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PLAY FOR GAY
The world might be a stage, but some stages are bigger than others, writes Phil Scott.
I was talking to two friends the other day about Gayplays. These are plays written by, for, and often starring, gay men in their teens or thirties. There were some on during Mardi Gras this year, as there are most years.
I quite like Gayplays. I was in one once, called The Gathering of Vampires. We had a disastrous opening night. One of the mainstream reviewers said: “I thought it was over after the first act. When I realised it wasn’t, I went home anyway.” I am pleased to report that a few years later that critic had one of his own theatre pieces produced, and it lost an absolute fortune. No producer will touch him now. Karma strikes again!
One of my friends started to rubbish the Gayplay genre. “They’re all the same,” he quipped. “They’re always about a couple getting bored with each other, who pick up a trick for a threesome and then one of them falls for the newcomer and they fight and split up and get back together and it’s all such a big deal.”
“No,” said my other friend, “they’re about a young boy who falls in love with his straight school friend and agonises over it and then the friend turns out to be gay.”
“Yeah,” answered the first, “that too. The straight guy always ends up gay.”
I detected the tang of sour grapes. Who hasn’t fallen for a straight friend now and then, and indulged in a little worthless fantasising?
“Those scenarios happen in real life,” I suggested, “don’t they?”
“Well,” said Friend 1, “the other thing is the actors. The ones who are supposed to be hot are always dogs. And the hot ones can’t act.
“And there’s always gratuitous nudity.”
“Wait a minute,” I argued. “Why is nudity gratuitous in a bedroom or a seduction scene? I prefer that to the ‘gratuitous underwear in bed’ option.”
“Don’t you wear underwear to bed?” asked Friend 2.
“Sometimes, but not two pairs of really tight underpants one on top of the other.”
The thing about male nudity onstage is: it’s variable. Not only from actor to actor, but with the same actor from one scene to the next. You’re always nervous when you first walk out there, and nerves can reveal themselves in all sorts of little ways. So then you overcompensate. Funny how nobody stands backstage trying to make their ears or nose look bigger before they face the crowd.
Blowing Whistles was the Gayplay last month downstairs at Belvoir. It’s one of the couple/threesome kind, but it worked because the emotional responses of the characters rang true.
All three actors in it could act, the one who was supposed to be hot really was (actually they were all pretty cute), and the nudity was perfectly justified. I didn’t leave at interval and neither did the critics.
So maybe the problem isn’t Gayplays but Badplays. They turn up anywhere. Sometimes they’re so bad, nobody even strips off in them.
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Opinion 
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