Posts Tagged ‘robert patrick’

R.I.P.: playwright Robert Patrick (1937-2023)

April 27, 2023

RIP

The gay theater pioneer Robert Patrick had a huge impact on me as a young journalist. He was one of the prolific early contributors to Off Off Broadway, but weirdly I first encountered his work at the time of his one and only Broadway production, a wonderful play called Kennedy’s Children, which I saw in its pre-Broadway tryout at the Wilbur Theater in Boston in 1975. (See photo below of the playwright with his cast, which included some legendary performers: Shirley Knight, Barbara Montgomery, Kaiulani Lee.) The following year, someone mounted a revival of his very first play, The Haunted Host, at the equivalent of an Off-Broadway theater in Boston, starring the force of nature that is Harvey Fierstein. That show blew my mind. I got to know Bob a little and saw and admired many of his plays, including Judas, T-Shirts, and My Cup Ranneth Over. He was an unforgettable character who left a big imprint on the gay theater worlds in New York, Los Angeles, and beyond.

In 1979 I wrote a piece about him for the Boston Phoenix. The opening three paragraphs give you a good sense of this artist at his most personal and eloquent:

Playwright Robert Patrick sits in the kitchen of his tiny East Village apartment. Posters from his shows and pictures of movie stars paper the walls. The shelves bulge with art books and manuscripts. A teeny-weeny Royal manual typewriter perches atop a makeshift desk overflowing with papers. Boxes of letters and clippings compete for floor space with what looks like shredded bedding. This homey disarray suggests the abode of someone who has more important things to think about, and Patrick usually does: his career, the theater, the universe.

“In California, when they revived my play Judas for the summer in their big 800-seat outdoor arena theater, I was afraid the play was too talky, and I really worried,” Patrick recalls, speaking in a soft voice still tinged with traces of his native Texas. “All around us were poplar trees rippling in the moonlight, a full California moon, stars like burning bees — you know, just incredible beauty. And here was this little stage with not even a very elaborate set…And the audience was sitting there looking around at all this beauty, and I thought, how could this talky play compete with this? Then I suddenly remembered that whenever people have done plays outdoors competing with nature, they’ve been the most talky plays in the history of the theater: the Greeks, the Elizabethans, the Indians, for Christ’s sake.

“And, at that moment, the actors started talking, and 800 heads looked away from the universe down to that stage to have it explained to them. and I realized that that’s the point of theater — not to relax tired businessmen, not to titillate teenagers. You may do all that incidentally. But the point is those words and actions that make the universe clear.”

When I interviewed him for this article, we covered a multitude of topics. He did like to talk! I got more material than I could possibly use, but there are a few passages I think are worth sharing — the equivalent of DVD extras.

On Judas: “I wrote the play in one night. I then read books for five years to understand the play. And out of 500 books, for 10 books I would get only one line, but that was all right, it clarified one scene. History, history of religion books, history of history books, Bibles, Korans, Confucius, Tao, Madame Blavatsky, theosophy, Chariots of the Gods, Worlds in Collision, African Genesis, and a million tracts, pamphlets, secret societies, crazy magazines on man, myth and magic, anything anyone handed me on the street. Eventually everything related to it. That’s what happens when you’re really researching. It wasn’t til the very last screaming raving draft of the play that the words finally came into Pilate’s mouth at one time: ‘You may think that a young man’s only concerns are sex and food, sleep and sports, but you are wrong, wrong. A young man’s main concern is morality. A young man wants to be good, to make good. That is why young men are so obsessed with authority, with testing it or protesting. They want someone to show them or tell them how to be or not to be good.’ The point being that people want morality, that morality is a stronger urge than sex, country, race, love, food. People will die to feel they’re doing right. They’ll kill. Convince someone that something is good and he will die trying to do it.”

On the future: “It’s pretty inevitable that we’re in for immense regimentation. But what will happen in our heads? Will the very idea of freedom have any meaning? This is the first age in the history of the world when people have even considered the possibility of freedom or the importance of the individual or the value of the intellect. We’re in the pioneering time as far as the existence of the importance of the individual mind and soul are concerned. And it may be the last. The whole experiment may have failed. The whole renaissance may have been proved to be a very unworkable idea. As more and more people survive and live, it may be absolutely impossible for them to have any individuality. It may be too grating. Too many people go too crazy for us to doubt it. It may be we’re evolving toward termite people – good, solid, unthinking functionaries. The overall sketches of totalitarianism have been made; it works pretty well. All you have to do now is make people love it or take away from them the idea that they need to love anything.

“On the whole I don’t think they’re going to want much thought in the decades to come. As I say, things work pretty well, the machines make enough food for people, etc. etc. I don’t think people want thought beyond that. They want the novelty of art, but even that they’re willing to surrender; after adolescence, they’re content to lull themselves to sleep with slight variations on the TV. Thought is the enemy of the state; and ‘the state’ is the same no matter what it’s called. I don’t like thinking all that, but it seems to be the logical next step unless there’s a war or something that wipes out so many millions of people that a lot of creative thinking is needed. But we certainly do live in an interesting time. A time of collapse like this is fascinating for an artist because when a thing collapses you see its most intimate structure. By the time America collapses, we will see whether the rot is really at the roots or whether it’s some corruption that’s crept into the American idea that’s made everything go wrong.”

On gay life in 1979: “Anyone who spends any time in the gay section of New York comes out of it saying, ‘This can’t go on.’ Not even morally. One reason I live in such isolation in New York is that the alternative, if I were to run around with the people I know – and I know thousands – would be to spend all my time as drugged and drunk as I could financially and physically afford to get every night and be discoing or fucking in backroom bars until I staggered home and got dressed to go to a job. That is how they live. They do not even see the possibility of any other kind of life. And the suggestion that they might be able to lead another kind of life is met with jeering cynicism. I mean, that cannot go on. People will be dying in those bars, if they are not already, from the amount of drugs those people are taking, the amount of sexual exertion. I have no close friends in New York because I’ve stepped out of the drug-and-drink cycle. Almost everyone I know lives for drugs and drink. People keep telling me there’s another world. I don’t know about it. I don’t meet anyone from it.”

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R.I.P.: Doric Wilson

May 10, 2011

Doric Wilson, who died Saturday May 7 at the age of 72, was virtually unknown to mainstream America, even to most theater people. But within the world of Off-Off-Broadway and post-Stonewall gay theater, he was a pioneer. He was one of the young out gay playwrights who made the legendary Caffe Cino his artistic home in the 1960s (along with Lanford Wilson and Robert Patrick), and in 1974 he founded the first gay theater in the United States, The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS). He had a tremendous influence on me as a young theater critic and baby gay liberationist hungry for historical touchstones.

We met in the summer of 1976, when I interviewed him and John Glines (separately) for a series of articles about gay theater for Boston’s Gay Community News. I was an earnest, starry-eyed 22-year-old Boston University student at the time, and I ended up publishing a rambling Q&A with Doric in GCN that strikes me now as embarrassingly naïve. But it was true that, as I wrote in the introduction, “As a person, Wilson is not ‘sort of’ anything – he is extremely intelligent, well-read, opinionated, headstrong, garrulous, and energetic.” Among the things that impressed me about Doric was his outspoken critique of gay homophobia, his willingness to describe himself unapologetically as “very promiscuous,” his openness as a leatherman, his refusal to distance himself from gay bar culture, and his frankness in articulating the subliminal ways that sexual attractiveness affects the way people interact professionally.

I don’t think anyone in the press had ever paid such close attention to Doric. I think he was flattered by my attention, as I was flattered by his openness (and his flirtatiousness, which led to the inevitable and inevitably anticlimactic one-night stand). Every time I saw him after that, he went right back into lengthy expostulation, as if I were still interviewing him, as if I were his personal historian, which was a little bit charming at first but quickly grew wearying. For all I know he did that with everyone. A large man physically and energetically, Doric spoke with a resonant, commanding voice as if addressing the multitudes, even in intimate circumstances.

In some ways, I was glad to take on the mantle of gay theater historian, because I had an ardent interest, particularly in the early days of Off-Off-Broadway. And I admired Doric’s plays (such as A Perfect Relationship and Forever After) for their willingness to depict the mundane aspects of gay life and romance with directness and humor as well as a sturdy but unpretentious theatricality. He liked to emulate the epigrammatic wit of Noel Coward but he also incorporated the casual way drag queens talk directly to the audience.

In 1977, I wrote a review of Doric’s play The West Street Gang for The Advocate, the national gay newsmagazine. (It was reprinted in Mark Thompson’s Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement.) The play addressed the topical issue of gay-bashing and was performed site-specifically at the Spike, a leather bar in the West 20s, an area quite vulnerable to late-night attacks by marauding haters. Similarly, his play about the Stonewall uprising, Street Theater, premiered at the notorious Mineshaft and has a history of productions staged in funky gay bars. I was proud to include Street Theater in my anthology of gay and lesbian plays, Out Front, published in 1987 by Grove Press.

At a Queer Theater Conference in 1995, I moderated a panel discussion among several ground-breaking artists about the emergence of an out theater aesthetic. (A redacted transcript of this discussion appeared in The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater, edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla, who convened the conference for CLAGS.)  Doric was the grand old man on the panel, and he spoke very personally about his background with details I had never encountered anywhere else:

“I came to New York in 1958 from a ranch in Washington State. I did not come to New York in the cowboy style of the seventies. In the fifties, if you came from a ranch in Washington State, you came to New York trying to look like Noel Coward, and I looked as much like Noel Coward as I could. I’ve always been out. I grew up in a sort of pioneer family in a very unpopulated pioneer country, at that time, in Washington, the Five Cities.
There weren’t any five cities when I grew up. There were only two cities. But my grandfather had more or less founded the county, and built the roads and what-have-you.
So, I had that wonderful old-time American arrogance of pioneers, that it didn’t matter what I did, nobody had a right to say anything to me. So I came out in school. I came out because a friend who was gay killed himself when he realized that he was about to be discovered, and I decided I wasn’t a good enough shot to kill myself, so I’d better come out…
I came to New York to be a set and costume designer, but I was so naïve, I had no idea where one studies set and costume design. So I was used as an actor. I did any number of stock productions of Auntie Mame as young Patrick Dennis. My roommate at the time was a straight English actor and I wrote a play for a little theater workshop that we were in, an Adam and Eve play called And He Made a Her.
An actress in that company had just done a Tennessee Williams play at this coffeehouse on Cornelia Street in the Village. Now those of you who know New York City and know Cornelia Street know that it runs for one block. In the early sixties, what is now the West Village was almost part of Little Italy. It was not part of Bohemia.
So, the Caffe Cino was really more in Little Italy environment than New Bohemia. This actress, Regina Oliver, took me down to the Cino, introduced me to this short, impish, round man behind the counter: Joe Cino, who always had one hand on the arm of the cappuccino machine or ringing a bell to start the performance, so I always see Joe Cino with one arm in the air. I started to hand him the play while he was making a sandwich and making cappuccino. He opened the notebook, and he said, “Three weeks from now, on Friday,” and closed the notebook and pushed the play away. I turned to Regina and said, “What does that mean?” She said, “That’s when you open.” From that point on, we all just did plays at the Cino. Lanford [Wilson], myself, Tom Eyen – we all wrote gay plays there, but it never occurred to us that’s what we were doing. We also wrote bad plays there. Joe was completely open.
The other side of the coin was critics. In the sixties it was a problem if you were known as an out gay playwright. There were theaters that would not do your work. The most important of them was the Public Theater. Most of the Cino playwrights were not done at the Public. But we had the Cino.”

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