GAY OLD TIME

posted by James Reel

In the latest Tucson Weekly, I preview an arts sampler at an unusual performance location, and review two plays that happen to feature gay characters. This is how the preview begins:

It's a safety officer's worst nightmare: a warehouse full of Japanese and Afro-Brazilian drummers, fire artists, aerial dancers and--those most insidious threats to public order--mimes. Rhythm Industry Performance Factory hasn't yet run afoul of the law, and so far, there's been no need to station ambulances at the ready in the parking lot. But we'll see what happens when all the Rhythm Industry resident ensembles converge on the "factory" at once for a public sampling of their works in progress. This weekend brings Rhythm Industry's first quarterly review. Note that the word employed is "review," as in a literary quarterly, rather than "revue," as in a variety show. It's an evening of performance, not magazine-reading, but all the participants are very serious about their work. Besides, the facility isn't intended to serve as a performance venue; it's an arts-incubation space, where groups can rehearse, and build and store sets and instruments and costumes. The only reason the resident ensembles have decided to present a performance sampler there four times a year is to raise money to help pay the mortgage.

You’ll find the complete story here. Once you’ve digested that, you can move on to my two-in-one theater review:

It's been a long time since "gay" meant "happy." Certainly the homosexual characters in two plays that opened last week have more than their share of trouble; even though the plays they inhabit start out as comedies, the trouble quickly takes over at Live Theatre Workshop in its late-night production of Dog Sees God, and at Alternative Theatre Company's mounting of Dirty Secrets. In Bert V. Royal's Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead at LTW, the Peanuts gang has gotten 10 years older and gone to high school. If you think Charlie Brown was depressed when he was in elementary school, you should see him now. To skirt copyright law, Royal has billed his play as a parody and changed the characters' names a bit, but you know who they really are: Charlie Brown is now called CB; his sister, Sally, is now referred to merely as "CB's sister," and she has gone goth; Linus Van Pelt, now called Van, is a stoner who smoked the ashes of his security blanket when it was burned by his sister (formerly known as Lucy), who is a promiscuous pyromaniac who's been institutionalized and doped with lithium. Tricia, the former Peppermint Patty, and her sidekick, Marcy, are mean girls who make catty remarks about everyone while sneaking booze into the high school cafeteria. The piano-playing Schroeder is now called Beethoven, but he's going through some changes: He's developed an interest in Chopin, and he may be gay. This disgusts Matt, the former Pig Pen, who has internalized his filth; on the outside, he's a compulsive clean freak, but on the inside, he's a vicious homophobe. This is not a pleasant crowd. Instead of calling CB a blockhead, they now yell, "You faggoty asshole." Good grief! At least when they go to a party, they still dance to Vince Guaraldi.

The full review of both plays awaits you here.