frontlines in Iraq; and Alan Zimmerman, an older straight guy rebooting his life after financial success and marital failure. Neither they nor their standard-issue problems, alas, are compelling.

Brockmann is a best-selling author of gay romance novels, while McCabe is "the pen name for an Edgar Award finalist." This undoubtedly explains the reams of narration that sweet-natured Jason T. Gaffney must deliver as Jamie. Time and again the play stalls for these undramatic expositional sections. But the writing is no better in the candy-coated scenes, which suggest an Adam Rapp play as rewritten by TV's Mister Rogers.

Brockmann's heavy-handed direction doesn't help the eager company, whose credits skew heavily to musicals, no doubt because everyone is required to tap dance. Only Apolonia Davalos, as Lynn, manages to show some acting chops, bringing impressively honest emotion to the scene in which Lynn learns her soldier may be dead. Choreographer Joseph Cullinane, while physically unlike Haines, nevertheless succeeds in conveying the star's brashly boyish onscreen energy in his scene with MGM mogul Mayer.

"Proud PFLAG mom" Brockmann and "gay rights activist" McCabe are full of good intentions. Unfortunately, the road "Looking for Billy Haines" is on is not of the yellow-brick variety.


Presented by Small or Large Productions at the Lion Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., NYC. March 25–May 22. Mon., Wed.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.