The Happiest Medium » Neil LaBute

Standing On Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays – Before And After “I Do”

Karen Tortora-Lee — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:21:12 +0000

Heading into the new play written by an “A-list lineup of writers with 2 Pulitzer Prizes, 4 Obies, 1 Emmy® and 3 Tony® nominations” I expected that the evening would make me laugh … but not till my sides hurt. I expected to be moved … but not to tears. Standing On Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays manages to take a controversial topic and give it a 360; some aspects are made endearingly simple yet never does this show shy away from the frustration and confusion that the issue of gay marriage brings with it. What Standing On Ceremony does so elegantly is show how gay marriage is just as easy as, just as complicated as, just as worthy as, just as demanding as, just the same as, and completely different from straight marriage. There are no two marriages on this earth that are the same because there are as many ways to live on this earth as there are human beings. The two people who join their lives together define what makes the union – the two personalities melding together will create the new whole. Gay, straight – these issue and roadblocks, these milestones and hurdles are to be celebrated together. That is what defines a marriage. Standing On Ceremony explores this brilliantly.

Ultimately there will be a revolving cast with writers offering up different material so your experience may vary. Currently the show is featuring ‘The Revision‘ by Jordan Harrison, ‘This Flight Tonight‘ by Wendy MacLeod, ‘On Facebook‘ by Doug Wright, ‘My Husband‘ by Paul Rudnick,’Traditional Wedding‘ by Mo Gaffney, ‘Strange Fruit‘ by Neil LaBute, ‘The Gay Agenda‘ by Paul Rudnick, ‘London Mosquitoes‘ by Moisés Kaufman and ‘Pablo and Andrew at the Altar of Words‘ by Jose Rivera.

Conceived by Brian Shnipper and directed deftly by Stuart Ross, Standing On Ceremony couldn’t be more robust. The bookend plays both deal with the biggest lynchpin of the wedding: the vows. The first offering – Harrison’s The Revision - finds Craig Bierko and Richard Thomas hammering out a way to best use words that will reflect their union. It playfully pokes at how each line must be revised in order to correctly and accurately communicate the event (I take you to be my lawfully wedded husband turns into my domestically partnered partner). Conversely, the final play of the evening – Rivera’s Pablo and Andrew at the Altar of Words - simply allows the joy, the giddiness and the love to wash over the couple (Bierko and Mark Consuelos) and their friends (I want to lie with you in a bed of exclamation points). It is a beautiful way to end a show which, in between, shines a light into every dark corner of the issue.

Particularly hilarious is Harriet Harris, although this comes as no surprise. She is deliciously devilish as she plays both ends of the argument – in one short The Gay Agenda (written by Paul Rudnick) she plays Mary Abigail Carstairs-Sweetbuckle who is a staunch Right Wing Conservative. When attempting to welcome her gay neighbors to the community, she finds that a small gay voice has taken up residence in her head. (How did I know it was gay? Because it was bitchy!) Suddenly she is seeing gay people everywhere, in everything. Her nagging doubt leads to full blown hysteria that is as funny as it is maniacal.

Harriet Harris, Mark Consuelos

Later in Rudnick’s second offering, My Husband, Harris comes off winningly again – and once more hilarious – as Gabrielle Finkelstein – a liberal and progressive New York mother who, in the race to keep up with her friends, bemoans her gay son Michael’s single status as she watches all her other friends marry off their gay children in lavish ceremonies. (One such extravaganza had the rabbi flown in from the ceiling on a blazing chariot. “Who was the wedding planner?“ “Julie Taymor“). Michael (Mark Consuelos) reflects the exasperation of every unmarried child (gay or straight) … half wishing they could give their mother what she wants, half wishing she would just back off.

Wendy MacLeod’s This Flight Tonight and Mo Gaffney’s Traditional Wedding both pair Polly Draper and Beth Leavel who are beautiful to watch together. They have a chemistry, an ease and a natural physicality together which underscores their believability as a couple. Both plays deal with the pre-wedding jitters that can fall on a couple even after they’ve been together a long time, underscoring the fact that there’s a difference between living together as a unit and actually having that piece of paper that says you’re bound and committed to each other for the rest of your life.

On Facebook by Doug Wright unites the whole cast in a dramatization of an actual Facebook-Post-gone-mad. While possibly the least creative of the works it is also the most reflective of the times. What begins as a “let’s just agree to disagree (Smiley face!)” type exchange slowly escalates into a heated debate on the use of the word “marriage” and what it actually stands for. Ultimately the woman who is against gay marriage — or at least the use of the word “marriage” to describe a gay union — turns out to be divorced. When that irony is pointed out to her she storms off in a virtual huff.

Throughout all the laughter of the evening there were two stirring, thoughtful, emotional pieces which acted as a reminder of how far the movement has come — and how far it has still to go. Neil LaBute’s Strange Fruit takes two monologues and intertwines them; Craig Bierko and Mark Consuelos discuss meeting, falling in love, starting their relationship, deciding to marry. Their current of words moving, melding, combining until the moment when it all doesn’t quite go as planned. As you begin to see what is happening it’s like the breath is being squeezed out of you. Bierko and Consuelos are astonishing in this one.

Moises Kaufman’s London Mosquitoes is perhaps the biggest gem of all. Richard Thomas is Joe, who has lost his partner of 46 years and now stands at his memorial attempting to eulogize not only Paul, the man, but also attempting to color in the different shades of their life together. He starts from the beginning when what they did went unmentioned … when they didn’t even have a name for what they were doing. He moves on to the middle of their life together – when the AIDS epidemic swept through and took all their friends … not some, but all. He winds through the decades of their life together that saw the towers fall; just blocks away that day he and Paul stood, watching. People plummeted to their deaths and the crowd below screamed and turned away. But not Paul. “Someone needs to bear witness to their death,” he said. “I need to witness“. We see this man who is no longer alive as more vibrant because of how Joe witnessed him. In a heartbreaking moment Joe explains why Paul didn’t want to get married – what would that mean for the last 45 years of their life together? What would that have been? London Mosquitoes covers themes of love, hope, secrecy, passion, despair, loss, silence, and triumph – tying in tragedies both great and small, spiritual, profound, personal and universal. It is an utterly breathtaking, heartbreaking piece that honors in death as it also reverberates with celebration of life.

If there’s a viewpoint to be found regarding the issue of gay marriage you’ll find it in Standing On Ceremony. Each opinion is handled with truth, raw emotion, tears of joy, tears of pain, and nods of recognition. For a topic that deserves to be discussed, debated, written about, mulled over and one day agreed upon, this is the perfect place for the discussion to begin.

~~~

STANDING ON CEREMONYThe Gay Marriage Plays

Short plays by Mo Gaffney, Jordan Harrison, Moisés Kaufman, Neil LaBute, Wendy MacLeod, Jose Rivera, Paul Rudnick and Doug Wright

Conceived by Brian Shnipper

Directed by Stuart Ross

Starring Craig Bierko, Mark Consuelos, Polly Draper, Harriet Harris, Beth Leavel and Richard Thomas

Minetta Lane Theatre

18 Minetta Lane

New York , NY 10012

Click Here for tickets

‘Standing on Ceremony’ will donate a portion of all ticket sales to Freedom to Marry and other organizations promoting marriage equality.

Reasons Why “reasons to be pretty” Couldn’t Survive

Karen Tortora-Lee — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:13:15 +0000

In Memorium

This was supposed to be a review for reasons to be pretty (written by Neil LaBute, directed by Terry Kinney, starring Thomas Sadoski, Marin Ireland, Steven Pasquale and Piper Perabo). A very late review, no doubt, but not every reviewer has the luxury of seeing a Broadway show while it’s still in previews. Sometimes a reviewer needs to wait until someone wins an extra pair of tickets and graciously passes them along to her … which is how I came by my tickets. So, if you’re looking for a review I’m going to direct you to a terrific review of reasons to be pretty by David Stallings of The Fab Marquee. If you’re looking for my reasons why good shows can’t survive on The Great White Way these days, then please keep reading …

It all started last week when I got this call:

Man: Is this Karen Tortora-Lee? Me: Yes.
Man: Did you win tickets to reasons to be pretty?
Me: (nervously) … Um … yes …
Man: Well, your tickets are for the 15th …
Me: Yes …
Man: … and the show is actually closing on the 14th …
Me: OH NO!
Man: Yes … it’s true …
Me: How unexpected!
Man: So we’d like to offer you tickets on a day before the 14th … can you make it before then?
Me: Sure … oh, this is so sad! Why are you closing?
Man: Well, we were up for a Tony …
Me: RIGHT!
Man: … and we didn’t win. So, you know … we just don’t have the ticket sales now …
Me: Can I come Friday the 12th?
Man: Sure … I’ll put you down for 2 …
Me: I’m so sorry … and I’m sorry that you’re going to have to make calls like this all day. That’s awful. Man: Oh, well, that’s how it goes. But thanks.

That’s how it goes.

Ahhh, boy. This is very, very sad. Very sad. Just goes to show you that The Tonys are nothing like American Idol where Season Two runner up Clay Aiken can have a better career than Season Two “winner”, That Guy With The 205 On His Shirt. (Yeah, I had to think a while before Ruben Studdard came to mind). Heck, even a 3rd Runner Up like Season Five’s Chris Daughtry was able to have a career that made actual winner Taylor Hicks look like an accountant doing karaoke in a dive bar on his lunch hour for tips. Broadway, however, is not American Idol and it seems like the “honor of just being nominated” is not enough to get butts in seats these days … not at $100 bucks a butt. Seems like these days the only way to get people to your show is to give tickets away in a contest (Glamorous Miss X had already entered and won the contest once before. To me this smacked of desperation on the part of the show. Perennial crowd-pleaser Wicked isn’t out there giving away tickets to anyone who enters their “contest”). Oh, and for what it’s worth? I saw God of Carnage — the winning play — a few months ago. I liked it, but aside from the fact that I got to watch famous people for an hour it really didn’t move me all that much. Notice I didn’t submit a review for it …

Of course, after Friday night’s performance of reasons to be pretty it was obvious to me why this show wasn’t succeeding. Not because it was badly acted … quite the contrary. And director Terry Kinney (Okay, okay, I admit it … I’m an OZ fan, even all these years later, and to me he will always be Tim McManus) hits the mark every time. This was a high octane show with layers and layers of emotion, with no clear heroes but rather four realistic characters who uttered comments filled with such truth that they actually drew gasps from the audience.

So … why did it close? Simple: It’s not a tourist show. It’s not a kid’s show. It’s not a show based on a Mel Brooks movie or a Disney movie. And it’s not a bunch of random songs from one particular group or time period strung together around a loose “plot”. In other words … it was a real and intelligent piece of theatre, and it was meant for a real and intelligent audience. Without a famous-name celebrity in the cast (sorry, Beverly Hills Chihuahua star Piper Perabo, Coyote Ugly was a looooooooooong time ago), a familiar plot, or a toe tapping song to jolt the audience into paying attention this play was coasting on fumes.

A taste of ... home?

Having lived in NYC my whole life, and being a Broadway fan from the time I could crawl, I have endless stories about tourists coming to New York City with high expectations and the inability to tell a good restaurant from a bad one (it is for these very people that there is an Olive Garden smack in the middle of Times Square). These tourists have made the long, expensive trip. They’ve put on their fancy duds … some gals are even in their highest heels and shiniest clothes trying to “blend in” as –what TV and their imagination tells them is– a Typical New Yorker. They’ve got their show ticket and they want to be IMPRESSED. Here’s what they do NOT want to be: Challenged (by world views that don’t match their own) or Confused (by plots that are too thoughtful). They don’t want to leave the theatre after plunking down $100 bucks saying “well, I just didn’t get that at all“. This is why CATS was the longest running show on Broadway and why the Disney Cartel is eating up the theatre district one playhouse at time. Someone from Montesoda (the fictional place that includes every none-coastal American State) can go to see any one of these shows with a Japanese grandma one seat to the left and a home-schooled 6 year old one seat to the right, and sit in the darkened theatre knowing that they won’t be shocked by anything they’re about to see … or offended … or forced to learn.

A while back my husband and I had traveled to a bed and breakfast in Mystic and met a European couple making their way down the coast with NYC being their last stop. They asked us which shows we’d recommend, after they named some shows they wanted to see, or had already seen (Mary Poppins, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid …). We said that Hairspray (which was still open at the time) was a lot of fun. The woman looked at me quizzically “It won’t make any sense to me” she said, in her completely fluent English. ”Why not?” I asked. ”Because I haven’t seen the movie” she replied, and promptly opened up her “I HEART NY” Travel Guide and left me to my Eggs Benedict. So much information in so short a sentence.

I loved reasons to be pretty. I loved the rapid-fire dialogue, the layers of emotions, the way it illustrated how an entire relationship can hinge on one mis-spoken phrase. I loved how the show examined our own images of ourselves versus what those close to us see. I viscerally felt the drain a friendship can have on you when it’s run its course but neither friend bothers to let go. I had flashes of my life, of old relationships, where ex-boyfriends said the wrong thing at the wrong time and our wrong relationship fell like a house of cards. I understood how some times a waste of time can feel like a good thing because the opposite is just too scary. I also understood how bitter a pill that waste of time is to swallow when you actually do leave it and glance back at it from a different perspective.

Having said that … I agree. This was not a show for a six year old. This was not a show for a grandmother from Montesoda. The language was too quick for a high-school English As A Second Language visitor from another country. And the themes were far far too dark for a person who is only in New York for five days and has to get up early every morning in order to get the best seat on the Big Apple Bus. If you can’t knock it out of the park for all those people every night, every time … you’re not going to have them go back to their home town and recommend your show to their friends who are making the big Broadway trip themselves next summer. You’re not going to have the six year old go back to her class and bring her program (or mug, or t-shirt) to show-and-tell and make all the other kids so jealous that by the time the three o’clock bell rings they’ve all got their Can we go too? Please? Please? Please? Please …. mantra all ready to spill out of their baby-toothed mouths. You’re not going to have that busload of Japanese tourists waxing rhapsodical about that beautiful play about … four hard to understand people who scream a lot.

It’s true, a Tony win might have secured reasons to be pretty a few more months. But eventually they were going to run out of New Yorkers, and visiting people from LA, and Neil LaBute fans. And then reasons to be pretty, as good as it was, as close to perfect as a show can get, would have closed their doors just the same.

These days, that’s just how it goes.

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Standing On Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays – Before And After “I Do”

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Reasons Why “reasons to be pretty” Couldn’t Survive

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