For nearly the first 200 years of its existence, American society had one overriding requirement of its gay and lesbian members: Be invisible. Or as Igor Goldin, director of the upcoming Off-Broadway revival of "Boy Meets Boy," puts it, "It's not individuals who were in the closet; it was a whole world of human beings." That invisibility was at last overtly challenged during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. And that revolution was fed, at least in part, by artistic ferment in a variety of disciplines, including, of course, the theatre. Modern gay theatre was born in Greenwich Village on May 18, 1964, when Lanford Wilson's one-act about a lonely drag queen, "The Madness of Lady Bright," opened at the Caffe Cino, a coffeehouse named for its owner-operator, the 30-ish, openly gay Joe Cino. As Robert Patrick, another Cino playwright, puts it, "The first modern gay play in the world, where gays weren't portrayed as villains who deserved to die, was 'Lady Bright.' That's as far as anyone knows, because if there was gay theatre before that, it was all secret and closeted. My play, 'The Haunted Host,' was the second, opening in November. We were writing at the same time, but Lanford got his dates before I did."
Happily, after 40 years, there is now a body of work rich enough to merit revisiting. And with the sharp learning curve that American society has been on with regard to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) community, Back Stage wondered how rapidly changing societal attitudes—in an America where sodomy laws are finally unconstitutional, 80% of the populace favors equal rights for gays in employment, and legal gay marriages are being performed in Massachusetts—would affect how we now see these groundbreaking works. So, for our 2004 gay pride issue, we decided to take a look at several recent, current, and upcoming revivals of gay- and lesbian-themed classics—running the gamut from a small regional-theatre production of "Last Summer at Blue Fish Cove" to the upcoming Broadway revival of the splashy musical "La Cage aux Folles," with stops along the way both Off- and Off-Off-Broadway—to see just how they might play in today's brave new world.
TOSOS II and the "Look Again!" Series
TOSOS (an acronym for "The Other Side of Silence") was the first gay theatre company in the U.S. The founders were Cino playwright Doric Wilson and his friends Peter del Valle and Billy Blackwell and the year was 1974. The company had a tumultuous five-year run, producing a wide array of work and disbanding in 1979 after a successful engagement of Wilson's "The West Street Gang," done site-specifically at the Spike Bar. But in 2001, Wilson decided to resuscitate his theatre company in conjunction with two younger writer-directors, Mark Finley and Barry Childs.
TOSOS II was born and, for its initial offering, presented a play reading series in the winter of 2002 titled "Look Again!" According to Artistic Director Mark Finley, "What we wanted to do was pull out a lot of plays that were written before the '80s. I've always considered myself a kind of theatre historian, like an archivist. I like to dig out old gay-themed stuff, just to see the contrast between how gay people were viewed then and now." A total of 11 plays were presented, by a diverse group of authors that included Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick, Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, Jane Chambers, and Hugh Wheeler. All but two were by gay or lesbian authors, and only one, Robert Anderson's 1953 "Tea and Sympathy," predated the Cino.
Surprisingly, it was Anderson's play that proved particularly eye-opening. Says Finley, "Having directed the reading, I no longer think 'Tea and Sympathy' is a gay play. In breaking it down to rehearse it, there are only two scenes Laura isn't in." (Laura, the demure young wife whose football-coach husband may be suppressing his latent homosexuality, is friendly with Tom, the "sensitive" teenage student who is finally accused by his classmates of being gay.) "It's not really about Tom, it's about Laura, because she's the only one who's being close to honest about her sexuality."
Playwright Anderson is on the record as insisting that Tom is straight. But in the TOSOS II reading, the actors playing Tom and Laura, without changing one word of the script, performed as though both characters believed that Tom was, indeed, gay (though desperate not to be). As a result, the famous concluding scene, where Laura gives herself to Tom sexually, played in a completely different way. Rather than seeming a selfless and daring act of love by Laura, intended to help the boy come into his manhood, it became an attempt on her part to turn Tom into a heterosexual, an act more likely to hurt him than heal him. And the play became about how a hatefully repressive society can damage even those who reject those mores and that repression.
Igor Goldin, who directed "Boy Meets Boy" in the series, became obsessed with "Tea and Sympathy" as a youngster in the late '70s. "I'm not sure I knew at the time why it was intriguing, but I just kept reading it over and over again. I knew there was something there that I couldn't pinpoint. Later on, I was sure it was because I sensed the boy was gay. Now it just seems obvious to me, because of our knowledge, our history, our sensibility. It immediately layers on top of it."
Donald Ward, co-book writer of "Boy Meets Boy," sees it this way: "Our sensibility today is that we expect any author writing like this to mean that the boy is gay, even though, at the time, Robert Anderson may have only meant that he was sensitive. We look farther into this than they would have at the time, and probably even farther than the author did."
Finley also thinks the audience response was a direct result of the changes in American society. "Though we still have a million miles to go, gay people are much more in the vocabulary of modern life today, whereas in the 1950s, homosexuals were still deviants and exotic. They're much more a part of my world than my parents' world. Even if I weren't in the theatre, I think I would have a lot more contact and exposure to gay people than my parents ever had."
Another play in the series, Hugh Wheeler's "Look: We've Come Through," was an example of how internalized homophobia can undo the best of intentions. It tells the story of two late-adolescent misfits, Belle and Bobby, who are trying to make the transition into adulthood. Belle is plain and intellectual and has a crush on Wain, the hunky boyfriend of her sexy best friend, Jennifer. Bobby is gay for pay with an older man named Arthur (a relationship approved of by Bobby's mother, no less) and has a crush on a macho, aggressively heterosexual sailor named Skip. Ultimately, both are sexually bruised and discarded by their respective inamoratas, and the play ends with Bobby severing his tie to Arthur and moving in with Belle as her lover.
The TOSOS II reading for the most part revealed a touching, intimate, and often quite funny character study up until the play's final scene. In 2004, the idea that Bobby would suddenly turn straight injected a jarring false note. Says Finley, "Rebecca Kendall, who directed the reading, was seeking other reasons why Bobby would make the decision to move in. And for me, I think she found an effective solution to it. It wasn't, 'Okay, we're together now and I'm straight.' She took a much more human and contemporary approach: 'We're together now as people who have to live together, not necessarily in a sexual context. We're the only two people in this world who really get each other, so we'll be here for each other.' "
The three creative principals of the original production (Wheeler, director José Quintero, and producer Saint Subber) were all gay. But in 1961, the commercial Broadway theatre could not accommodate a young gay man accepting his sexuality. Wheeler was opaque discussing the subject in 1972, when critic Marilyn Stasio included the play in a volume called "Broadway's Beautiful Losers." "My characters are definitely 1950s people. I suppose today's kids worry less about sex than the boys and girls in my play. But society's pressures are also more subtle. Whether young people can survive all that or not, I just don't know." Saint Subber defensively railed that "the play is not about a queer boy. It's about a boy who thinks he might be queer, who asks himself questions, who, when he was a child, had a love for another boy. I'd like to know the case history of a child who is not like that." But Quintero put his finger on what was wrong: "Today [in 1972], homosexuality has become a thing that people go to the theatre and the movies for. But at the time it was different. The critics made an issue out of the homosexuality. And Saint got scared. That's the truth. It wasn't him, but the times that were wrong. It was very sad, because the times have since turned around. I didn't care, but Saint did. He felt the finger pointed at our own personal lives." Despite some good reviews and inexpensive weekly operating costs, Subber abruptly pulled the play after only five performances, without even consulting Wheeler and Quintero, who disagreed with the decision.
"Look: We've Come Through" fell victim to what gay historian and cultural critic John M. Clum calls "the split that would exist for decades to come between gay-positive theatre written for gay audiences, and mainstream gay representations that had to take into account the predominantly heterosexual audience before whom they would be performed." Rebecca Kendall's approach to the ending made emotional sense, but the play's text did not really support it. It left the audience wondering if, somewhere in the Hugh Wheeler archives, there might be an ending scene that did.
The Normal Heart
Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart," on the other hand, has never been accused of lacking the courage of its convictions. This famously passionate scream of a play opened at the Public Theater in April of 1985 as the four-year-old AIDS epidemic was metastasizing amid the neglect of the governments of President Ronald Reagan and New York City Mayor Edward Koch. It became the longest-running play in the history of the Public Theater (and remains so to this day) and inspired furious debate as to whether it was an important and necessary call to arms or the unbalanced ravings of a lunatic. Or, as David Esbjornson, director of the current Worth Street Theater production, puts it, "If you were on the fringes of the gay community back then, you might have said, 'This is a political diatribe; this is a hysterical response. He's crazy to be blaming The New York Times and everybody else.' People questioned how legitimate his anger was in terms of where he was directing it. But today, I don't think anybody has a question about all that. We're now not naïve about the way the press covers things in this country. I don't think we have any trouble believing that institutions were culpable in all of this as well."
Esbjornson was in his last year of graduate school when the original production opened, but he never saw it. "I'm still kicking myself for not having experienced that. If you weren't gay and didn't have a direct connection to it all, it was hard to think about going through that experience in the theatre. There was a period of fear that I was probably experiencing without knowing it. And I had a very dear friend who went right about that time." Esbjornson was glad of the chance to direct the current production: "Part of what it was to experience directing this show right now was to go back and, in a sense, re-experience those moments in history personally. There is something rather profound about it, because I was dealing with things now in a way that I couldn't have then."
Kramer, on the other hand, was loath to revisit history, not wanting to plunge back into the pain of what had occurred. "I didn't want to do it and I said 'no' for over a year." But he's now glad he did. "When we started rehearsals, literally from the first day, I started crying. The actors were so good, and the play seemed to move me from the beginning of rehearsals. I didn't know that could happen again. It's that strange combination of something very painful and very moving and intense that becomes very beautiful."
Still, for Kramer, "The Normal Heart" in 2004 is a very different play, though essentially the same text (one scene written for the original production but cut was reinstated, two scenes were intercut into one, and a handful of lines from some of Kramer's screenplays of the property were added). "Everything that the play predicted came true, so it seems in essence a different play. What audiences are responding to so movingly is that it all happened. That's a whole other experience than the original witnessing of it, which was a warning that you either listened to or you didn't. Now it's a history play, this piece of the earliest years of AIDS. It's all a matter of fact now, not of opinion."
But with the premise of the play no longer in question, audiences are free to become more fully engaged in the story. Says Kramer, "I think it's a much more personal play now. It's much more a love story, and I think people start crying a lot sooner." Adds Esbjornson, "That was a focus of this particular production. We knew that people would understand the politics of the play with 20/20 hindsight and perspective. What I wanted to show in particular was how complicated the personal was in the political arena. It's exciting for all these people's points of view and backgrounds to collide; that's what makes it a great piece of writing in addition to being a good political play."
But the cumulative knowledge of the last 19 years was also a hurdle to be surmounted. Says Esbjornson, "Most or all of the characters in the play died without really knowing what had killed them. That's a very different perspective. There was such fear underneath it all; you could know somebody and they would die in three days. I have to keep reminding the company over and over again that you don't know anything. You can't act it from the standpoint of knowledge. You have to take that away and allow yourselves to react to this information in a completely fresh way." Esbjornson notes a conundrum in that task: "To some extent, there's something false about it, suggesting that everybody use their imagination to create a world where they don't know as much as they do now. As a director, you must help to create the circumstances and the specifics on a moment-to-moment basis that makes them feel like they're not in the here and now. So that the play can resonate now." One way Esbjornson chose to make the play feel immediate was by "hitting the first scene in crisis mode. We weren't building it to the end of Act One; the idea of 'What the fuck is happening to us?' was in place right from the very beginning. And then we went from there. That represented my recollection of what everyone was going through then."
Kramer notes that "The Normal Heart" "never stops getting done. There's not a week that goes by where it isn't being done somewhere in the world. I get clippings of it being done in places so remote I've never heard of some of them and, believe me, I don't get royalties from them. But it never stops getting done because more and more people want to know where AIDS came from, and this is a piece of work that people can relate to that tells all that." He is particularly pleased to see the crowd skewing younger at the Public. "A lot of gay kids are coming and I get letters saying thank you for my first gay-history lesson. That moves me a lot."
"Heart" never transferred to Broadway in 1985 because another play dealing with AIDS, "As Is," got there first, and it was thought that Broadway could not commercially sustain two plays about such a controversial and depressing subject. Currently, Broadway producers Daryl Roth, Scott Rudin, and the Shubert Organization are eyeing a possible transfer. Exhorts Kramer, "It depends on what business it continues to do. We can only stay in the Anspacher until the middle of August, and so we have to prove it quickly. I urge all your readers to come fast and prove that it can sustain business sufficient as to move it."
Thriving Theatre
Kimberly Gifford and Elle Poindexter founded Thriving Theatre three years ago in Corvallis, Ore., a town of about 50,000 located in Benton County between Portland and Eugene. Gifford had directed Poindexter in a production of "The Vagina Monologues," and the two women hit it off. "We decided we were going to make theatre happen, the kind of theatre we wanted to do. We don't want to leave Corvallis to do good work, and we found some people in the community who feel the same way." The theatre has grown quickly from the first season, where Gifford and Poindexter comprised the complete cast of all four plays presented. "The response was amazing. People were so thankful that they didn't have to go somewhere else to see shows that interested them. We like to do provocative shows that people wouldn't have had the opportunity to see, because most of the theatres around here do safe, money-making shows over and over again. They're good, but you've seen them."
Because Corvallis has "a wonderfully large gay community," and no doubt because Poindexter is a lesbian (who recently married her partner in Portland during the brief window when gay marriages were being performed there), Thriving Theatre has made a point of producing one lesbian-themed show each season. (Not that they wouldn't do a gay show; they're considering "Love! Valour! Compassion!" for next season "if we can find the men," sighs Gifford.)
Two of the three lesbian plays Thriving has produced are older works: "Dos Lesbos" by Terry Baum and Carolyn Myers, a play from the early '80s wherein two women discuss the best way to inform their parents of the true nature of their relationship, and "Last Summer at Blue Fish Cove" by Jane Chambers, written in 1976, about a group of lesbians who are best friends and gather every summer, and the stranger who invades the group. The third was Diana Son's recent "Stop Kiss." Each presented distinct challenges: "Dos Lesbos" suffered from a political stridency reminiscent of the radical feminist movement, while "Cove" incorporated certain attitudes about the dynamics of lesbian couples that seemed antiquated.
Says Gifford, "The fact that 'Dos Lesbos' was a two-woman play was a huge part of why we chose it for our first season. We realized that there were a lot of challenges in it, but we also realized that we could have a lot of fun with it." Still, a deciding factor in its selection was that "Terry Baum, the co-author, was so willing and receptive to making the minor alterations we needed to make." And what changes would those be? "It was just too much. There were certain references and name-calling things that wouldn't work today. There was a joke about AIDS, something to the effect of giving them all AIDS and having them die—you wouldn't make that joke now; it wouldn't be funny. It was a really aggressive piece in the sense that it's almost like it was designed to be seen by people who are already supportive."
But Baum understood their concerns and worked with them to modulate her play for contemporary audiences. And it still packed a wallop: "One of the scenes, the hating men scene, was a challenge even for people who loved the show. We had to keep it within the context of the period it was from."
Continues Gifford, "Some of our audience, not necessarily gay- or lesbian-supportive people, were jarred and offended by a couple of scenes from that show. But I thought, overall, they were won over." And it fulfilled the goal of doing provocative theatre: "They were able to bring to our attention what they didn't like, what offended them, and then we could talk about it. I think communication is the main thing, to try to get people active and involved, get their thoughts out in the open."
Gifford found "Cove" to be the more solid of the two as a piece of writing. "The play itself was still relevant in its themes: love and friendship. The same troubles they were having then, we're having now. We loved that there's a lot of heart, a lot of humor, and a lot of social topics that need to be addressed." Still, they left the play set in the 1970s. "There's just too much that's changed, languages and references and things like that. Saying 'lady' so much, for example. You say 'woman' now. And the characters talk about the feminist movement and women's lib in ways that we don't anymore."
When asked if the play suffered from any internalized homophobia, Gifford responds, "I did not find that. But I did hear from people who were not comfortable with what they perceived as a stereotypical masculine-feminine dynamic in each of the relationships. They thought there was a little bit too much of that kind of gender thing happening." For Gifford, "Those are very true relationship scenarios, even today. Not every play can represent every possibility. I think it's interesting that when minority plays are done, oftentimes people need them to be more noble. They're supposed to represent the whole community. But making them noble takes away the dramatic element."
Still, a lesbian couple who had seen a production of the play in the '70s had a better experience this time around. "They said they couldn't laugh as much then. When they looked at it now, the humor was easier for them to get chuckles out of, perhaps because there has been some growth and improvements with regard to gay issues in American society." Others saw it differently. "There were some who asked why did it still have to be the same issues? They were angry that not enough had changed. You had both, 'Oh, good, there is some progress' and 'Why is it taking so long for things to be completely handled?' "
For Gifford, the importance of doing productions of older gay- and lesbian-themed plays has to do with the options faced by her audience. "Aside from the university, we're the only company around here that's done gay-themed work. It's about providing an opportunity for the gay and lesbian community to have something that reflects their lives. The opportunities are very limited. You have to go somewhere else; you have to go to the big city. Our goal is to grow and continue to support ourselves and provide an opportunity for people who live here."
Boy Meets Boy
Bill Solly and Donald Ward started writing their musical comedy "Boy Meets Boy" in London in 1970. "We wanted to write a 1930s boy-meets-girl screwball comedy, but felt that there were a lot of pretty good ones out there and not much reason for doing another. Suddenly, we had the thought, 'Well, nowadays, boy meets boy is the thing.' We put the two together and got something different."
"Boy Meets Boy" is based on what Solly calls "a historical lie." It posits a universe where nobody thinks there's anything unusual about two men falling in love and marrying. Gay romances fill the gossip columns and the cream of society turns out for high-class nuptials. It ultimately had successful runs in New York City and Los Angeles in the mid-'70s, and generated two original cast albums. Presented as part of the TOSOS II "Look Again!" reading series, where the audience received it rapturously, it so impressed producer Jamie Heinlein that she took out a commercial option on the property. Backers' auditions are underway, and Heinlein plans to produce a revival Off-Broadway in the 2004-05 season.
Solly and Ward have added one scene and two songs to the second act, but that's just "to flesh it out a bit." Neither author thinks the show needs rewriting to bring it up to date with modern gay sensibilities. "We were lucky that we chose to set it in a '30s style. It doesn't date. Thanks to VCRs and Turner Classic Movies, what Americans loved about the '30s back then they still love." Adds director Igor Goldin, "People may not know who Preston Sturges is, but they certainly know who Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are."
Goldin and producer Heinlein deliberately invited some "politically and morally conservative friends" to the backers' audition. Reports Goldin, "A husband and wife in their late 50s said, 'We just loved it.' " Goldin pressed them further, "You had a man and a man falling in love and marrying. Didn't it bother you?" "No, it didn't" was the reply. "Why didn't it bother you? You're politically opposed to gay marriage." Their response? "We cared about the characters and we wanted them to get together. And nobody onstage was judging it."
And, of course, gay marriage is what the late writer Peter Stone would have called the "contemporary envelope." The show begins with an English nobleman leaving a rich American at the altar, and follows that with numerous romantic complications until everyone ends up happily paired off, with the two leading men in tuxes atop a wedding cake.
Back in the '70s, audiences (and most critics, too) adored the show, but "they needed to get past the title," says Solly. "Once they did, they fell in love with the show and came back." According to Goldin, "Karl Tucker, who reviewed for the Village Voice, admitted in his review that he went in with all the hang-ups of a heterosexual, and walked out calling it 'pure joy.' " But considering the subject matter, it's not just mindless fluff. As Goldin points out, "It's light and funny and touching, and then, after the fact, you walk away and go, 'But it was more than that.' Which is very difficult to do." According to Solly, that's because "you have to care about the characters. They're the most important thing." Adds Ward, "They're just human beings and their problems are falling in love and getting confused and sorting it out. We didn't want anything else weighing down on them. It's a romance like any other romance, regardless of whether it's two men or a man and a woman. You care about people. Gay people are people."
Ward is optimistic that "Boy Meets Boy" will once again meet with approval from happy audiences, fewer of whom will have trouble getting past the title in 2004. "It may be a little less unusual with so many other people now doing gay-themed work. We were out by ourselves the first time; now we have a lot of other things surrounding us."
La Cage aux Folles
In one respect, "La Cage aux Folles" is a big brother to "Boy Meets Boy": Both shows unapologetically lay claim to traditional family values as the rightful provenance of the gay community—not as the only choice, perhaps, but definitely as a possible one. But, as Jerry Zaks, director of the planned Broadway revival, acknowledges, back in 1983, "The creators of 'La Cage' were always aware of how important it was that nobody walk out. On one level, that informed everything, consciously or unconsciously." Indeed, Arthur Laurents, who directed the original production, has often spoken of how nervous he, Jerry Herman, and Harvey Fierstein were at the first preview of the show out of town in Boston. The goal they had set for themselves was a high one: to get middle-American audiences to applaud two middle-aged gay lovers walking off into the sunset together hand in hand.
Clearly, "La Cage aux Folles" is one of John M. Clum's mainstream gay representations that had to take into account the predominantly heterosexual audience before whom it would be performed. And the original took some flak in the gay community for pandering too much to straight America. But "La Cage" did what it set out to do, and its 1,761 Broadway performances, not to mention the touring companies, international productions, and subsequent legions of stock and amateur productions, undoubtedly contributed to changing societal attitudes about gays. One only has to look to Hugh Jackman's story of seeing the show as a teenager in Australia with his morally conservative father to understand its effect and the length of its reach. To Jackman's surprise, Dad loved it.
Zaks notes, "You can't underestimate the original collaboration of Arthur Laurents, Jerry Herman, and Harvey Fierstein. They did a great job. Anyone who pretends that the most critical work isn't done when the show is originated doesn't know what he's talking about." But what's different about 2004 is that "there's no need to make the story palatable. And we're going to use this opportunity to see if we can improve the piece. The primary thing is to make it feel like it's a brand new show. The burden on us is to make this love story as believable as possible, for us to believe these two men have been happily married—realistically married—for as long as they have been. That they're just made for each other, which means that they have disagreements and their relationship is tested through the course of the show."
So what are some of the changes contemplated? The casting of Albin, for starters. As good as George Hearn was in the original, he was also the butchest drag queen imaginable, and he didn't endear himself to the gay community when he refused to perform on the Tony Awards in drag, instead singing the show's signature tune, "I Am What I Am," in a tux, which rather defeated the song's message. Zaks has made an offer for the role of Albin, but can't disclose to whom just yet. Still, he sees the character this way: "Albin is happiest when he's performing in his dress and his makeup. He is free, unself-conscious, not insecure anymore—all things that the character is in real life in the outside world. And I think it's important that we see all of that."
Another criticism of the original production was the lack of physical expressions of affection between Georges and Albin. They rarely touched, and only kissed once, in Act II during "The Best of Times," when Albin was in full drag and everyone onstage was supposed to think he was actually a woman. This time around, says Zaks, "We're going to be looking for the believable behavior for any scene. They'll kiss if it's appropriate. They'll hug, they'll cuddle, they'll tickle each other. I'm going to pretend they're just a married couple. That's something I know something about."
Zaks also promises changes in the text. "Jerry Herman has already rewritten some lyric lines here and there. 'Anne on My Arm,' which originally included a dream ballet in which the son's fiancée appeared and the two of them danced together, is going to be altered so that there won't be a dream ballet and there will be responses from Georges, the dad, to his son." As for the book of the show, "We're looking, we're examining everything. I'm meeting with Harvey this week to discuss book changes. We've already had conversations, but I'm going to get very specific now. I think, as good as it is, we can make it better. The nice thing of having a wonderful blueprint, if you will, is that it's good, and so now it invites us to play around with it a little bit, knowing full well that if we make a mistake, we can go back to what worked." As the show is being set in 2004, Zaks is also hoping that Fierstein will "come up with some contemporary references."
Harvey Fierstein declined Back Stage's request for an interview through his publicist, who said he was taking a well-deserved breather from the press between his two-year run in "Hairspray" and his upcoming responsibilities as book writer for "La Cage" 's revival. Nevertheless, some thoughts he expresses on the commentary track of the recent DVD release of "Torch Song Trilogy" seem germane to "La Cage" as well. Fierstein notes that "most of my work has been ahead of its time," and offers as proof of that how he was "attacked by many people in the gay community for wanting to write about monogamy and wanting to adopt a son" when he penned "Torch Song." According to Fierstein, many gays said, "We want to be able to go out and carry on. We don't want to be like heterosexuals; we don't want to be in a marriage. Well," notes the actor-writer with just a hint of self-satisfaction, "look where we are now." Certainly "La Cage aux Folles" also trumpets the value of the nuclear family unit. In 1983, that may have made it square for some in the gay community; today, it's arguably the cutting edge.
"You can't underestimate how groundbreaking these guys were when they did the original production," says Zaks. "All the courage involved. That's not an issue now. We don't face the climate and the situation. All we have to do is get it right and just do it well. I can't wait!"
Turning Night Into Day in 'De-Lovely'
In 1946, Warner Bros. released "Night and Day," a film biography of Broadway songwriter Cole Porter. Produced by Porter's fellow Broadway composer Arthur Schwartz, it told a highly fictionalized tale of Porter's life, and starred a very un-Porterish Cary Grant as the author of such song hits as "Begin the Beguine," "Anything Goes," "Let's Do It," and the title tune. Opposite Grant was Alexis Smith as Porter's wife, the beautiful and wealthy socialite and divorcée Linda Lee Thomas.
Aside from Mary Martin playing herself and recreating her showstopping song "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," there was almost nothing in "Night and Day" possessing authenticity. Indeed, even Monty Woolley as himself played a mostly fictionalized version. The point of movies like this was the musical numbers, not the biographical niceties.
In Porter's case, one dicey nicety was his hedonistic homosexual love life. As the Motion Picture Production Code explicitly forbade any mention or dramatization of such a subject, making it part of "Night and Day" was never even an issue.
In 2004, of course, "times have changed" and Plymouth Rock long ago landed on the Hollywood production code. And so now we have "De-Lovely," the welcome corrective to "Night and Day," coming to movie screens on June 25, just in time for Gay Pride weekend. The film, starring Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, surrealistically weaves Porter's songs in and out of a biographical narrative that attempts to shine the light of day on the emotional truth of his life, even if it, too, occasionally plays a bit fast and loose with the facts.
"De-Lovely" screenwriter Jay Cocks (whose other screenplays include "The Age of Innocence" and "Gangs of New York") said yes to producer-director Irwin Winkler immediately, based solely on "the initial impulse of my emotional response to the music. Still, if it had not been possible to talk about Porter's intimate personal life, there's no way we would have done this movie."
Cocks did extensive research for the film. "From the time that he was very young, he seems to have had no problem with being gay," remarks Cocks. "There was a whole group of gay students with him at Yale, a sort of bohemian theatrical crowd, but they didn't seem self-conscious about being gay, nor were they given a hard time about it." Ultimately, says Cocks, "the thing that intrigued me the most about Porter is that he had no hang-ups about being gay, yet the love of his life seemed to be this woman [his wife, Linda]. It was a very complicated love, because it had to do with a lot more than physicality. It had to do with strength, reassurance, contacts, worldliness, acceptance, charity in the non-philanthropic sense, and a certain kind of spirituality. I became convinced that it was Linda who was the light of his life, though he had huge, major crushes on several guys, verging on obsession." Continues Cocks, "The dramatic core of his character, what moved me so much about Porter, is that he could have everything he wanted—in terms of success, romance, wealth—but he could just never find in one person all that he needed and wanted to support his creative spirit and his heart."
A key to the seriousness of Porter's marriage surfaced when the lawyer for the Cole Porter estate, Robert Montgomery (who died in 2000), told Cocks that Cole and Linda had tried to have a baby, but that Linda ultimately miscarried the child. Cocks was able to confirm this story with Jean Howard, who knew the Porters well. "This affected his character in a very basic way and strengthened his internal conflict—where does his heart really lie? I don't think that he and Linda would have tried to have a baby just for appearance's sake. It seemed to be about a need they both had and a feeling between them, that they did it for each other, not for social acceptability, not for any other reason."
Cocks believes that Porter felt guilty because "he couldn't respond to Linda in all the ways that she needed," even though, prior to their marriage, she willingly accepted that her husband would continue to be homosexually active. And certainly "De-Lovely" takes pains to portray the gay side of Porter's life, from an affair with a Russian dancer while living in Europe in the '20s to Porter's all-male Hollywood pool parties (he would run a flag up a flagpole in front of his house to signal the onset of festivities) to the suggestion of a long-term love affair with his hunky physical caretaker (Porter's legs were shattered in a riding accident in 1937), one whom Linda thoughtfully hires for him in hopes of just such a possibility. But the film runs a risk in placing such total emotional emphasis on his relationship with Linda. The lack of gay emotional ties could suggest to gay viewers that the film sees homosexuality as a pesky nuisance that Porter would have been far better off without. But Porter without a gay sensibility would hardly be Porter: the work would have been different and, almost certainly, not as good.
"God, would I be depressed if people thought that," cries Cocks. "I tried to do justice to this complicated compact that these two people who were in love with each other had made. He found his greatest love in a woman, even though his physical passion was for men. I didn't want him to be less gay than I believed he was, but I didn't want to gainsay the solidity and depth of their relationship because it only had an intermittent physicality. I never thought about what the audience would or wouldn't accept; I put that aside and just tried to get the people and the situation right. You can say, 'All right, here's a straight guy writing this; how much ultimately does he really know about this?' I think if we're creative, all territory is open to us. Nothing should be forbidden."
—Erik Haagensen