MY WEEKLY READER

posted by James Reel

    With Thursday comes my appearance in the Tucson Weekly. Two stories this time. First, anaother in what looks like it’s becoming a weekly series on local gay theater:

    Eugenia Woods is producing four new plays in a single weekend, but she's not thinking of the project as merely a theater event.
    "This is a chance for the community to come together and expose themselves to stories that will give them a sense of the real issues that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender families in our community face," she says.
    The key word in that sentence is "families." Woods' Stark Naked Productions is presenting First Words: Relativity, a festival of plays all about "the strengths and challenges of LGBT family life."
    And importantly to Woods, those families extend well beyond a couple setting up housekeeping together.
    "Some people may have been estranged from their family of origin, and they've had to be very creative in forming families of their own," she says. Families wind up including lovers, friends, adopted kids, and parents and siblings at varying levels of acceptance of LGBT life.
    Families are tremendously important, regardless of one's sexual orientation, Woods asserts. "It's a wild world, and without that unconditional support, that faith other people have in who you are authentically as a human being, we will be manipulated by fear-driven and commercially driven dictates. I rely on my family to mirror my own truth to me, and accept that truth, regardless of whether it's comfortable for them."

    You can read the whole story here, but be patient; pages are taking ridiculously long to download today.
    I also have a review of Tartuffe at the University of Arizona, in a limber translation by the UA’s own Harold Dixon. The important sentence: “The UA's Arizona Repertory Theatre has mounted a winning production of the classic, its only little flaw being a tendency to argue too hard for the story's pertinence.” Find out more here.