You may think my life is all about going to shows, sitting in the dark, absorbing — going back home … writing reviews.  It is NOT.  My life is about highlighting, showcasing and celebrating the talented people of the independent entertainment world that I am lucky enough to experience.   I only know how to do that one way: by knowing their work first, and then – if it works out – by meeting them for interviews, then seeing them socially … then interviewing them again.  It helps when I can know the artist from the inside out – Know Them: Know Their Work.  In turn: Know Their Work … Understand How To Distill It To An Audience.  Voila - suddenly it’s all second nature.

Larry Kunofsky and I started out like any playwright/reviewer.  But we soon learned that we had a lot to say to each other. A LOT.  Larry is many things: a playwright, a thinker, a brilliant man.  He’s as much an interviewer as an interviewee, and that’s what makes for a good give and take.  In a few weeks The Management Theater Company will be doing his play Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary. I had a lot to ask him.  He had a lot to tell me.  As a result I ended up with a two parter – and so did you, lucky reader.  So, grab a drink and get ready to find out why New York City on a Saturday Night can be like falling down the rabbit hole, read why every relationship has an imaginary component to it,  and, if Feist gets mentioned, play some of her music as you read. That’s what the link is for.

Love the title: Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary.

Larry Kunofsky: Thanks, Karen. I won’t deny it, some of my titles are pretty nifty. I’ll let people like you speak to the merits of the plays themselves, but I hope that you and your readers will indulge me my little self-back-patting when it comes to Title-Pride.

If a play is sex, then a good title is foreplay. And if giving good foreplay is my legacy, I’ll accept my lot in life.

And we’re off!

Truthfully, Larry – How many imaginary boyfriends do you think are floating around out there? I bet in New York alone there are THOUSANDS. What’s your ballpark figure?

LK: I’ve never met any adult who has admitted to having an imaginary boyfriend or girlfriend. I think there are probably scores of undocumented cases of such things, but how would we quantify this? It’s kind of like trying to find out how many people cheat on their taxes.

Wait. Just got an idea for a play. An Internal Emotional Revenue Service that documents the love that we feel for others. A society in which intimacy is taxed. And your imaginary boyfriends need to be declared. That could be the next play… written by somebody else. That’s a terrible idea!

Frankly, I’ve heard worse.

LK: Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary is not really about imaginary people. And in general, I’m much more interested in how we imagine our actual partners to be. Y’know what I mean?

No.  Tell me more.

LK: Whenever friends talk to me about their partners, it always feels so intimate, since I will never see their partners the way that they do. And perhaps we never really know how our significant others talk about us, so we ourselves are always alien to the imaginary versions of us. And then – not that I’m conducting any kind of social experiment here, but it is something that I notice a lot – I find myself comparing my firsthand knowledge of the boyfriend or girlfriend or Otherfriend in question to the version of this same person as described to me by their partners. This can often create a fascinating disconnect.

I think that even the most aware and truthful and pragmatic of lovers can’t help but impose their own meaning of their partners onto their actual partners. So, in essence, all our boyfriends and girlfriends and friends in general are imaginary, because we sometimes see the idealized version of them, and sometimes (maybe when we’re cranky and having arguments in the middle of the street; although I’ve never been party to such base behavior) we see our partners in the most hypercritical and uncomplimentary ways.

But the key to any adult relationship is getting to know the other person beyond our own perspective. It’s a yin-and-yang thing. You need to split the difference between how you see the one you love and how the one you love sees her-/himself. To love and to be loved in any meaningful way involves factoring in all these versions of one another and striving towards our most truthful selves.

I think I was putting something together there, but it all fell apart like Jenga. My brain just slapped me in the face.

No no … it stuck.  Not every Jenga brick fell to the ground. Okay.  So, theoretically, everyone is imaginary when they’re being thought of more highly than they are, or demonized somehow … the real person is somewhere in the middle of the huge pendulum swing.  I  got it.

So then, what’s going on here then? What makes everyone suspicious that this boyfriend may be imaginary? Tell me a little bit about this play and what made you write it.

LK: Ah, now I can just plug the bejeebus out of this play!

Great!

You’re Welcome, The Management!

Thanks, Karen – you’re good.

Okay.

“It’s a busy, happening Saturday night in the Big City, and everyone we know is having a party in their apartment. Apartments! Parties! People! Music! Dancing! Cell Phones! Flashbulbs! Making Out! Longing.”

Those are the opening stage directions for the script of Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary.

We’re following Marci, a woman of good character but of low standing in the society and mini-societies within this play, as she goes from party after party looking for her missing boyfriend, or at the very least, some information that would lead her to find her boyfriend.

It’s kind of like Alice in Wonderland, if Alice were an adult, had a boyfriend, couldn’t find him, and jumped into the Rabbit Hole that is all the parties that people are having in the Big City on a happening Saturday night.

I love that.

LK: Everyone Marci encounters apologizes to her for being so busy and so out of touch. At first it seems that Marci has failed to connect with the other people in her life, but along her search, we see that everyone around her is failing and failing again to connect with anyone and everyone.

And the more Marci enquires into the whereabouts of this boyfriend that no one has ever met, the more people suspect that Marci doesn’t really have a boyfriend.

And so not only does Marci need to find her boyfriend, she has to find someone who believes her, or believes in her. And the more “clues” that she discovers about her missing boyfriend, the more Marci realizes that she’s not only looking for where her boyfriend is, but also, and even more importantly, who her boyfriend is. And these questions make her wonder who she, herself is, and where she is right now, within her own life.

It’s funny.

It’s sad.

It has mysteries and discoveries.

It has love between boyfriends and girlfriends, and it also has love within relationships that we don’t even have names for yet.

That’s Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary.

Thank you for asking.

Really.

I’m so proud of The Management and the phenomenal ensemble for this production.

When I hear “your boyfriend may be imaginary” to me, that’s a very different subtext than “You’re lying! You don’t have a boyfriend!” It’s actually very gentle, cautious … like you’re approaching the person with a comfy blanket and some cocoa, hoping not to disturb the fantasy. Am I wrong? Are the people in this play warm, fuzzy blanket people trying to help, or are they those buzz kills just trying to be balloon poppers?

LK: This question speaks so much to my philosophy on how to be a real friend.

My mother always used to say, whenever anyone screwed up or said or did something stupid: “They mean well.” And the older I get, the more I do appreciate good intentions, and I really do see her point as deeply compassionate and forgiving.

But I also can’t deny that I find the well intentioned among us to be somewhat oppressive when they try to help us in the way they think we need to be helped (or loved, or treated in general), rather than in the way that we want them or need them to. It’s like asking someone for the time, and they give you instructions on how to build a watch.

Ha!

LK: So this is a play about someone who needs something very specific from people, but who is mostly given the other person’s version of what they think she needs, rather than what she’s asking for.

And Marci, our heroine, seems to have a long history of not getting what she really needs from people. But since she needs to find her boyfriend, she forces herself to ask others for help. The fact that most people in Marci’s life don’t help her is (I think) among the funniest and most poignant aspects of the play, but the ultimate challenge for Marci is to allow others to help her in their way until she can find someone who can help her in her way. And I think that’s a challenge for all of us. Often what people give us is not really what we need from them, but it helps if you accept what people give you, just the same. At least some of the time. Because, like my mom says, “they mean well.”

There’s a song on Feist’s latest album that goes “When you comfort me / It doesn’t bring me comfort, actually.”

And I suspect that the subtext of this song is that the First Person Narrator is missing out on something profound.

My theory is that this person (and I somehow cannot accept that Feist is singing about herself here. I’m not entirely sure why, but I have a lot of strong feelings about Feist in general, so bear with me) refuses to face the challenge of being comforted.

Perhaps how we expect or want to be comforted is too complacent, and we have to get past an outmoded comfort zone in order to find true comfort.

Isn’t that a fascinating paradox?  (It is.) Do you have Feist’s email address? (I don’t.) She needs to know about this right away!   (Maybe she’s reading this …? Possibly? We have a lot of readers !)

The main characters in my plays are usually so put-upon in their struggles for basic kindness, intimacy, understanding, that this struggle (which I admit, seems on the surface to be common and ordinary) is, in itself, heroic.

It’s my way of turning the mundane into an Epic Quest. Because I always find the struggles of someone as seemingly ordinary as Marci in her search for her boyfriend to be far more compelling than someone like Sir Galahad searching for the Holy Grail. That’s just how I’m wired.

By the end of the play (Spoiler Alert: This is NOT a Spoiler!) Marci finds someone she can help and from whom she learns to accept help and comfort and intimacy and companionship in return.

Wow, that sounds really nice!

I was going to say that Larry.  So I will: That sounds really nice!

LK: Not all of my plays have happy endings.

This play has a lot of happiness in it. But I think people will cry at the end.

Maybe that makes me sound like I think I’m All-That-and-a-bag-of-chips (as if! Wait, who am I right now? I don’t really talk like this!), (You don’t.  But you’re on a roll. ) but when I see the lovely actors in this powerful ensemble really BRINGING IT in rehearsals, I get a little verklempt myself.

So bring a hankie to Under St. Marks.

But the good thing is, it’s a Happy Cry.

And sometimes we all need a good Happy Cry.

Sometimes?  I need a good Happy Cry every other Thursday.  So, looks like I can put away my Barry Manilow Somewhere Down The Road 45 the week I’m going to see your show.

Okay.  Moving on.

I’ve seen 2 of your plays so far: The Myths We Need – or – How To Begin and The Un-Marrying Project. On the surface both those plays were acres away from each other in terms of theme, but at the heart of it the pulse that drew the audience in was the 1:1 relationship between two people be it man and woman, man and man or woman and woman. So, would you say that Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary is similar?

Meaning – probably looks and feels different from your other works but has the same heart?

LK: This question makes me reflect deeply on the past year, Karen.

I haven’t known you all that long (even though we’ve become fast friends; a phenomenon that should happen more often between playwrights and reviewers! I mean, it’s one thing to give your friend’s work a good review, but it’s another to become good friends with someone whose work you respect and admire. And on the other end of that equation, it’s easy for me to let you in on my creative process, because I actually like talking to you and hanging out with you), but Boyfriend will be the third play of mine produced in NYC within a single year.

That’s very rare. I’m not sure I’ll be so privileged again anytime soon.

This fills me with both pride and humility.

I have some anxiety about the future of Purple Rep, my theatre company, and I also have some anxiety about finding more opportunities for myself as a playwright beyond my own company (and beyond New York City, for that matter).

But ultimately, when you’ve collaborated with the kind of talented people I’ve worked with this past year, you get really hungry for that kind of work and for those kinds of working relationships.

It freaks me out a little (not knowing where my next creative “meal” is coming from), but it also helps me focus on working for what I know will feed me, creatively – keeps my head in the game.

Maybe that was a bit of a tangent, but it was worth reflecting upon.

These three plays are a good cross-section of the kind of work that I do as a playwright.

The Un-Marrying Project plays with form (is it a film or a play or a film-within-a-play?) and is among the most politically engaged of my plays (it deals with the fight for Marriage Equality. And now it’s a “period piece,” at least in New York, but I feel that this play continues to be relevant in the questions it asks about political activism itself (particularly now, in the age of the Occupy movement), as well as the questions that the play asks of us beyond politics, as in: What does it mean to be together with someone? What does it mean to separate from someone you’ve been with for a long time? When the obstacles against connection with others are external, how does this change our internal harmony with others? And what happens when we do get what we want, politically, artistically, romantically?

The Myths We Need – or – How To Begin plays with language. It’s written in something I like to call Ole Timey Talk. And it’s part of my cycle of biblical plays, The Genesis Tapestries, which dramatizes, reinterprets, and sometimes challenges themes from the Old Testament. The plays in this cycle might seem, on the surface, to be my least personal, since they take place in different times and places than where I am in my own life, but in many ways this long-term, ongoing project comprises my most personal work, in that I’m stretching the canvas, painting in broad strokes, and seeing how these ancient stories and themes reflect my own life, and vice versa.

Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary might seem to be the most conventional of these three plays. It has some social satire in it, but it’s basically a character-driven comedy. It’s probably most similar to my play What To Do When You Hate All Your Friends – an anti-social comedy then any of my other work. (Both plays have a bunch of parties in them, and both plays deal with the weird hierarchies we place on our friendships, relationships, and social circles), but it does play with form (more on that later), and may not be political in any way, but does ask questions about how we as individuals interact within our community, and it does play with language, in that everyone speaks in this play in what I call Bi-Polar Speak, all run-on speech, and breathless syntactical (il)logic, but ultimately, all these plays are about how we love.

We all love. And we all love differently. And in many ways we all love badly. Or, at best, we don’t love enough, or we don’t love well enough. But there is hope that we can love better. That is, in essence, what I am always, always, always writing about.

That was the long answer to your question.

Here is the short answer:

Yes.

~~~

Can’t get enough of Larry Kunofsky?  Neither can I.  That was part 1.  Part 2 is coming up soon.  It’s just as funny, thoughtful, moving and minxy as this was.  So … grab another drink, stay tuned, and get ready for more of the same (but completely different)!

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Related Posts:

• Larry Kunofsky Take 2 … Still Imaginative – Nowhere Near Imaginary
• The Myths We Need -Or- How To Begin: The Play You Need To See
• The Un-Marrying Project: Passion Is Easy – Commitment Is Hard
• The Team Behind “Gay Plays For Straight People (And Also Gay People)” Gives Me Some Straight Answers (And Also Some Gay Answers)
• Your Boyfriend May Be Imaginary – A Epic Quest Through Another Hundred People

Meet Simon and Kim – passionate. About their cause (we’ll get to that in a moment), about each other (when we meet them they’re taking a cozy bath together) and about their work which (currently) is a documentary film they’re shooting called The Un-Marrying Project.  As it stands, this play IS the film.  Or is it the other way around?

So passionate are they about their work, their relationship and their cause that it all blends together for them in one big ball of “Here we are!  Simon and Kim!” (Exclaimed in unison, no less.  Well … after some practice).  They’re so deeply connected that they even have joint panic attacks.  (Awwww – cute).  But is all this passion enough to get them through their act of civil disobedience – The Un-Marrying Project: documenting the process of several married couples who willingly get un-married (yes, also known as divorced) in the name of protest … living apart until ALL people can be married EVERYWHERE?  In other words … they’ve decided that until Gay Marriage is legal, no marriage should be valid and several brave couples are taking up the cause, allowing their journey to be filmed.  So here’s the question … can they all stay committed to the cause?  To the film?  To each other?  Is their committment as strong as their passion?

In The Un-Marrying Project writer Larry Kunofsky has taken a controversial matter and then turned it inside out.  This is no easy topic and Kunofsky doesn’t gloss over any of it.  With the overarching premise  being that we’re watching two documentary film makers (Documentarians!) create a record for posterity, we gain access into nooks of participants lives in ways that perhaps they wouldn’t be so quick to divulge.

Abraham Amkpa, Diana Oh, Bill Weeden, Brian Miskell, Katie Atcheson, Nic Grelli, & Jolly Abraham

Participating in Simon (Nic Grelli) and Kim’s (Jolly Abraham) documentary are several couples of varying ages, backgrounds, and even sexual orientations.  What’s refreshing is that Simon and Kim chose to include (and by that I mean Larry Kunofsky chose to write) same-sex couples who married legally in Massachusetts which says a lot for how this play is going to cover the topic.  All these couples have agreed to physically and legally separate, living apart for a year (which is how long you must be legally separated in New York State to get a divorce) in the name of Gay Marriage  - they won’t re-marry until everyone can get married.  As Simon and Kim admit right up front “We haven’t really figured out an ending for our documentary yet.” And therein lies the beauty of this play.  Because, of course … it shows that while everyone wants to do SOMETHING, there are ramifications that can’t always be foreseen, let alone taken into account or planned for.  So what happens when a handful of people who want to do good make a radical move fueled only by their passion for the cause?

After a community of voices throws out all the verbal imagery surrounding the issue – both pro and con – (everything from “Come on, People! A woman married a roller coaster! It’s time to let people marry people!” to “Only people are this perverted! Animals aren’t gay! They have normal sex.”) we begin to meet the couples who are Un-Marrying for the sake of change.

First up is are the Kramms (Bill Weeden and Katie Atcheson) - an elderly couple married in 1941 who are excited to join the project in an effort to break free of their  WASP-y Westchester mores.  They are “fairly certain” that gays live in Westchester … they just haven’t run across any.  With their only son deceasd they find themselves the last of their bloodline and feel moved to do something … and so they choose to spend their twilight years as activists participating in this project.

Diana Oh, Bill Weeden, & Brian Miskell

Next we meet Ephraim & Tzipora, (Brian Miskell and Diana Oh) a young Jewish couple from Teaneck New Jersey who are deeply religious, but only recently. “Kind of like Born Again Christians. But also actually nothing like Born Again Christians.” Having come from a more worldly background they have more experience with all types of people. While they know that  being gay is against the Torah they’ve also “seen enough of the world to know that loving your neighbor for any good they do is more important than hating them for anything bad they do”.

The third pair is Janos & Andy, (Abraham Amkpa and Brian Miskell) a Brooklyn gay couple who were legally married in the State of Massachusetts.  They recognize they’re the lucky ones who had the resources to cross the state lines in order to get married.  So in solidarity for those not as fortunate, they’re un-marrying.

The next couple is Maggie & Wendy (Katie Atcheson and Diana Oh). They’re lesbians – also hailing from Brooklyn, also legally married in Massachusetts, who are divorcing in the original spirit of civil rights.

The final couple are Peter & Hope (Abraham Amkpa and Katie Atcheson).  They are perhaps the least likely of the group to be participating; Peter is a blowhard and Hope is a passive follower who diverts the awkward moments of the dinner party with bland non-sequiturs, but Peter’s brother (now deceased) was gay (“A homo” as Peter refers to him) and their support of the project is as misguided as their marriage but equally as necessary to commemorating Henry’s memory.

Oh, and there are some dream sequences involving Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins too (Abraham Amkpa and Katie Atcheson again).  We’ll get to that later.  (Maybe).

From here, Kunofsky does an amazing job of weaving a story that starts with the brilliant fire of newly sparked passion which then quickly (or not so quickly, depending on the couple) turns into something a little less than ideal.  After all, the notion of not just talking the talk but walking the walk is a very powerful one – and each couple gets enlivened by the idea of doing something to aid the cause.  However, committing to the act is where things become difficult.  Divorce as a choice for two people who are no longer in love is hard enough on the psyche … now have that process invoked upon two people who are actually still quite in love or at the very least certainly not OUT of love and the effects can be devastating.  How often have we, as human beings, seen something from this end of the situation -working two jobs, serving on a committee, taking in an ailing parent- and said “I can handle it!  I’ll manage”.  Its the very core of “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”  And as The Un-Marrying Project progresses all the couples involved – including the big ball of ”Here we are!  Simon and Kim!” find themselves and their situations changing as their “flesh” becomes weak … and sometimes even their spirit.

The progress – and the ending  - make a very powerful statement about exactly how necessary it is to twist your own life around in order to help a greater cause.

The cast of merely seven are one of the strongest ensembles I’ve ever seen assembled as they all pull at least triple duty with a few smaller roles for each as well.  There were actual moments when I was convinced that someone new had joined the ensemble mid-way even though I knew it was someone I’d been watching the whole time.  Not only do each of the actors have to juggle multiple roles, they must convincingly move from being partnered in a loving straight relationship in one scene to a loving gay relationship in the next with the same intensity, chemistry and believability.  To single out one actor or character would be a disservice to the others – though this is an ensemble cast helmed by two strong main characters this is really more like a series of individual showcases.  Under Rachel Eckerling’s intuitive direction each actor brings Kunofsky’s wonderful script to an even higher level, and in turn they each simultaneously win (as well as break) your heart.

The Un-Marrying Project is a story of triumph.  It is a story of trials.  It is a story of trying to do what’s right when what’s right isn’t necessarily what’s best for two people.  And ultimately, The Un-Marrying Project is one of the most intelligent, entertaining, enlightening, innovative pieces of theatre I’ve seen in a long time.  This one is not to be missed.

~~~

Click Here for tickets

Related Posts:

• The Team Behind “Gay Plays For Straight People (And Also Gay People)” Gives Me Some Straight Answers (And Also Some Gay Answers)
• Larry Kunofsky – Unimaginably Imaginative. But NOT Imaginary – Take 1
• Magic Trick – Baring It All (Fringe Festival 2012)
• The Foreplay Play – What Comes Before
• Larry Kunofsky Take 2 … Still Imaginative – Nowhere Near Imaginary

Gay Plays for Straight People (and also gay people) is comprised of two plays which will play in rep brought to you by the new theatre company Purple Rep founded by playwrights Larry Kunofsky and Mariah MacCarthy.  The plays - Kunofsky’s The Un-Marrying Project and MacCarthy’s The All-American Genderf*ck Cabaret – will run from April 8-30 at The Paradise Factory (64 East 4th Street between 2nd Ave and Bowery).

Larry  and Mariah took some time to answer my questions and give me some straight answers (and also some not-just-straight answers) about what they’re passionate about, how they explore the fuckupedness of both genders, what it means, exactly, to be “un-married”, and how they intend to keep blending it all up in an effort to keep it Purple.  Read on …

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s get right into the title. Gay Plays for Straight People (and also gay people).  So – really … everyone, right?  Transgendered, Bi, Bi Curious … poly amorous … even those who are abstinent for personal reasons or just because that’s the cards they were dealt.  So tell me how you came up with that title.
Mariah: We both had these plays we were really passionate about. One is about married people divorcing in the name of gay marriage, and one is about the limitations of gender norms. That’s a lot of queer themes swirling around, but roughly two thirds of our characters are straight and we’re a “straight” couple, which gave us the “gay plays for straight people” idea. But, let’s face it, there’s already plenty of “gay” culture that’s really for straight people, or has been whitewashed to make it “palatable” for straight people, and that’s not what these plays are. These plays come from a real passionate place, as allies and, for me, as a pansexual woman who just happens to be in love with a man. And we want to make sure that the community for whom we are allies knows that these plays are for them. So we added “and also gay people.”But, yes, these plays are absolutely for everyone. Genderf*ck‘s characters, for a start, are gay, lesbian, heteroflexible, genderqueer, and straight–and some of them have not had sex in a longtime, or ever. And the characters in The Un-Marrying Project are gay, straight, WASPs in their 80s, Orthodox Jews, working-class Bronx families, wealthy immigrants, Long Island Italians…you get the idea. These are gay plays for everybody.

Larry: If there’s a link between Mariah’s work as a playwright and my work as a playwright – even before we get into what Purple Rep is about – that link is about Sex and Identity. All our plays are about sex, and there’s usually a fair amount of sex in them. Even if it’s not onstage sex (which does occur, too) it’s the notion that sex has simply MADE these characters.

We’re born from sex and we come alive again on a whole other level whenever we have sex. That’s in ALL our plays! And then there’s identity.  Maybe all plays are about a protagonist searching for who he/she is, and our plays can certainly be seen through this lens. Which brings us to Gay Plays For Straight People (And Also Gay People). Hetero- or Homosexuality is not just about choice or how someone is wired, but also about how someone perceives oneself and is perceived. And we are celebrating this. Sometimes sex and identity issues can be oppressive, so we’re not proselytizing about any aspect of this spectrum (we want to look at and write about all of this as comprehensively as possible), but we think that this kind of fluidity within the too often rigid societal expectations on an individual can be liberating. Something that Mariah & I kept saying to each other to make this clear when we were rewriting our plays was, Gay Is A Color. I tried using that as a line in my play, but it never quite fit. But Purple Rep is about all kinds of colors.

The All-American Genderfuck Cabaret features “eight gender stereotypes”.  How stereotypical are they?  Like … the slut, theprude, the metrosexual, the jock … or will it take some work for the audience to pick them out?
Mariah: You’ll be able to figure it out pretty quickly. You have a Feminine Woman, a Feminine Man, a Masculine Woman, a Masculine Man, a Gay Woman, a Gay Man, a Promiscuous Woman, and a Promiscuous Man. Which translates roughly into Girly Girl, Nice Guy/Metrosexual, Tomboy, Meathead, Feminist Lesbian, Gay Best Friend, Slut, and Player. The play is definitely set up to help you figure these labels out as quickly as possible–so that we can then transcend them, and learn what contradicts or lies beneath these labels.

The Happiest Medium just wrapped up a series on Women’s History Month.  Ispecifically asked women how gender played a role in how they’ve been treated in their chosen paths.  The answers ran the gamut.  So I ask the same question here, but a little differently – will Genderfuck deal with the fuck-upedness found in both genders, or does it lean alittle to one … and if so, which one?
Mariah: Ooh. Love this question! Short answer: Yes, there is fuck-upedness in both genders, and this play definitely tries to explore both. Being a woman, I probably spend more time exploring the fuck-upedness of femininity/the myth of “female identity,” but maybe not–maybe that’s all in my head. This play has been performed before, a year ago, and a lot of men told me how strongly they related to it. When it comes to sex especially, we’re all caught in sort of a weird dance: pursuing/having sex can make us feel special and happy and joyful, or it can make us feel bored and disappointed that it didn’t fix our lives and whiten our teeth and balance our checkbook or whatever we thought it was going to do. And this experience in America is often different for men and women. A statistic I heard about five years ago continues to haunt me: when surveyed, women’s most common fear was being raped and/or murdered, while men’s most common fear was being laughed at. I think a lot of the play comes from the exploration of those fears.

Really, the play is about how we all have infinite choices. If you want to wear a dress, you can. If you wear a dress because you feel pressured to do so but don’t really like it, don’t wear one. If you want to have sex, you should. If you want to stop having sex because for whatever reason it’s not enjoyable for you right now, you should. If you feel like you’re a man or a woman or both or neither or something else, be that. It’s all about what will make you feel happy and connected and sexy.

Mariah MacCarthy and Larry Kunofsky (Photo by Marissa Bea)

 

The second part of the Gay Plays For Straight People (And Also Gay People) is The Un-Marrying Project.  It deals with straight married people who are “un marrying” in support of gay marriage … and not re-marrying until it’s legal for everyone. Larry, tell me how this idea came to you.
Larry: I’ve been happily unmarried my whole adult life. But even though I’ve known that marriage was not my deal since forever, it is a right that our laws seem to withhold from a specific class of people and I truly am outraged by this. My patron saint in thinking about how to respond to this issue has been Rosa Parks. A brave and intelligent, but ultimately, by her own admission, a very ordinary person who broke the law in a very simple way that helped change the world. My initial impulse in writing this play was in looking at well-meaning people who would de-marry, if you will, as a similar type of civil disobedience. But that brought me to the notion of how disruptive any deviation from the norm can be. There’s danger in making waves – sometimes people drown. I tend to idolize the individuals behind the civil rights movements of the sixties. I do believe that – with Gandhi as their model – they were hoping for a bloodless revolution. The tragedy was how bloody this bloodless revolution was. And most of the blood seemed to be shed on the side of the just. But ask any survivors if they regret it…

If you two were married, would you actually commit this “act of civil disobedience” if you knew it could bring about change?
Mariah: Yes. We’d do fucking anything if we knew it could bring about change.

Larry: I don’t claim to be a brave or adventurous person, but when I look back at my early years of grade school, my main regret is not getting into trouble enough. I must confess, as an adult, I spend most of my time looking for trouble. That might explain why my past theatre companies broke up and why I’ve been fired from a lot of jobs, but choice and freedom is about calling people (and more importantly, institutions) on their bullshit. So it’s like that early Brando movie, where he’s a biker, and someone asks him, What are you rebelling against, and he’s, like, “Whattya got?!” I’m all for that.

Purple Rep is a relatively new company.  I love your mission statement:” … plays that make you see red and hear the blues … until it all mixes in your mind’s eye into a purple rush.” That’s a tall order.What plans do you have to keep this strong mission alive?
Mariah: We plan to keep writing. Purple Rep will eventually do plays by people other than Larry Kunofsky and Mariah MacCarthy, but we started this company because we wanted to do each other’s work. Our work, while vastly different from each other, come from our hearts and guts. I once had a writing teacher ask me, after I brought in a scene with lots of punching in it, “Do you want to hit people?” I immediately responded, “Yes.” I think sometimes I write plays instead of hitting people.

Yet I consider myself a compassionate writer–and often, that compassion just adds sadness to that rage. When we sympathize with a rapist or an abuser or a cheater or a liar or a murderer, that’s tragedy. We know we could have been them under different circumstances, so whatever happens to them could happen to us. So that rage and compassionate-sadness–that seeing-red, hearing-blue thing–is characteristic of a lot of our work.  And so are our senses of humor–all that rage and sadness won’t sink in unless an audience laughs with you first. We really consider these plays especially to be great expressions of joy. So, we intend to keep doing plays that have their share of red and blue and laughs.

Larry: That’s such a vital question! Right now we’re hoping to stay afloat through THIS mini-season, but we are trying to see what our next mini-season, or the one after that will look like. Basically, we’re trying to explore how we put the REP in PURPLE REP. This time around we shared the same space and the same designers, sure, but perhaps we’ll do a mini-season with one shared director. Maybe we’ll do one shared cast. We want to constantly re-define what our REP is. And PURPLE is clearly about sexuality this time, but next time… PURPLE can be about race; about the body; about the blending of all kinds of themes. PURPLE is a rorschach color for us, and we’re looking at ways to look at Purple in new ways. Maybe that sounds a little Art School, but to paraphrase something I said earlier, Theatre is a color. We’re testing out the hues and shades through which we can continue participating in this medium.

Thanks for answering these questions!  Looking forward to seeing the shows!

Larry: Thank you! These questions were Purple to begin with! You’re One Of Us!!!!!!

I’m honored to be one of you.  Can’t wait to see the shows!

~~~

The All-American Genderf*ck Cabaret

The Un-Marrying Project

The Paradise Factory

64 E. 4th St.

New York, NY 10003

United States

 

 

 

Related Posts:

• The Un-Marrying Project: Passion Is Easy – Commitment Is Hard
• Larry Kunofsky – Unimaginably Imaginative. But NOT Imaginary – Take 1
• The All-American Genderf*ck Cabaret – Equal Opportunity Exploration
• Larry Kunofsky Take 2 … Still Imaginative – Nowhere Near Imaginary
• The Myths We Need -Or- How To Begin: The Play You Need To See