OUT THERE, NAKED
By FRANK RIZZO; Courant Staff Writer
One man stands alone on stage and looks back at his complicated relationship with the Catholic boys' camp counselor, who began sexually abusing him at age 12. Another recounts his ex-communication from the Mormon Church and his subsequent life as a gay escort and drug addict.
Still another talks about the years he spent in a Christian "reorientation" program that tried to make him an "ex-gay" until he awoke from his "Biblically induced coma."
Theaters are increasingly filling up with gay men eager to tell their personal narratives in solo shows. Call it "confessional theater," call it theatrical therapy, but stories about personal trauma -- laced with humor and humanity -- are becoming a cottage industry on the fringe theater circuit. Autobiography has become increasingly the norm with celebrities and semi-celebrities, such as Billy Crystal, Elaine Stritch, Bea Arthur and Suzanne Sommers -- all among those feeling compelled to tell all on the Broadway stage. Performance artists such as Lisa Kron, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller and the late Spaulding Gray also have spun their personal perspectives on downtown stages for decades.
But recently the wave of gay men crafting solo theater pieces telling intimate, pointed and often disturbing stories have included Martin Moran ("The Tricky Part"); University of Connecticut grad Steven Fales ("Confessions of a Mormon Boy"); Peterson Tuscano, who now lives in Hartford ("Doin' Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House"); and Perry Ojeda ("Pride"). Marc Wolf's "Another American: Asking and Telling" gives voice to gay men in the military who can't speak out for themselves.
"By getting up in front of people, I think it's a way of reclaiming our identity in society," says Ojeda, who says he has been coached to "pass" as straight to be more marketable in the musical theater. Ojeda, who has starred in such shows as "On the Town" and "Blood Brothers" on Broadway, says seeing a wide variety of stories about gay men on stage makes him feel "that I am not alone."
Telling these stories is often not an easy experience. Moran, an actor with many Broadway and regional credits (Broadway's "Titanic," the "Bells Are Ringing" revival, off-Broadway's "The Man of No Importance"), began writing a memoir about his Catholic childhood in Denver. He took one aspect of his book-in-progress and fashioned what would become a stage piece centering on how Moran's sexual awakening and emerging sexual identity were exploited by a male abuser who was a church camp counselor. (The full memoir, also called "The Tricky Part," was published in June by Beacon Press.)
It's one thing to write a revealing memoir, but what makes a person get up on stage to tell a story so deeply personal? Is it theater, or therapy?
"It's like you're a member of a tribe sitting around a campfire after you've gone into a deep, dark forest, and now you've returned, and you're telling that story," Moran says. "Ultimately, it is the deep human need to tell that story. And it's what attracted me to the theater in the first place."
In Moran's case, his story was about his 30-year struggle to deal with both his childhood self and the man who seduced, scarred and shaped him. He centers on the complexities of youthful desire, complicity, compassion, repression, shame, faith, loss of faith and finally forgiveness.
Moran says he didn't want to make the story only about himself. "I was determined to craft something that was not self-indulgent," he says. Plus, he wanted to make it good theater, too. Craft, he says, was of the essence. In meeting Bob again in 2002 and confronting him, Moran also had a dramatic end to his personal angst -- and his show. He began crafting the piece that year and further developed it over two years with director Seth Barrish (including at New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre and the Sundance Institute in 2003). He presented it off-Broadway last year and won an Obie Award. "The Tricky Part" will receive its regional bow at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., in the Berkshires beginning Tuesday and continuing through Sept. 4.
"I felt terrified, vulnerable, nauseous and half the time crazy," says Moran of the first time he presented his work. "But afterward I felt tremendous freedom and gratification." He says he sometimes receives vitriolic responses from friends "who are incensed that I am not more angry at either Bob or the church." But, he says, his intention was not to find blame but understanding.
In writing the piece, Moran also found himself in the middle of seemingly daily revelations about Catholic priests' child abuse. " It was interesting how my personal history was coinciding with this cultural phenomenon," he says.
But in performing the piece nearly nightly in some theatrical runs, is he continuing his trauma?
"I'm not reliving my story anymore," Moran says. "I'm now simply presenting it with an audience. There's something cleansing, nourishing and human now in telling the story. It's not emotionally like ripping open a wound. I do find it deeply challenging and exhausting, but there is also something especially joyful, too, in the telling."
Moran says he doesn't experience it as a confession "but as a nightly inquiry into the paradox of what happened to me. How can something be a blessing and a crime? That's the mystery of being human. In the end, I've found that Bob is beside the point. It's the 12-year-old that I'm really talking about, and that's the moment of grace that I'm after. I can't be obsessed with blame. It's ultimately your relationship with your own soul."
That feeling of self-exploration and redemption also permeates the work of Tuscano.
Tuscano, born in Stratford, was a theater-loving boy who grew up in the '70s and early '80s in the New York Catskills. Rebelling against his liberal parents and fueled by his shame and fear of his homosexual feelings, he became a born-again Christian when he was in high school.
"Instead of going to theater school, where I had a slew of scholarships," he says, "I went to a Christian college in Nyack, N.Y." This was followed by mission work in Ecuador, a stint trying to make it as an "ex-gay" actor in Manhattan, a marriage to a Christian woman (ironically the wedding was in a Broadway theater that was the home to "My Fair Lady" and that had been converted to a church).
He and his wife left New York for mission work in Zambia, where his gay urges continued. ("I wasn't doing well against temptation," he says.) After he was "outted in Africa" and divorced in the mid-'90s, he placed himself in the Love in Action program in Memphis, which he describes as "a Christian fundamentalist residential 12-step program that teaches you to understand and suppress homosexual desire."
Toscano, 40, says he awoke one day in 1999 after more than two years in the program and realized he had to recognize who he was. "It does seem like a miracle to me -- a miracle I didn't kill myself, because there is such a high suicide rate among people who are struggling to overcome their homosexuality. But what made it especially miraculous to me is that I was doing it in spite of God, not to spite him."
Right after his sudden turnaround, Tuscano says his creative side returned, and "I began writing." He moved in 2001 to Connecticut, where he worked as a teacher at Watkinson School. He began working on his one-person show in 2002, and it premiered in 2003 in Memphis.
Tuscano's piece, which centers on a series of characters from what he calls "the halfway house," draws the line at what he will and won't talk about. For instance, he doesn't discuss his wife in the show. ("It's just too personal and hard," he says.) He appears as a character only at the end of the piece. The characters he portrays from the "halfway house" are sympathetically drawn, he says. "What makes the piece powerful is how I take responsibility for my own actions and how I refused to be a victim."
Tuscano, who is now a Quaker, explains the importance of gays' putting their stories on stage with a personal anecdote.
"At Thanksgiving, my sister's husband, Pat, who's this Italian guy from Brooklyn, turns to me and said, 'I don't understand why is it that you gay people always have to talk about it. Why can't you just be gay, but you always have to tell people about it?' So I told him that for many years I lied about who I was, and it is important for me now to tell people who I am. And besides, we all need something to rally around.
"'Now Pat,' I asked. 'Can you tell me something? You're a Yankees fan. Why is it that Yankee fans always have these shirts and jackets and caps and posters. You're a Yankee's fan. Why do you have to tell everyone about it?' And he smiles and says, 'Oh, I think I know where you're going with this.' And I said, 'Pat, I already went there -- and came back."'
Another solo writer-actor is Steven Fales, 35, whose "Confessions of a Mormon Boy" centers on his religious upbringing in Utah, his marriage and divorce to "Mormon royalty," his love of his children and his ex-communication in 2000. "I found the whole thing so fantastical that someone should use this as theatrical material," he says.
So he did, but he says it was important to be as hard on himself in the piece, detailing his experiences after his ex-communication, when "I got sidetracked in a ferocious gay adolescence" of prostitution and crystal methamphetamine. "These are things I am not proud of," he says.
He cleaned himself up in 2001 up and began to write the piece, compelled to tell his own story for his children, now 8 and 10, whom he feared he would lose contact with. (He hasn't, and he is on good terms with his ex-wife, Emily Pearson, the daughter of Carol Lynn Pearson, a celebrated Mormon writer and poet. Carol Lynn Pearson's book "Goodbye, I Love You" dealt with her gay ex-husband Gerald, whom she took care of when he was dying of AIDS in the mid-'80s.
Fales' wife knew of his attraction to men when she married him, but he says he had "limited experience" with men. "With new 'reparative therapy' that tries to make you straight that was coming into vogue in the early '90s when we married, we thought we could write a different story. I was so naive to what I was dealing with, but I was very true to her until the end of our seven years of marriage."
Fales, who received a master's degree in fine arts from UConn in 1998, first presented the solo piece in late 2001 in a circumspect version in Salt Lake City centering on his Mormon upbringing, his homosexuality, their marriage and divorce and his ex-communication. It sold-out, the feedback was encouraging, and "I knew I was on to something."
In 2003, he reshaped the piece with Tony Award-winning director Jack Hofsiss ("The Elephant Man"), curbing the "Mormon insider material" and including his hedonistic life in New York City. He has since toured the country with the "gentile version" of the show, which he called "transformational theater." The piece, which played last year in New York's Fringe Festival and at UConn, is expected to have an off-Broadway run this fall, Fales says.
Fales says a lot of stories about gays are being told, and the typical coming-out story so prevalent in recent years has run its course. "But I do not deal with growing up gay. My story is of a gay man who got married, had children and then came out. My story is illuminating because it deals with the cost of coming out when children are involved."
"One of the most powerful things we can do as gay men is to just tell our stories," he says. "We are so demonized by so many forces in this country. We need to tell our human stories so we can make change happen. There's a phrase in Mormonism that says you are 'called to the work,' and that is what I feel I am doing now."
Politics was the motivation for Ojeda to craft his one-person show "Pride," a title that he sees as deliberately ironic because it really deals with shame, says the 37-year-old actor. His show, which features songs and dances as well as stories, deals with how the gay community begins to believe the political attacks against gays by the Bush administration and "how we end up vilifying and hating ourselves."
Ojeda, who comes from a conservative Latino-Mormon family in southern Michigan, felt he had not hidden from his homosexuality, "but we never talked about it, either." He started receiving anti-gay e-mails from conservative relatives from Idaho during the last presidential election, when there were many anti-gay-marriage initiatives on state ballots.
"I felt so affronted and that the family was being polarized," Ojeda says. It also made him examine how he fit in with his family and society, "I felt I had to come out again on another level."
"Pride" presents a series of characters affected by the politics of the day, including a little boy, a hustler, a lesbian Sunday school teacher and a self-involved gay actor.
"I didn't want it to be preachy or didactic and have people laugh along with me, but like 'Cabaret,' the musical I am currently performing in here in Sacramento, I see it as a warning for people to look around us and see what's happening."
Ojeda's voice in the piece is most prevalent, he says, in a scene at a gay wedding seen through the eyes of a straight Mexican American. "I wanted a sincere declaration of love spoken in my voice -- but it is tempered through the eyes of a bigot. The other is in a song I wrote with Randy Redd called 'Out in America,' which asks how I can be out in America and have a career, life and happiness without compromising myself."
The piece played at off-Broadway's Dixon Place, with direction and choreography by Karen Azenberg earlier this summer, and is being further developed. "Pride" is expected to tour this fall and come to a regional theater in Connecticut in early 2006.
For some, their stories can only be told through someone else: like Marc Wolf, who created the Obie Award-winning "Another American: Asking and Telling," directed by Tony Award-winner Joe Mantello, about gays in the military.
Wolf says he was most attracted to the theme of what happens to people when they are silenced. "I'm interested in what compromises people make and what ideals they won't give up and how honest and dishonest they are."
"If you are gay and in the military, you cannot tell your parents, you cannot tell your friends, you cannot tell anybody," he says.
Wolf says gathering the material was a difficult task at first. "There is a strong sense of reluctance among most gays in the military to talk," he says. "Your career is on the line if someone finds out and your safety may be on the line, too. So you train yourself not to talk about those things."
But many did talk to Wolf. "There were some who felt it wasn't a big deal, or not a tragic thing. People in the military love serving. It only gets tragic when you get caught. Or someone outs you."
Wolf also presents in the play the viewpoint of those who believe gays should not be in the military. "These people when they saw the piece were shocked by how fairly I treated that side of the issues," he says.
Did the anonymity empower people, like confession?
"People train themselves not to talk about it. It's so dangerous. But if you get people to start talking about something that they've been bottling up for a long time, if that cork is releases, then lots of things will come out. For me, however, I don't see it as confession although some [subjects] talked about it in that way. Confession to me sounds like 'I've sinned and I have to confess.' To me it's just a personal story telling."
Wolf's next work is an interview-based piece centering on his cross-country ride following 9/11. "It's an odyssey that explores the idea of 'home' in America and how it relates to my home in New York. That work will play this fall in Rochester and next spring in the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston.
"The Tricky Part" plays Tuesday through Sept. 4 at Shakespeare & Company's Spring Lawn Theatre, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, Mass. Performances are Tuesdays through Sundays at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $49, with student, senior, group rates and rush tickets available. Talk-backs are scheduled for Tuesday, Saturday, Aug. 23, 26 and 27. Tickets and information: 413-637-4274 or www.shakespeare.org