Center Theatre Group News & Blogs

The ‘L.A. Times’ Spotlights ‘Bent’

Center Theatre Group — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 01:43:00 -0700

Arts and culture writer Deborah Vankin sat down with director Moisés Kaufman and playwright Martin Sherman, and explored the history behind Bent, which tells the story of a gay man who is sent to Dachau concentration camp in 1930s Germany:

“I don’t find the play dark. I find it full of life and humor,” says director Moisés Kaufman. “We have this preconception about tragedy. I think tragedy is only one color in bad fiction. In reality, there was sexual attraction in the camps—wherever the human spirit is alive there will be sexual attraction—and humor.”

Sherman, sitting alongside Kaufman, calls the play inherently optimistic.

“One of the things the Nazis did was to strip you of your personality,” he says. “But if you found a way to somehow grab a hold of your sexuality, then you found a way of maintaining your identity in the camp—which was a great act of defiance.”

In his review of the production, L.A. Times theatre critic Charles McNulty called Bent “a gripping tale of love, courage and identity that today can be universally appreciated for its enduring theatrical power.” And while McNulty, like Kaufman, noted that “the play makes room for humor,” he also lauded the gravity of the staging—and the timing of this revival:

The deadly seriousness of the situation is never absent in Kaufman’s staging. The play’s shorthand theatricality doesn’t paint a realistic portrait, but the way the production humanizes these victims of genocide ultimately make atrocities, past and present, all the more real.

Gay rights have come an enormous way in the 36 years since Bent was first done. The timing is fortunate for Center Theatre Group to be presenting this potent production of Bent with the tender gay coming-of-age musical Girlfriend at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. In this summer when many are celebrating that marriage equality has become the law of the land and when President Obama is reminding African leaders that gay rights are, indeed, human rights, it is important to remember that looking back is perfectly compatible with moving forward.

Read Deborah Vankin’s article here, and Charles McNulty’s review here.

Refashioning Oppression–The History of the Pink Triangle

Center Theatre Group — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 01:35:00 -0700

For Moisés Kaufman, who is currently directing Bent at the Mark Taper Forum, being confronted by this pink triangle on a visit to the concentration camp Dachau was the source of a revelation.

“If you were gay you had to wear a pink triangle. I kind of knew that. But the Germans were so specific that if you were a Jew and a homosexual, you had to wear a pink triangle with a yellow Star of David on top of it.” Kaufman explained, “I remember having this horrific moment: yes, as a Jew I would have been in a concentration camp, but there was this object that tried to encompass all of my identities.”

Following World War II, it remained difficult for men and women to embrace their gay identity. Gay persecution continued around the world, often by the same people and countries that had liberated the camps. In Germany, gay survivors of the Holocaust were denied reparations, and many were quickly re-imprisoned for their original offenses.

It wasn’t until the mid-20th century sexual revolution and the civil rights era that campaigns for equality gained ground. The Stonewall riots of 1969, and the many smaller scale protests that preceded them, galvanized the nascent gay rights movement into fighting oppression more directly and aggressively.

To this end, many groups and organizations repurposed the signifying pink triangle as an act of defiance. The historian Erik Jensen and others have traced this resurgence and reuse of the symbol to the 1972 book Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel (The Men With the Pink Triangle) by Josef Kohout (writing under the pen name Heinz Heger). One of the few works to document the history of gay men in the Holocaust, it is a firsthand account of Kohout’s experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, as well as the persecution that continued after he was liberated.

The German gay liberation group Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin advocated using the pink triangle as both a memorial to gay Holocaust victims and a protest against continuing discrimination as early as 1973. Emerging gay publications such as San Francisco’s Gay Sunshine and the Toronto’s The Body Politic ran several stories on the use of the triangle in the camps and urged its use among everyday people as a memorial and a radical act of advocacy.

“We have chosen the pink triangle as a symbol. A symbol of the history that others have tried to obliterate, the history that we must recover. And a reminder of where gay oppression can lead if gay people neglect the active struggle for their rights.”
—The Body Politic

Ultimately it was the AIDS epidemic that inspired the widespread use of the pink triangle worldwide. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, also known as ACT UP, used the pink triangle as a defining logo along with the motto “Silence=Death” beginning in the late 1980s. However, they turned the symbol on its head, facing the triangle point up and transforming it into an active response to the apathy of the government and the medical industry.

In recent years, the triangle has become a defining symbol of the gay rights movement, comparable to the rainbow and the Human Rights Campaign’s iconic yellow equality symbol on a blue background. Several memorials commemorating persecuted gay people in the Holocaust are based on the pink triangle, including the Homomonument in Amsterdam and Pink Triangle Park in San Francisco. Pink triangles, point facing up or down, now also find prominence on T-shirts, mugs, and as tattoos, continuing to draw attention to the horrors the Holocaust visited on gay people and the ongoing fight for an equitable future.

In the final act of Bent, the pink triangle takes on an even deeper meaning. As Kaufman said in explaining the play’s relatability; “Bent really is about owning up to who you are.”

David Gere on ‘Bent’

Center Theatre Group — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 01:47:00 -0700

I went to see the play several times, watching my straight brother play a gay man in Nazi Germany who lands in a concentration camp. Seeing the play would have been a harrowing experience for any viewer, but it was particularly so for me because, at that moment in my life, I was beginning to realize that I was gay. In the theatre, I would watch my brother, Richard, as he was grievously degraded and forced to wear a pink triangle, and I would quake in my seat with the horror of it all. One night at a performance of Bent, I was seated next to Lauren Hutton, who had come to see her American Gigolo co-star on Broadway. She could feel my consternation, my uncomfortable squirming, and reached over to take my hand, to console me.

By that time, that very same pink triangle, turned on its end, had become a gay rights symbol—a demeaning icon brilliantly reclaimed in order to remove its sting. In 1987, when it was adopted by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), I proudly donned the pink triangle on a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Silence = Death.” Now the pink triangle wasn’t just about fighting homophobia. It was about fighting AIDS phobia, too. Thankfully, by then I was “out," as a gay man, and as an AIDS activist. I still have that shirt.

Now, all these years later, with my husband, Peter, and two children by my side, Bent for me is about two moments in time: the Nazi era, to be sure, but also the year 1980, when the pink triangle catalyzed a social movement of which I now realize that I have been a prime beneficiary.

Gay Berlin, Before Hitler Came to Power

Center Theatre Group — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 01:49:00 -0700

Homosexual acts were illegal on the books, but a combination of factors allowed a vibrant gay culture to begin to establish itself in Berlin as early as the late 19th century. The police tolerated gay bars, which was one reason that Berlin became a global center for gay prostitution. Berlin was also home to a burgeoning gay civil rights movement led by a German-Jewish physician and sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was at the forefront of a medical establishment that widely accepted homosexuality as a “new sexual minority,” said Beachy. In fact, Germans’ “respect and regard” and faith in science, said Beachy, is part of the explanation for why they rejected traditional religious views of homosexuality more quickly than the rest of the West.

After World War I, Germany almost completely eliminated its censorship laws, and a gay press flourished in Berlin. Beachy said that from 1919 to 1933, over 25 separate gay, lesbian, and transvestite journals were published in the city. They were supported by advertising from bars and clubs—as well as dentists and doctors and lawyers, said Beachy. During this time, Hirschfeld founded a research center that experimented with the first sex reassignment surgeries and primitive hormone therapies. And of course there were those 100+ gay clubs and bars, catering to a variety of tastes and background—the world we know from Cabaret.

Berlin at that time “reminds me of what I know about New York and maybe San Francisco in the 1970s,” said Beachy. You could be out, at least in smaller circles of friends. Lots of prominent cultural figures were “pretty widely recognized as gay or lesbian, and in some cases they had life or long-term partners” who were treated as spouses—not people to be hidden or embarrassed about, said Beachy. “They would have lived their lives quite openly.”

One such public figure was Ernst Röhm, Hitler’s closest friend, one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party and the leader of the SA, the Nazi militia. Röhm, like many men and women, didn’t see Hitler’s anti-gay crackdown coming. Nazi rhetoric associated homosexuality with femininity and Jewishness; it was only “an issue in the sense that it undermined Nazi pro-natalist policies,” said Beachy. But Nazi attitudes toward homosexuality “didn’t have the racialist or ideological heft of the anti-Semitism or any of the other racially motivated persecutions.” The Nazis didn’t believe in homosexuality, so they weren’t interested in killing this group to wipe out their culture. “They thought it was a perversion,” said Beachy. “They thought it was something that could be cured for the most part.”

A criminal act included flirtation. If you looked at someone the wrong way you could be arrested and interrogated.

Most of Berlin’s gay bars remained open after the Nazis took power, except for about 15 of the best-known establishments, which they closed in the first months of their rule. Then, in June 1934, in part because of political infighting among Nazi leaders, the SA was purged, and Röhm and the other high-ranking leaders were all killed. “It was only after that, a full 17 months into the Third Reich, that it’s going to start to dawn on some people that they’re going to be in trouble if they continue to be openly homosexual,” said Beachy. “I think that probably a lot of people were taken by surprise.”

In the fall of 1935, the Nazis put in place a more draconian version of anti-homosexual law Paragraph 175. It was worded, said Beachy, to make it possible for “almost anyone” to be arrested if the Nazis suspected they might be gay. “A criminal act included flirtation,” said Beachy. “If you looked at someone the wrong way you could be arrested and interrogated.” And then sent to a concentration camp.

Why has history erased the stories of gay Berlin? It’s partly because in both East and West Germany, Paragraph 175 stayed on the books long after World War II ended. In West Germany, homosexuals were persecuted and sent to prison into the 1960s. But it’s also, said Beachy, because the Holocaust and World War II “obscures everything that might be thought of as progressive in German history.” The previous generation of historians of Germany devoted their work to explaining fascism and Nazism as an outgrowth of German culture. The openness of Berlin was not part of that story.

But it is part of the story of Bent, and it’s one reason Kaufman was drawn to the play. Bent begins in a “moment of possibility, said Kaufman. “There was a sense in the streets that you could maybe be gay.” The Nazis killed that moment, but for Kaufman, the struggle of the characters in Bent resonates with it. “This idea of coming out and owning your identity and owning who you are and fighting for who you are is at the core of this play,” he said.

18 Movies and Novels That Will Take You Back to the Summer After High School Graduation

Center Theatre Group — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 01:51:00 -0700

The rock musical Girlfriend, with book by Todd Almond and music and lyrics by Matthew Sweet, opens on the last day of high school in Alliance, Nebraska, in 1993. Prom king and baseball star Mike has just surprised outcast Will with a mixtape. Could this mean he’s dealing with the same feelings as Will? And so Will and Mike embark on a summer of self-discovery and romance, one that doesn’t seem made to last: Mike is heading to college in Lincoln in the fall.

An expiration date is just one source of tension for the characters in the many American movies and novels set in the summer after high school graduation. Many of them are also dealing with parental disapproval, class warfare, financial stresses, and changing friendships. These post-graduation summer stories are as notable for what they have in common as for what sets them apart. As Girlfriend opens at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, here’s a list of 18 great movies and novels set during that fateful season:

Seventeenth Summer (1942) What’s considered to be one of the first YA novels tells the story of Angie and Jack, who fall in love despite the fact that she’s college-bound while he’s heading to work at his uncle’s bakery.
Splendor in the Grass (1961) In late 1920s Kansas, two high school sweethearts grapple with the pressures of class, sex, and parental expectations.
American Graffiti (1973) As the summer of 1962 draws to a close, teenagers cruise around small-town California—breaking up and making up, chasing after girls, drag racing, and trying to decide whether to stick around or head East for college.
Breaking Away (1979) It’s townies versus college kids in this story of four friends in Bloomington, Indiana, who don’t quite know what’s next for them until they decide to enter a bicycle race run by the university.
The Flamingo Kid (1984) A kid from a poor Brooklyn neighborhood takes a summer job at a fancy Long Island beach club, where he falls under the spell of a suave car dealer and gin rummy champion.
In Country (1985) Sam is a typical teenager, trying to choose a college, breaking up with her high school boyfriend, confiding in her best friend—except that she’s obsessed with the Vietnam War, which took her father’s life.

EuroTrip (2004) Four American friends take the ultimate graduation trip to Europe for an adventure ranging from an absinthe-fueled night in Bratislava to a major mishap at the Vatican.
An Abundance of Katherines (2006) After being his latest girlfriend named Katherine (number 19 in a series) breaks up with him, former child prodigy Colin Singleton hits the road with his best friend, Hassan, on a quest to discover why Colin keeps getting dumped.
The Wackness (2008) All his friends have left New York City for the summer, but Luke Shapiro’s stuck in town, dealing marijuana to pay for psychiatry sessions while nursing a crush on his shrink’s stepdaughter.
The Vast Fields of Ordinary (2009) When his kind-of boyfriend Pablo rejects him, closeted Dade feels more alienated then ever—until he meets drug-dealing love interest Alex and becomes friends with cool, confident Lucy, a lesbian who’s comfortable in her own skin.
Toy Story 3 (2010) With their owner Andy about to head off for college, Buzz Lightyear, Woody, and their fellow toys have to make new lives for themselves.
Alice on Board (2012) Working on the crew of a Chesapeake Bay cruise ship with her best girlfriends seems like the perfect summer job for Alice before she starts college…except things don’t quite go perfectly.

Theatre’s Next Generation Speaks

Center Theatre Group — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 01:55:00 -0700

CTG provided five alumni of our student programs with full scholarships to travel to and participate in the conference, which took place June 17-20 in Cleveland, Ohio. For some, it was their first time on a plane; for all, it was a rare chance to talk with adult professionals as peers. In addition to attending parties, workshops, talks, and discussion salons, the students presented a special lunchtime session, Changing the Landscape of Theatre Audiences, Artists & Beyond: The Youth Voice, which you can view here.

After returning back to Los Angeles, students crafted creative responses to the experience. Below are excerpted selections from these responses. It turned out that their biggest takeaways weren’t necessarily about the theatre but about themselves—and what they have to offer the world as artists, theatregoers, and human beings.

Defining myself to make change

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” —Oscar Wilde

At the 2015 TCG Conference (aptly titled Game Change), every session and speaker was aligned with the charge of freeing us from the agents of systemic marginalization we have been subjected to since before the inception of this nation. They aimed their energies at creating a space in which every attendee was equipped to speak in his or her own voice and inspire others toward crafting a more inclusive theatre landscape.

The focus was clear early on: we all have been bound with classifications of one sort or another. However, the way we move forward is to find our own definition of what it means to be our true self. In my case, my charge is to define for myself what it means to be an African-American teenage male of Christian faith. Because until I define those labels on my own terms, I am ill-fitted to shift paradigms of any sort. If I am just as susceptible to oppression as the next person, how can I effect tangible change?

The TCG Conference taught me that no one can oppress you so long as you know who you are.

—Elijah G., 16

Realizing you are indeed a young adult

Only 12 days prior to the TCG Conference, I graduated from high school, which was a very pivotal moment in my life—kind of like the cocoon becoming a butterfly, or the bird leaving the mother’s nest. Basically, it’s a moment when you realize that you are indeed a young adult, which was reinforced by attending the conference. Because the majority of attendees were older, it was almost impossible not to be involved in conversations with adults, which was something I wasn’t used to. Everyone I met had some quality that made him or her unique, and really worth connecting with. At the Black Theatre Commons, for example, I learned a lot about black theatre companies, but I also got to hear what the adults had to say about what they’ve been through as black artists. The conversations we had within that session and in general were helpful to me as a young black artist who is looking to achieve growth both artistically and overall as a human being.

—Julyza C., 17

Breaking stereotypes

Did you hear about the “screw up/at-risk teen/illiterate” who went to the TCG Conference in Ohio? A woman came up to me after our presentation and said, “Thank you.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

She told me, “Thank you for sharing your story. You’re breaking the stereotype of an at-risk young adult.”

Adults need to give young men and women a chance to express our ideas, because we are the future.

—Erick M., 18

Finding my place in theatre

Going into the conference, the only thing I knew about theatre was how to perform, and that was just about it. But when all the teenagers met for the first time, we had to introduce ourselves with our name and place in theatre. I was astonished by how vivid everyone was about what they enjoyed and what their interests were. I felt like an amateur. When it was my turn to introduce myself, I said something along the lines of, “Hi, my name is Sabino, and I’m not sure what my place in theatre is, but I wish to find out at this conference.”

I came to realize that my voice mattered, especially when discussing topics like engagement. My engagement with theatre had taken me all the way to Ohio. Now, entering my first year as an undeclared undergraduate at CSU Fullerton, I question how I can engage kids like me, especially Latinos, into relationships with theatre. I want to help them find their voices and platforms and individual creative beauty, and though it may not be my permanent place in theatre, I will continue looking.

—Sabino R., 18

Change: A poem

I’ve always wanted to change
Change my body
Change my skin
Change my hair
Change myself
I searched 17 years for change

I found a bigger need for change
Change in the world
Change in media
Change in society
Change in our minds
I didn’t know where to find change

But theatre knows the need for change
Change in hatred
Change in racism
Change in sexism
Change in our lives
It can fuel that bigger change

We together must choose to change
Change our goals
Change our mindsets
Change our actions
Change our hearts
Maybe then we can help the world change

—Mykaela S., 17

How ‘Bent’ Made Gay History

Rob Weinert-Kendt — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 20:03:00 -0700

The reclamation of that hated symbol as a token of pride is just one of the legacies of Sherman’s play, which premiered on London’s West End in a production starring Ian McKellen, and on Broadway in 1980 with Richard Gere in the lead. Life has changed rapidly and radically for gay people in the West since then, as much or more than it had changed between World War II and the dawn of AIDS. What’s easy to forget amid the inexorable march of history is not only how far forward gay liberation has moved but also how little was popularly known in the mid-1970s about gay life under the Nazis. Indeed, even the mere fact that they were among the minority groups rounded up and sent to Nazi detention and death camps—alongside Jews, gypsies and communists—was not then widely known.

It certainly wasn’t known to Sherman, a Jewish-American who lost family members in the Holocaust. He was in London in the mid-’70s working with a small company called the Gay Sweatshop, whose production of his play Passing By had “renewed my determination to continue writing for the theatre,” when he sat in on a rehearsal of Noel Greig and Drew Griffiths’ As Time Goes By.

“It was in three parts, showing gay life in three historical eras: one was in Victorian England, the second was in Germany before the war, and the third was at the time of Stonewall,” Sherman recounted in a phone call from a writing workshop he was leading in Austria (“Hugely ironic,” he noted). The mention of “pink triangles” was, in his recollection, no more than “one sentence” in the play. He asked Griffiths and Greig about it; they said they’d done some research on the subject. Sherman later caught an article in Christopher Street, a gay magazine in New York City, titled “The Men With the Pink Triangles,” that would further inform the writing of Bent (the article’s author, Richard Plant, had written a book on the subject, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, but couldn’t find a publisher until after Sherman’s play premiered). In the absence of a detailed English-language history on the subject, then, Sherman found himself doing research at London’s Wiener Library, a comprehensive collection of literature about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

“I spoke to an old librarian there and asked her, ‘Are there books that talk about homosexuals in Nazi Germany?’ She was very homophobic; she asked me, ‘Do you mean the Nazis as homosexuals?’ I said, ‘No, I mean the Nazi treatment of homosexuals.’”

Whatever her attitudes on the subject, Sherman recalled, “She was an excellent librarian—she remembered everything. She would show me one paragraph in one book here, a sentence in another there, and so I was able to piece together a mosaic of certain facts.”

Sherman said he also found Bruno Bettelheim’s 1960 memoir of his time at Dachau, The Informed Heart, “hugely influential in my writing,” particularly about “the psychology of being in the camps.” Sherman’s play follows Max, a gay man in Berlin rounded up with his lover, a dancer named Rudy, after the infamous Night of the Long Knives in 1934. This purge, one of many turning points in Hitler’s consolidation of power, targeted one of his allies and potential rivals, Ernst Rohm, the openly gay leader of the Nazis’ paramilitary wing, the Brownshirts. Political differences, not Rohm’s sexuality, were the real reason he was killed and the Brownshirts decimated, but homosexual “decadence” became one of many convenient Nazi scapegoats.

Bent dramatizes not only the way gay men got caught in this crossfire but, in the compromised character of Max, the terrible means by which some fought to survive. Only in the play’s second act, set at Dachau, does Max—who forms an intimate friendship with another man, Horst—grasp the futility of mere survival, sans dignity and love.

Sherman said he’d initially intended Bent for the Sweatshop, “which meant that I thought it was going to be performed in a small little fringe theatre somewhere.” That may account for the play’s sexual frankness and formal ambition, not to mention its unflinching depiction of Nazi sadism. But Griffiths immediately recognized its larger potential and told Sherman, “We can’t do this. You have to send this out into the world.”

“It was an act of enormous generosity,” noted Sherman. And prescience, it turns out, “I wrote it for a small theatre, about a subject that hadn’t been talked about. I never in a million years dreamed that it would be in a position to make that known throughout the world.”

But while Bent is clearly a play about a particular moment in history, it is also a play inspired by gay life in the late 1970s.

“In some ways, you could argue that gay life was peaking, in terms of what it became in the ’70s, and was going to stop being once the specter of AIDS arrived,” recalled David Marshall Grant, who appeared in the play’s first reading at the O’Neill Playwrights Center in 1978, and later in its Broadway premiere. The play’s first scene—in which Max and Rudy wake up together in an apartment, and Max can’t recall how he spent the previous wild night—was for its time a disarmingly casual portrait of what we might today call a “monogamish” gay relationship. As Grant recalled, “You might have thought you were in Greenwich Village in the ’70s—that’s how it played when it was first read. Until the Nazis came in.”

Sherman agreed: As any good playwright does, he wrote the play for his time as much as for the ages. “The gay world then was somewhat brutalized—it was enormously sexualized,” Sherman recalled. “New York was absolutely wild. People were just [having sex] all over the place, literally. But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. I did not see a society that was progressing. It was extremely commercial; people were making a lot of money out of it. It was in its way not dissimilar, I thought, to what Germany was like in the Weimar era.”

If Bent was groundbreaking for its delineation of a little-known historical period, and for its blunt depiction of same-sex sexuality—in its most famous scene, Max and Horst make love without touching, or even moving very much—it was prescient in another way which may explain its wide appeal and longevity.

“It was ahead of its time in that it showed that the prize wasn’t sexual liberation—ultimately the prize was love,” said Grant, who noted that this theme would later resonate through Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart, in which he also starred. “Sexual liberation was an absolutely necessary step toward understanding; you can’t love until you understand your sexuality. But Martin was already beyond that. The play is very clearly about somebody who learns how to love, and I don’t think love was in any way a priority for gay life in the ’70s.”

Sherman agreed: “Love didn’t seem to enter the picture on a visible level then. Of course it existed. But the play is as much about internal repression as external.”

Moisés Kaufman, who is directing the revival at the Mark Taper Forum, called Bent “a much richer, deeper, more complicated play than just a play about gays in the Holocaust,” though he admitted that its function as a historical marker is still urgently necessary. “When I tell young gay men and lesbians that I’m doing the play, they are shocked to learn that gays were persecuted in the Holocaust.”

For Kaufman, who grew up Jewish and gay in Venezuela, the demimonde of Weimar Berlin represents an important pivot for gay identity. “There were 100 gay bars in Berlin in the 1930s, and 40 gay publications,” Kaufman said, pointing also to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Studies and his activism on behalf of legalizing gay relationships. He cited the thesis of Robert Beachy’s 2014 book Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity.

“In Victorian times, male-male relationships were only about sex,” said Kaufman, whose breakthrough work was Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (which played at the Mark Taper Forum in 1998). “Only in the 20th century did the notion of love between men emerge, and Beachy’s book shows that Berlin in the ’30s is where that conversation began to occur.”

That conversation was cut short, obviously, and has since often been interrupted, if never entirely silenced. As Sherman was quick to point out, “The Nazis aren’t coming for us, but this is going on in a lot of cultures—in Russia, for instance.”

For Kaufman, Bent is not just a postcard from a more repressive era; it’s also a crucial alternative history.

“Gay relationships have, for better or worse, entered the mainstream,” said Kaufman, who’s been with his husband for 26 years. “Gay people today are going to grow up with marriage as an option, but there were no norms, no models at the time for Max. So this play becomes even more relevant: The people in the play are showing a relationship that is very intimate but doesn’t follow the morality that is in vogue.”

If Greig and Griffiths were to add a chapter to As Time Goes By, they might include one in which gays have claimed their rightful place in two conservative institutions—marriage and the military—and still wonder what’s missing. Bent reminds us that what we can still miss now, as then, is the only thing that will save us. As W.H. Auden put it, “We must love one another or die.”

My Broadway Debut at the August Wilson Monologue Competition

Shaila Essley — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 20:11:00 -0700

Aside from workshops and acting exercises, I also enjoyed sight-seeing throughout the trip. Given that this was my first time in New York, I wanted to do all the touristy things first-timers do. During our free time, my chaperones and I went shopping in Times Square, visited the Fame high school (the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), and walked through Central Park and Theatre Row.

However, the most memorable “monument” I saw was the Apollo Theater. Thanks to True Colors Theatre in Atlanta, which organized the competition and our activities, I was able not only to see the Apollo inside and out, but also to perform on its stage and touch the Tree of Hope! (The Tree of Hope is a section of tree trunk that performers rub for good luck on the Apollo’s famous Wednesday Amateur Nights.)

The most impactful event of the trip was simply performing August Wilson monologues on the subway while on the way to the Apollo with the other students. The new environment and audience forced all of us to focus on telling a story as a living person rather than “acting” as a character. Besides the subway, performing on August Wilson Theatre’s stage was also unforgettable: I have always dreamed of performing on Broadway and never expected to have accomplished this dream so soon. At first I was extremely nervous because I had never performed in a huge theatre like this one before, but as soon as I walked onto the stage, my nerves turned into electric energy. Then, walking up to perform my monologue, I was finally able to let go of all the pressures I had put on myself and just give the performance my all.

I am so grateful to have had this opportunity, and wish I could go back and relive the experience. I urge anyone who is interested in participating in the competition to just go for it; the August Wilson Monologue Competition has built me up as an actor by allowing me to tell powerful stories while building my craft. Finally, for the national finalists next year I have one piece of advice: Stay off your phone! This kind of trip only comes once in a lifetime; you will want to savor every moment so you can hang onto the memories.