FANCY DANCERS

Somehow I seem to be producing a series of posts about gay men, partly because of friendships and partly because they can be a powerful metaphor, embodying nonconforming lives based on intimate relationships.  I’ve compared them to tribally enrolled men, who often have highly productive but sociologically ambiguous lives that raise religious questions.

“Tom Meeker is a handsome rookie priest stranded in a dying rural parish. Vidal Stump is a proud, gay half-breed with a criminal record and unlawful desires. Father Meeker must choose between his sacred vows and his secret attraction to this Fancy Dancer who lures him into forbidden love.

First published two decades ago, this provocative, hard-hitting novel was the first bestseller to portray a gay priest and to explore gay life in a small town.”  (http://www.anobii.com/books/The_Fancy_Dancer/9780452263208/019971144dca592e16)

Marshall W. Mason says in the Afterword of “The Circle Repertory Company: the First Fifteen Years” that at one point he was interested in making a film from another of Patricia Nell Warren’s books, “The Front Runner” but it didn’t work out, as most movie projects do not.  I would like to raise a vision of a film of “The Fancy Dancer” shot on video with all the special effects that Tim Barrus and Cinematheque have developed over the past decade.  

Full disclosure: I only wrote with Tim rather than making video, but I’ve seen most of them, often repeatedly.  One of the early vids juxtaposes two dancers: one Asian man dancing in a bare cement space and one white dancing in a standard mirrored studio.  The two overlap contrapuntally, seeming to dance as partners, then merging into one dancer, then separating and contrasting.  Another vid in the same mode melds skateboarding with surfing.  Physical movement is one of the hallmarks of Cinematheque and is key to the lives of boys.

In the years Marshall and I were in the community around Alvina Krause at NU and Eaglesmere (1957-1961), we were not close but both of us walked and thought in multiple levels, overlapping or informing each other, slowly unfolding as we came to grasp more and more about what it is to be human.  It was so intense that ever after I’ve had a little trouble finding a world as idealistic and piercing.  The rez in some aspects, the world of sculpture before it was seized by the cowboy commodifiers, sometimes ministry, and mostly writing have been far more to me than they seem to be for other people.  These things are full of bright shadows, in that paradoxical way informing the work of some artists.  My skill level only pursues them, but Tim, in the years he had strength and health, captured.  His poetry still does.

Marshall and some other NU people were fortunate — oh, fortune had nothing to do with it and not money either — because they created The Circle Repertory Company, which was as much workshop as theatre, in the same way that Cinematheque is a school, in the sense that a school is a place to grow, a kindergarten.  For me my school was seminary, a seedbed, a place of insemination.  But then I had to return to the land.  Like Sam Shepard, who was peripheral to Circle Rep, I am a Westerner.  (Actually, Marshall is, too, but I don’t think he identifies that way.)

Living in the world as an artist, particularly as a solitary, is not easy because the visions can come with overwhelming kaleidoscopic impact, but might also contract into darkness.  Unless one has built habit and discipline, there will be no container that can hold and shape the patterns.  If there are others who interfere with that, it dies.  If there are others who can be dance partners, it is elaborated.

Alvina Krause was not self-promoting, nor was she a star-maker, but she had learned in her own life how to be a effectively contained “dancer” and could pass that on to others.  We knew her in old age when even the tribal old warriors dance with slow steps, enormous dignity, wrapped in a blanket but wearing a headdress.  (In her case, a silver comb.)  Deceptively simple her life seemed, and yet it was layers and layers deep, non-conforming in private ways because she was always in danger of exploitation or exclusion.  Inside this small Edwardian-style woman was Marlon Brando on a motorcycle, a leather-lady. 

Paula Ragusa Prentiss and Rob Thirkield

Caesar and Cleopatra  at NU

Marshall is something like that as well and so was his collaborator, Rob Thirkield, who was finally “washed out to sea”.  That’s a metaphor for suicide.  The other suicide that deeply affected the company was that of Joe Cino, who danced his self-slashing death while Maria Callas sang “Norma” on the record player.  It’s much easier to understand Cino in a time when young people practice “cutting” to relieve psychic pain.  I think about Montgomery Clift and James Dean as twilight dwellers, while today’s youngsters go directly to werewolves and vampires, but always keep the intense bonding of pairs.

One of the powerful patterns today, coming from biology as well as philosophy, is that of the rhizome network: nodes connected by long filaments.  This is the pattern of the connectome in the brain, which plays the neurons as though they were the keys of a piano.  The visionary aspect of the artist, priest or dancer is not imaginary — it is the symphonic expression of an electrochemical instrument.  Not just in the brain.  Muscles and bodily fluids play their part as surely as brass and strings.  But the pattern is also expressed in lives of lovers and nomads — fusion and flight.

Still alive in my memory is sitting in the back of the auditorium of Annie May Swift Hall during acting classes watching moments when meaning came alive.  I’ve been more the observer than the performer all along, except for the years in ministry when I led services and preached.  I’ve avoided most intimate relationships for fear of being trapped and prevented, used by people who don’t have the vision.  

That may just be a rationalization, but even just sitting safely in this old house with kittens grappling my ankles, I can feel the danger in great effort and risk.  The world itself flames and gutters, not just with human life but also with the hurtling cosmic rays and ringing of the universe.  Gay men in the arts seem to understand.  So do Native Americans and the best priests.

"AS IS:" Reflections

Edinburgh production

There are two good ways to enter a world that is to most folks quite unknown.  One is through a pair of lovers and one is through commerce.  On one hand is Romeo and Juliet and on the other hand is the Silk Road.  To penetrate unknown worlds is deadly dangerous, but people do it anyway, out of love.  And other things.

“As Is” was the first play about the beginning of AIDS, written by William M. Hoffman and first produced at Circle Repertory  where it was directed by Marshall W. Mason, a friend of mine from undergrad years whom I had kept track of through mutual friends.

Explaining how he began writing this play, Hoffman says:  

“All around me was illness and death.  I fell into a depression.

“So, sometime in 1982, as a sort of therapy, I started to express my feelings on paper.  I decided to write a play about a man named Rich — a writer and runner — who comes down with AIDS, his former lover, Saul, and their friends and families.

“I did my research, I visited friends who had the disease; I talked with a hospice worker; I went to support groups; I attended lectures; I made field trips to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (the most important organization dealing with the disease in New York City); I spent hours eavesdropping in gay bars, taking the public pulse.

“I was willing to go to any lengths for my play, except to imagine myself having AIDS.”  

It didn’t work until he let himself be funny — death humor is a part of eloquence.  At the time he began he was writing the libretto for “The Ghosts of Versailles” — why couldn’t his dying men be as eloquent?

“The opera is set in an afterlife existence of the Versailles court of Louis XVI. In order to cheer up the ghost of Marie Antoinette, who is upset about having been beheaded, the ghost of the playwright Beaumarchais stages an opera.”  The play satirizes this opera-in-an-opera and asks the audience to accept fantasy as it shifts the terms of the scenes.  There are YouTubes.

Though Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993) pulled in ghosts in the form of angels, “As Is” only included dying people.  Still, it certainly must have prepared the way for the more elaborate and complex “Angels.”  The earlier Hoffman play was workshopped in scenes at Circle Repertory, everyone feeling their way into an unknown future.  In that year ('82) I was just leaving seminary and had almost no consciousness of HIV.  My “ethics of dying” class (taught by Don Browning) used melanoma as the worst case scenario.  But that’s not far from Kaposi’s sarcoma.

I left formal ministry in 1988.  By that time a valued colleague had died of the virus in spite of his partner, an MD, using every resource he could muster. By 1993 I was returning from Heart Butte, where some students were quietly gay, to Portland where the city was aswirl with needle drug users and uncloseted gays.  Arthur Ashe died of AIDS that year.  It was no secret, not much of a surprise.  The disease and its consequences swept over the continent faster than anyone could react effectively.  It’s still happening.

Marshall says in his production notes for "As Is":  “I feel it is important that the actors remain on stage as much as possible, to witness as a community the events of the play in which they do not participate as characters.  The audience must be kept from feeling “safe” from this subject, so the actors of the “chorus” must act as a bridge between the fictional character and the real theater event . . .The desired effect is to assist the audience in a catharsis, as they are required to contemplate our common mortality.”

Marshall's production of "Trojan Women" at NU.

Dennis Parichy did the set, for both this and "As Is."

These ideas — from staging to moral passion — came from NU where Mason directed a performance of the “The Trojan Women.”  I was in it as a chorus member.  Characteristic of Alvina Krause’s acting classes and directing critiques was that they centered on high principles.  She came into theatre through the Methodist Garrett Seminary on campus, where she taught interpretation which segued into the stage as part of the School of Speech.  Greek theatre is the origin of catharsis, going back to Aristotle’s “Poetics” and usually taken to mean purification or purgation.  Theatre/opera/Greek plays are strongly Sacred.  

This is the thread I follow.  The Lutheran minister who headed my CPE program always said that one purpose of a congregation is to witness as a Greek chorus does and that nothing significant in human life is “real” to a person until it is witnessed by someone who grasps the meaning.

AK could not have seen a production of “As Is” or even have been aware of AIDS, since she died in 1981, but I would love to know her reaction and I expect Marshall would as well.  She had a lifelong female companion but veered off abruptly on certain subjects.  She was an Edwardian, very daring but only when totally hidden.  And yet she believed in going to the bony heart of pain and loneliness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcalL3C-zH4 is a sample of the TV production in 1986.  Though it was also written by Hoffman, the change of medium loses the stage fluidity and the chorus, but somewhat preserves the contrapuntal “libretto” of a scriptwriter who writes for opera and hears words as opera.  I’d much rather see a stage production, though film in the last 34 years has loosened up and learned a lot, so is far more musical.  The play did well enough at Circle Theatre (49 performances) to move to the Lyceum on Broadway for 285 performances.  I've only read the script and seen the YouTube clip.

Playing around with possibilities, one wonders what would have been different if this play had been written and produced by someone in San Francisco.  In retrospect, what if the first deaths of AIDS, in the Seventies which included women and children had become the markers for the disease instead of seeming like undiagnosed anomalies at the time.  The identification of HIV with gay men  — not just gay but sexually interactive — has skewed understanding and response ever since.  By 2015 the disease is still predominantly male in terms of new diagnoses but skews to Southern blacks.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_HIV/AIDS)

Can the impact of a play confronting this first of the mysterious jungle-emergent viruses ever be equalled by a play about ebola or Zika?  Were there plays as personal about malaria or yellow fever?  About polio?  Does Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” count as a film about the Black Plague that emptied Europe of a third of its population?  

As far as I know, no one has written a play from the indigenous point of view portraying smallpox at the time of its genocidal sweep in this intimate Manhattan way instead of broad political strokes.  Part of the power of “As Is” comes from the self-analyzing tight friendship and family circles of the specific Manhattan society with their feeling of being an elite.  Native Americans and maybe Blacks have seen so much hardship, they are not surprised and far more fatalistic.

"The Normal Heart" was developed at about the same time as "As Is," and produced soon after the more personal play.

MARSHALL W. MASON

The first play about AIDS, 1985

Directed by Marshall W. Mason

I subscribe to my “Alma Mater” publications in order to feel connected to my education though I’ve moved far away from anything they would recognize.  I just received the most recent issue of “Dialogue” (Summer 2016), which is about the Northwestern University's “Communication Studies” department.  Just the fact that they call themselves “studies” instead of “arts” is significant, signalling a kind of distancing, a cooling, a reliance on data.  In my day (1957-1961) it was all about passion and (hopefully) genius. 

Department of Communication Studies

"The Department of Communication Studies explores the social, political, and cultural functions of communication as it occurs in diverse settings ranging from interpersonal interaction to global media. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, the department’s teaching and scholarship explore communication practices, media, institutions, and arts as they shape agreement and dissent, competition and cooperation.

"Our faculty are leaders in the study of new media, public culture, social networking, technology and social behavior, and other areas as well. They address both perennial problems and emergent phenomena in a context of interdisciplinary collaboration. Students have opportunities for direct involvement in state of the art scholarship. Additional programming ensures a rich academic environment for acquiring the understanding and skills that will be expected for leadership in the twenty-first century."

The illustration at the head of the above includes an Asian woman and a North African man.  They might actually be from the countries that are their genetic sources or they might be several generations' American.  When I was attending, there were no people who looked like this photo.  There were two groups that have been otherwise stigmatized over time but were quietly included: one was Jewish and the other was gay.  Both were well-represented in the Theatre Department, but I know of men who were arrested for being gay.  No one was arrested for being Jewish.  Several of both groups have been major successes in the arts.  There's a bit of overlap.

A subset of the theatre department students of the School of Speech (which is what we called it then) were devoted to Alvina Krause and her “Method”, signalled by being chosen to work in Eaglesmere, Pa, in the summer theatre.  A high percentage had family connections to Broadway and other acting/production venues.  We wondered whether we might be a community that history would note as a “hot spot” of creativity and brilliance.  By now, I think it has turned out that we were.  Not myself, because I returned to the West, where I am now, part of a different but echoing story.

Marshall W. Mason

In this issue of “Criterion” the Alumni Achievements include a thumbnail of Marshall W. Mason (C61).  Marshall, founder of New York’s Circle Repertory Company, is one of two recipients of the 2016 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre.  The other recipient is famed Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick (BSM49).”  Marshall grew up in Amarillo, Texas.  He’s still comfortable south of the border but is not Mexican.  He was on the faculty of Arizona State University for a decade and remains emeritus professor there.

In an interview after receiving this award, a culmination of a career of awards, Marshall says that he is most proud of producing “As Is,” by William F. Hoffman at Circle Repertory.  Here’s the Samuel French description:

"Winner of the Obie and Drama Desk Awards

"The time is now, the place New York City. Rich, a young writer who is beginning to find success, is breaking up with his longtime lover, Saul, a professional photographer. The split is particularly difficult for Saul, who still loves Rich deeply, but the mood is one of bantering and ironic humor as they divide their belongings. However Rich's idyll with his new lover is short-lived when he learns that he has AIDS and returns to the goodhearted Saul for sanctuary as he awaits its slow and awful progress. Thereafter the action is comprised of a mosaic of brilliantly conceived short scenes, some profoundly moving, some brightly humorous, which capture the pathos of Rich's relationship with friends and family; the cold impersonality of the doctors and nurses who care for him; and the widely diverse aspects of New York's gay community—for which Rich's plight is a chilling reminder of their own peril. In the end the effect of the play is emotionally overwhelming—an honest and unsparing examination of a deeply felt human relationship shattered by a mindless, destructive force which cannot be tempered or turned aside.

"Winner of the Obie and Drama Desk Awards, this powerful, deeply affecting play was originally presented Off-Broadway by the Circle Repertory Company, and then transferred to Broadway where it was nominated for a Tony Award. Dealing with the AIDS crisis in the homosexual community, the play blends humor, poignance and brilliant theatricality as it details the bravery and compassion with which two young men face the shattering revelation that one of them is affected with the dreaded, and fatal, disease. "…the most impressive work presently being performed on or Off-Broadway…It is beautifully written and splendidly performed." —Variety. "AS IS is one of the few theatrical evenings in town that may, if anything, seem too brief." —NY Times. "A wonderful and frightening play…" —NY Post. "…this is the best new play of the season." —NY Magazine."

from the London Production of "As Is"

Peripherally in the AK group, I was fairly close to the gay men, but not the women.  I suppose I was a beard, but for what I’m not sure.  They tell me now that in those late Fifties they were aware that they were “different” but not what it meant.  They were “artistic”.  Or something.  When I talk to them now, they are surprised that I always knew they were “homosexual” which was a phobia in my childhood household, but of no concern or real interest as a college student.  My student teaching supervisor was gay.  He told the beautiful and gifted student actor she had no career ahead of her because she was black. 

Looking at the poster for “As Is”, the actors seem recognizably gay: plaid shirts with sleeves rolled up, Air Force mustaches, but no black leather jacket.  There were no markers like that at NU in the late Fifties, so I don’t know what I was picking up on.  Much less what they saw in me, except that we were all head-trippy in a — brace yourself — corticolimbic way.  That is, the WHOLE head plus bodies as a means of thinking and reacting, global sensory awareness as a source of identity, and never shutting down everything that wasn’t processed in the prefrontal cortex (the post-animal) which everyone else clung to and the school seems to have returned to. 

Blue tailed skink.

Tony Roberts  (no idea about his romantic preferences) did his class exercise assignment of embodying a living creature as a skink, a lizard that does nothing unless it’s in danger or hungry, so we all scoffed at him.  He was being humorous (he does that) but he also put up a pretty good defense about achieving a mind that’s only reflexes.  I can’t remember anyone doing a class scene directly about gays.  Not even Oscar Wilde.  But we were pretty invested in Tennessee Williams.  Maybe that was not so much euphemism as a kind of slant displacement.

We talked a lot about culture in terms of sensory styles (food, clothing, climate) and family dynamics, but I remember almost no discussion of drugs or politics.  Most people smoked, some drank too much.  The Peace Corps was just beginning, the birth control pill was approved in 1960, there had been no assassinations yet.  No one had any real idea what American Indians were like because they were all portrayed by Italians.  No one had any awareness of AIDS though in retrospect it can be identified as far back as the Twenties and maybe earlier.  

"Ghosts" by Ibsen, directed by Mason

Marshall Mason writes quite a bit about theatre.  I’m wondering whether he might trace out the larger evolution of his consciousness about HIV between the secret of one’s desires in 1960 to the frank confrontation of 1985 and what has happened since then, now that it's 2016.  It seems to me that the years at NU gave us such a broad, deep and intense understanding of human beings in all their permutations that maybe this new and ghastly spectre could be wrestled with honor, painful as it is.  

Today’s HIV/AIDS is a far different issue for a pre-adolescent boy entangled in sexwork, needle drugs, starvation, collateral trauma, and lack of shelter — bereft of family.  What seems to pull those boys back from suicide is the same thing that we at NU thought was the source of genius: a group, a community, a family.  But now they don’t write three-act plays.  They blog, they vid, they photo, they sing and dance, they skateboard (which is now an Olympic sport).  I’m not sure the present incarnation of NU’s elaborate Communication Studies has caught up to that.  They seem a little too cold and distant to me.  Not much like Timo.