cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
Looking for a picture I’d taken of Malcolm Boyd, I came across a bunch of great shots of the handsome men who attended the 1994 Gay Spirit Visions conference in Asheville, North Carolina. (click photos to enlarge)
me with Mark Thompson
Mark with Dave MacDonald and Stan Mobley
Dave with Malcolm
Duncan Teague and Gary Kaupman
Jonathan Lerner and a guy named David who was 6’9″ and fathered a child with two lesbians
GSV’s resident sage Andrew Ramer and I
I was sad to hear that the fine actor Edward Herrmann died on New Year’s Eve at the age of 71. He was one of the 55 men featured in Caught in the Act: New York Actors Face to Face, my collaboration with photographer Susan Shacter that was published by New American Library in 1986. Susan’s Kennedy-esque portrait of Herrmann was one of my favorites in the book; a print of it has hung in my home for decades.
When I interviewed him for the book, he was quite thoughtful, candid, opinionated, and funny. Here’s an excerpt:
Why did you want to act in the first place?
To act out feelings too intense to articulate. To release pain or elation by acting it out. In high school, I emulated my athlete brother — I was a trainer. I stayed away from the theater crowd. Everybody thought they were pansies, and weird. I’m glad I stayed away from them — they were pansies, and weird. If you go too soon into the hothouse, you develop attitudes that make you unfit for other things. The best actors are inclusive of experience, not the ones who are overly specialized in theater.
When you’re an actor, you tend to draw parts to you that are essential to working something out in your life. There’s something crucial in that character’s dilemma that you can apply to yourself. It’s the most creative therapy under the sun. But it’s not just therapy. I’ve often found parts allowed me to experience things I didn’t have to go through in life.
I did The Great Waldo Pepper with Robert Redford in which I had this relationship with this megastar where I had to put him down all the time and call him an asshole. I didn’t do it very well; I was obsequious. We mythologize other actors. They don’t need it. When we were doing The Betsy, Olivier found out I was from Michigan, and he came over and asked, “How’s the accent?”
How do you get over being starstruck?
You don’t get over it; you learn to control it. The first thing to recognize is that it’s something we do — it comes from us. Stars are primary psychological images. Actors forget that the profession depends on the tribe mythologizing us into the image they need in order to be healed. Fonda’s a healer. Duke Wayne, Stewart — they express something that needs to be expressed. Right now, unfortunately, it’s Rambo. It may be horrible, but it’s a fact.
But the profession doesn’t recognize it. All those towers on Sixth Avenue, those solid edifices, are built on nothing. They’re built on what happens between one actor and another, an energy that passes through performers from a writer, a series of ideas with no substance that draws the interest and need of a community. If television executives knew how those images affect the community, they’d become monks. They’re responsible for the psychic health of the world, and they turn out images of lust, cruelty, greed, violence, and meanness twenty-four hours a day. It amazes me that people still talk to one another.
You can read the complete interview from Caught in the Act online here. Check it out and let me know what you think.
The HBO premiere of Ryan Murphy’s long-awaited film version of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart has excited and engaged a lot of attention in the press and social media. It feels great and pertinent that conversations are emerging between people who lived through the worst days of the AIDS epidemic and those who are learning about it retroactively through its artistic representation.
I’m reminded that in 2007, I was interviewed by Sally Plaxton for the KPFA (Pacifica) radio program “What’s the Word?” for an episode on “American AIDS Drama.” Catherine Sheehy talks about Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz, and Robert Vorlicky discusses Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. But the show starts with me talking about the play, the social context from which it emerged, the original production at the Public Theater in 1985, and how the play held up in its 2004 Off-Broadway revival (below, featuring Raul Esparza and Joanna Gleason). Since then, of course, the play received a Broadway revival in 2007 directed by George C. Wolfe and Joel Grey, which probably helped get the film finally made.
You can check out the hour-long radio program online here. My portion starts at about 4:15 and runs to about 12:30.
Seeing Mark Rylance and Company’s take on Twelfth Night, currently on Broadway, conjured fond remembrance of Nicholas Hytner’s 1998 production at Lincoln Center Theater. Many snoots were cocked at Hytner’s casting the play with young movie stars not schooled in Shakespearean performance. But Hytner’s reading of the play struck me as deep and thoughtful, and Bob Crowley produced one of his most spectacular sets for the occasion. (The production was broadcast on “Live from Lincoln Center” and you can see clips from it on YouTube starting here.)
My review begins:
Director Nicholas Hytner has said in interviews that his production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center Theater in New York continues the theme of unrequited love he explored in his film The Object of My Affection. What he was shyer about saying was that the production also investigates the same slipperiness of sexual identity that figured heavily in the film about a gay man’s affair with his female roommate. In any case, Hytner has mounted a physically ravishing production (with a show-stealing set by scenic genius Bob Crowley) that makes the case for Twelfth Night as Shakespeare’s most direct examination of homo love.
The production, which runs through August 30, features Hytner’s Affection-ate leading man, Paul Rudd, who is practically unrecognizable here. Bearded, hairy-chested and with a scraggly rock-star mane, Rudd’s Duke Orsino is costumed by Catherine Zuber to resemble Prince in his New Power Generation period — all purple pajamas and brocade uniforms. As the audience enters, he and several serving boys are sprawled around an onstage pond passing a pipe and being serenaded by court musicians. He rouses himself to rhapsodize about Olivia (Kyra Sedgwick), the countess who spurns his advances while mourning her perhaps over-beloved brother. It becomes pretty clear, however, that this Orsino’s vision of women is a romantic spasm of compulsory heterosexuality. He seems quite content hanging with the homeboys. And when Viola (Helen Hunt) washes ashore from a shipwreck and disguises herself in trousers with just the right amount of gold piping to infiltrate his household as “Cesario,” she/he immediately becomes the Duke’s favorite, hand-picked to strip him down to his Princely purple trunks for a morning dip.
You can read the full review online here. Check it out and let me know what you think.
another eye opens 