Own Your Inner Homophobe

Michele Bachmann is, quite simply, a twat of exponential proportion. Now, before the feminists go wild, I mean that in the British sense of a derogatory insult, a pejorative meaning a fool, synonymous with the word twit and not the more vulgar euphemism for a certain part of the female anatomy. And she is. And I challenge anyone to argue the point.

All one had to do was watch Bachmann’s little performance on Sunday’s Meet the Press, during which she evaded nearly every direct question on LGBT issues raised by host David Gregory, to fully grasp this concept. Repeating what must be the new Republican mantra of “I am running for the presidency of the United States” over and over again like a stoned Stepford wife in answer to almost every question posed by the journalist, Bachmann came across looking like a bona fide caricature of America’s other favorite conservative sound bite whore, Sarah (“I can see Russia from my house!”) Palin.

But, please, don’t take my liberal-leaning word for it. Watch for yourself:



Now, setting aside for a moment the contemptibility of the few comments she did make and what her refusal to answer specific questions communicated, it’s her caginess that really irks me. Listen, if you are going to be a bigoted, gay-hating, homophobic hypocrite with a closet-case husband who runs a clinic that engages in conversion therapy (and accepts government dollars to do it), then (wo)man-up and own it. Don’t sit there with that smug little plastic grin on your face and pretend you’re getting one over on the American people – well, at least the ones with an ounce of critical thinking skills. Sadly, there will undoubtedly be a handful of supporters (from the Westboro Baptist Church, no doubt) who will buy into her shtick, but the majority of conservatives must have winced during that segment of Sunday’s show. Seriously, while I’m tickled as pink as Sherlock from The Magic Garden that someone as outrageously inept as Bachmann has sashayed onto the national stage in her Manolo Blahniks, you got to ask yourself: Is this really the best that the Republican Party has to offer?

And, just so there are no claims of partisanship on my part levied, I’ll go on record as saying this tendency of our politicos – regardless of their party affiliation – to dodge, hedge, and sidestep questions has risen to the level of an art form and needs to stop. We need to demand real answers to our real questions. Journalists need to practice journalism again and not worry about incurring future favor with the public relations machines that bring guests – and thereby ratings – to their shows. Media outlets need to worry less about making journalism sexy and bring back hard-hitting investigative reporting. Most importantly, we, as news consumers, need to stop accepting the journalistic drek that we’re fed through the mainstream network news outlets.

As for Bachmann, we needn’t worry. Even with the shortcomings of modern journalism, you can smell the excrement of her message from a mile away wearing nose plugs. Her campaign will implode once hubby Marcus is caught in a public restroom sting or the photos of him and one of his rentboy travel companions come to light or – as they always do. Or she’ll choke on her next corndog and no one at the state fair will know the Heimlich Maneuver.

Either way, this woman will never make it near the White House. Count on it.

Corndoggin' with the Bachmann's

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

The Glory of 'Unnatural Acts'

Unnatural Acts: Harvard’s Secret Court of 1920 is the story about – really – one man’s vision and determination to bring a hidden piece of history from the darkness into the light. To understand the labor of love that this play has been for the creative forces behind it, a brief history of the project:

Unnatural Acts is the brainchild of Tony Speciale and concerns a secret cadre of Harvard University administrators who launched a campus-wide witch hunt into the private lives of its students that resulted in the expulsion of a group of promising young gay men and several subsequent suicides in the 1920s. After reading journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis’ account of the real-life events in a 2003 OUT Magazine article and being further inspired by Yale alumnus William Wright’s 2005 book Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals (St. Martin’s Press), Speciale – along with fellow Columbia University MFA candidates Nick Norman and Heather Denyer – gained access to these Secret Court documents held in the Harvard archives in 2006. After Denyer photocopied and meticulously decoded all 500 pages of the fragmentary archival documents, playwright Norman began to write scenes using the Secret Court testimonies and correspondence as his primary source material.

After nearly three years of setbacks – including Norman’s early withdrawal from the project – Speciale continued to tirelessly massage the source material and explore ways to dramatize the story of the Secret Court. In the spring of 2009 – having graduated from Columbia with an MFA in directing and landing a gig as Associate Artistic Director at the Classic Stage Company in New York’s East Village – Speciale and Denyer reconnected and decided to revive the project under a new group collaborative model. The Harvard Project – the play’s initial working title – went through another rigorous round of intense research, improvisational exercises with a newly configured collective of actors and technical crew (dubbed the Plastic Theater) during a five-week period in August of 2009. At the end of this first workshop, a new story structure began to take shape and an entirely new draft of the play was written.

Speciale and his multidisciplinary company presented The Harvard Project shortly after as a staged reading before an audience of more than 200 at The East Thirteenth Theater in New York. Following audience feedback solicited via an electronic questionnaire, a second workshop ensued; this time, the focus of the play expanded to include not only the institutional prejudice suffered by the men of Perkins 28 – which references the dormitory room of undergraduate Ernest Weeks Roberts where the men gathered – but also how their personal relationships buckled under the intense public scrutiny and emotional weight of the scandal. A few short weeks later, a second staged reading took place.

Buoyed by audience reactions to the two staged readings, the ensemble regrouped for a third and final workshop – with the play undergoing a title change. A third staged reading of the newly dubbed Fair Harvard was presented. By April of 2010, Speciale was fielding options to produce the play. It was ultimately his own employer – Classic Stage Company – who committed to producing Fair Harvard, with the stipulation that the ensemble brainstormed a new title.

In May of 2010, Classic Stage Company announced that Unnatural Acts: Harvard’s Secret Court of 1920 would be the crowning jewel of its 2010-2011 season. An official website for the production launched later that same month with the goal of raising $100,000 to cover production costs. The play made its official off-Broadway bow on June 23rd of this year. The show opened to critical acclaim and it enjoyed several extensions before coming to a close on July 31st. Having had the distinct pleasure – no, privilege – of seeing Unnatural Acts on the night before it closed that weekend, it’s easy to see why and one of those rare times when something lived up to the hype surrounding it. (This year’s “it” musical The Book of Mormon also comes to mind.) Not surprisingly, word on the street is that the show’s entire off-Broadway run has been circled by commercial producers who have been gauging the show’s viability for a bigger (Read: Broadway) future outing.

For the uninitiated, live theater has the power to be a transformative experience. It’s the one performance medium where no one – not the audience members, not the actors, not the stage crew – knows the exact outcome of a particular performance. And each outcome can be a tad different, with each night’s performance being slightly nuanced by the onstage chemistry of the ensemble, or unforeseen technical glitches, or an audience’s energy being unexpectedly strong – or weak – on a particular night. There is no greater energy and feeling of possibility and promise than that of a live theatrical show, whether it be a dramatic play, glitzy musical, or an elaborately staged pyrotechnic spectacle of dance and acrobatics (i.e. a Cirque du Soleil production).

Simultaneously intimate and epic in scope, Unnatural Acts is a haunting slice of gay American history that resonates with both the timeliness and timelessness of its societal intolerance theme. Indeed, as we bear witness to same-sex marriages taking place all around New York, Unnatural Acts reminds us of just how far we’ve come (while there’s always the Westboro Baptist Church and the Vatican to remind us just how far we’ve yet to go). Speciale and his company of 11 actors (several playing dual roles) transport audiences back to the hallowed halls of the venerable university, where the 1920s in the post-WWI weary Cambridge landscape were beginning to roar louder than pre-war moral values.

The story is straightforward: The discovery of incriminating letters following an undergraduate’s suicide prompts a five-member secret panel of Harvard administrators to launch an aggressive investigation into campus “homosexualism”. In an effort to rid their respected campus of this “disease”, school authorities – acting with neither scruples nor restraint under the protective cloak of the virulent homophobia of the time period – go about their inquisition unchecked, audaciously asking the young men about masturbatory habits, their sexual relations with same and opposite gender partners, and leading questions about their comrades. When one student finally cracks under the terror of their unrelenting interrogation, the floodgates open and names are named. With the cards stacked against them and under the manipulation and emotional blackmail of the panel, each successive student folds under the pressure and one betrayal after another seemingly seals the undergrads’ fates.

There is a palpable sense of fraternity among the show’s stellar ensemble — no doubt due in large part to the improvisational aspect of the way the story fleshed out and the dual roles that several play as co-authors. Nick Westrate, in particular, delivers a knockout performance as Ernest Weeks Roberts, son of a retired congressman and social lynchpin of the daringly decadent covert company of gay young men who gather in defiance of prohibition to drink gin, swish about in unabashed rebelliousness against the reigning heterocentric ideals of the day, and engage in taboo acts in their exploration of the love that dare not speak its name. That these gay bacchanals take place in a dormitory within the uptight world of conservative Harvard University speaks to the world of privilege these young men come from and both their recklessness and arrogance in believing in their own invincibility. Even assistant classics professor Donald Clark (Jerry Marsini) walks that fine line between moralistic tradition and social evolution, guardedly discussing banned books of the time like Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion with a curious student.

Other performance highlights from Unnatural Acts include Jess Burkle's interpretation of Edward Say, Roberts’ flamboyant best friend. Burkle deftly balances the character’s exaggerated mannerisms and howlingly funny one-liners early on in the play with the decidedly weightier emotional material that comes later with remarkable skill. Actors Joe Curnutte and Frank De Julio also shine. Curnutte plays upperclassman Nathaniel Wollf, theatrical mentor to De Julio’s sophomore and aspiring thespian Keith Smerage. The big brother/little brother dynamic between the two is rendered beautifully and believably by these two actors and the love that blossoms between them comes across as achingly honest. When one betrays the other during the interrogations in a desperate attempt to salvage a future in medical school, the other’s sense of loss – ingeniously set against a Shakespearian monologue that the two rehearsed earlier in their courtship – will absolutely break your heart.

The striking theatricality of this engrossing docudrama is greatly enhanced by Justin Townsend’s formidable lighting work, particularly his use of shadow and light during the tribunal scenes or when he shrewdly backlight’s the set’s towering bookcase backdrop to dramatic effect. The theatre’s three-quarter space adds an almost voyeuristic intimacy that heightens Speciale’s highly stylized staging, while Walt Spangler’s understated period set design adds a neutral, masculine backdrop that allows costumes by Andrea Lauer to give marvelous glimpses of the young men’s individuality lurking under the traditionalism of the day’s dress code. Factor in an exquisitely choreographed show-stopping scene in the first act that features overlapping montages performed in slow-motion, and Unnatural Acts has all the fluidity of an extravagant musical — without either music or extravagance.

Even when the play touches on the histrionic tone of Matt Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 play The Boys in the Band – particularly during an extended party scene in Perkins 28 – it never veers completely off course and retains its prevalent air of authenticity. Although the play loses a bit of its dramatic momentum early in its second act (partially due, I think, to the intermission itself), it builds to a heartrending climax that includes a tour de force monologue by actor Brad Koed who is accompanied by the rest of the ensemble with a chorus of dialogue snippets and a choreographed ballet of synchronized motions that intensify in volume and tempo. By the time Koed’s Eugene Cummings begs the central question of the play – “If it occurs in nature, how can it be unnatural?" – the audience is as emotionally wrought as the actors appear. Unnatural Acts ends with a simple roll call of the inevitable fates of its characters – admittedly an overused device in such epilogues but forgivable here because it seems logically appropriate and affords the story its final dramatic punches to the gut.

Simply unforgettable in every sense of the word, Unnatural Acts is live theater at its very best — easily on par with A Normal Heart in terms of its emotional resonance and compelling narrative.

Deconstructing Jude: Maternal Madness in ‘Mother’s Boys’

Jamie Lee Curtis toplines Canadian helmer Yves Simoneau’s Mother's Boys, a visually stylish psychothriller about the bonds between mothers and their sons — and the sometimes psychopathic ties that bind them.

Curtis shines as Jude Madigan, a prodigal mother from hell who returns after three years of gallivanting around Europe and tries unsuccessfully to charm her way back into the lives of the husband and trio of blank-faced sons she abandoned. But despite Jude employing the most beguiling of her feminine wiles, estranged husband Robert (thick-browed Peter Gallagher) doesn’t bite, instead filing for divorce with plans to start a new life with assistant school principal Callie (Joanne-Whalley-Kilmer). She fares no better with her sons, who have taken to the sweet-natured Callie like traumatized puppies much to Jude’s consternation.

Eldest son Kes (Luke Edwards) has fared the worst, perhaps because he’s able to grasp the concept of the mental illness at work here even if he can’t understand the full implications of Jude’s sociopathology. Freud would have a field day with the big elephant of an Oedipus complex in the room here, especially when Jude rises like Hera from the baths, displaying to Kes in full nudity her Caesarean scar that both marks the spot of his physical entrance into the world and symbolizes the special, lasting bond between mother and son. Furthering the manipulation, she explains to the boy how she was in labor with him for two days because he didn't want to leave her. It’s one the film’s genuinely disturbing moments, appropriately alternating between discomfiting and skin-crawling.

The venerable Vanessa Redgrave has a welcome – albeit underutilized – supporting role as Jude’s mother, Lydia, whose own complicity in turning a blind eye to her daughter’s abuse at the hands of her father is hinted at in a hospital bed confessional. The scene is pivotal, and the audience can almost see Curtis cross over the thin line between sanity and insanity she was straddling to begin with. Despite some serious pathology at work here and the constant undercurrent of psychosexual tension, the film is surprisingly psychology-light, opting instead for full-tilt thriller territory that never quite gets past a half-tilt. Unfortunately, the story lurking beneath Elliot Davis’ moody cinematography and Barbara Cassel’s overdressed sets demands more than the film is ultimately able to deliver before devolving into a clichéd, implausible ending reliant on a perfect storm of circumstances.

Curtis has a grand time playing against type as villainess here, ditching her damsel-in-distress past with gleeful unrestraint. From the moment she drives into town in a flurry of white – car, outfit, stylish locks – you just know she’s put her babysitting, prom-going, train-riding days long behind her. It’s a glorious role reversal and Curtis proves she’s up for the task. In one of the film’s best scenes, Jude pays Callie a visit at the boys’ school and in a moment of deranged abandon smashes a framed photo of the reconfigured Madigan family – her family – against her own forehead in an attempt to frame Callie for assault. The ensuing gotcha grin as Jude picks up a sliver of glass and slices her forehead is pure Curtis smirk. It’s hard to fault her then when the threadbare script by Barry Schneider and Richard Hawley leaves her to chew on the scenery a bit. Even when she’s channeling Glenn Close and sliding dangerously close to parody, Simoneau pulls her back from the cliff; Jude, the character, isn’t quite as lucky by film’s end.

Best of the Rest - 2010 Edition

Over the past few days, I’ve shared with you my picks for the ten best albums and songs of 2010. But what about the rest – movies, television, and books? I had to do more in 2010 than just listen to music, right? So here a few of my other “Best of…” selections that colored last year.

BEST MOVIE: It was trippy, hallucinogenic, artfully directed, and buoyed by a pair of stellar performances. I’m speaking, of course, of Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant psychosexual suspense thriller revolving around a young ballet dancer performing dual roles in Swan Lake. Natalie Portman catapulted herself onto Hollywood’s A-list with her powerful turn as Nina Sayers, the driven ballet ingénue who finds her rise to stardom within a New York City ballet company complicated by one hell of a nervous breakdown. Barbara Hershey turns in a career-best performance with her role as Nina’s stage mother-from-hell, a relentless, driving force of maternal over-protectiveness who’s sporting some serious baggage of her own. Filmed with a stylistic franticness by cinematographer Matthew Libatique, Black Swan is an outlandishly melodramatic throwback to 70’s-style giallo that’s visually arresting, intellectually captivating, and just plain nail-bitingly good.

BEST BOOK: It was hard to make a call on a “best” book this year. There were so many great titles in 2010 that I really enjoyed, making my third year of book reviewing duties at Dark Scribe Magazine more of a pleasure than ever. There was Sparrow Rock, Nate Kenyon’s seriously creepy apocalyptic chiller about teens trapped in a bomb shelter after a nuclear attack. And Lisa Morton’s spooky debut, The Castle of Los Angeles, about a haunted theater and the ghost of a serial killer who decides to upstage a production based on his crimes. There was The Wolf at the Door, Jameson Currier’s gorgeous elegy to gay midlife wrapped within a traditional ghost story narrative set at a haunted New Orleans gay guesthouse. In the same vein (albeit a different genre), there was Stephen McCauley’s Insignificant Others, another beautifully rendered look at gay men at the crossroads of their lives and the myths of monogamy. John R. Little continued his trend of making me cry at the end of every one of his brilliant time-slip novellas with Dreams in Black and White. Peter Straub and Stephen King both added to their impressive – and ever- expanding – bibliographies with A Dark Matter and Full Dark, No Stars, respectively. Needless to say, neither was a disappointment.

But the best book of 2010, hands down, was also the weirdest and hardest to categorize. With magicians and sorcerers (here referred to as “hexslingers”), gods and monsters, western shootouts, and more audacious gay sex than anything you’ve likely read last year, A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files is one of those novels for which no number adjectives is adequate in describing it. But I’m going to try! That this ambitious, wildly imaginative, Aztec mythology-laden slice of genre-defying speculative fiction set in the post-Civil War American West is a debut novel makes its merits even more noteworthy. Everything here in Files’ debut is carried out with sheer precision – language, dialect, setting, mythology. The very definition of enthralling. Best part: This is part one of a planned trilogy.

BEST TELEVISION SHOW: Yes, True Blood and Dexter continued to deliver with stellar new seasons this year. Modern Family continued to make me howl with laughter, while freshman comedies Hot in Cleveland and Mike & Molly harkened back to a time when sitcoms were actually funny. And, yes, even an old(er) ratings stalwart like Desperate Housewives showed what a quick trip to the ladies powder room (in this case, the cast addition of the delectably slinky Vanessa Williams) could do to freshen up a tired face starting to show its age. But it was a gory, plot-light little survival drama on a basic cable network that gets my vote as last year’s Best Television Show.

The Walking Dead – based on the long-running monthly black-and-white American comic book series of the same name – turned out to be the water cooler show of the year and the most watched show in AMC’s history. The story is simple: In the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, a group of survivors travel across a ravaged American landscape trying to dodge the shuffling, flesh-eating undead while attempting to wrap their heads around immense personal losses and their own seemingly insurmountable odds. While the former offers nothing new – we’ve seen and read about the decaying dead noshing on the living ad nauseum since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead – it’s the latter that makes this show the unlikely hit it has deservedly become. While the show – the brainchild of frequent Stephen King adapter Frank (The Mist, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) Darabont – has taken some heat for its uneven writing, this is still a surprisingly engaging, moving drama about people and their relationships with each other and the (in this case, quickly dying) world around them.

A few unfinished pieces from the music-oriented “Best of…” lists:

BEST MUSICAL RETURN: Jennifer (The Power of Love) Rush returned to fill the power-diva void left by the late Laura Branigan and Celine Dion, who has unwisely opted to curtail her vocal acrobatics on more recent recordings. Although the material on Now Is the Hour – her first album of new material in more than thirteen years – may be Euro-generic in spots, Rush’s distinctive throaty warble is like the return of an old friend.

BEST GREATEST HITS COMPILATION: After releasing eight albums and selling more than 57 million copies of them worldwide, it’s a head-scratcher why the UK’s Robbie Williams isn’t a bigger draw here stateside. He’s got photogenic, boy-band good looks, possesses a terrific, multi-octave singing voice, oozes charisma and that British wink-wink wit we seem to gobble up, and has that outlandish bad boy image that keeps him in the media spotlight for myriad vices and oddities including chain smoking up to 60 cigarettes a day, prescription pill addiction, alcoholism, and drug-induced UFO sightings. By all accounts, the guy’s the male equivalent of Amy Winehouse. So, if you’ve yet to experience the former Take That member’s solo efforts, may I humbly (albeit strongly) suggest that you pick up a copy of his superb second greatest hits compilation, a comprehensive, marvelously packaged three-CD set called In and Out of Consciousness: Greatest Hits 1990–2010? Includes 39 songs that explore William’s diverse pop sensibilities, his ear for clever hooks, and his talent for some of the most witty, engaging lyrics in the modern pop era.