Disco Pigs
Written by Edna Walsh
Directed by John Haidar
Booth Theatre
January 13, 2018
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

What the hell were they saying?  From the moment Disco Pigs began and two captivating young actors pulled apart flaps in the back wall essentially narrating their birth at the same time in the same hospital – you just couldn’t understand what they were saying.  I thought, at first it was because it was an Irish play – set in Cork – and they were just taking this dialect thing a BIT too far.  Then I realized Continue reading Disco Pigs →

Mankind
Written by Robert O’Hara
Directed by Robert O’Hara
Playwrights Horizons
December 30, 2017
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

Mankind was a most unexpected treat.  The advert for it mentioned that it was a satire about a world in which there were no more women, and men were left to give birth to babies without them.  Ouch!  I thought this was going to be a cheap – woman hating – even gay celebration play – but I was wrong!  Nothing in this play was gay and nothing in this play was about hating women – far, far from that. Continue reading Mankind →

Bright Colors and Bold Patterns
Written and Performed by Drew Droege
Directed by Michael Urie
Soho Playhouse
November 16, 2017
Production website
💉💉💉 out of 5.

I am in Palm Springs for a wedding of someone I have only heard of. I am in my mid-twenties and in the prime of my life. An older man – I guess we can call him my boyfriend – brought me along because every party needs some eye candy. I have no interest in attending the wedding, but I am digging the attention I am getting floating around this pool in my impressive tan and speedo. [Okay, this is not me – not me now, not me then, and regretfully, not me ever.]  Continue reading Bright Colors and Bold Patterns →

Torch Song Trilogy
Written by Harvey Fierstein
Directed by Moises Kaufman
2nd Stage
June 23, 2017
Production website
💉💉💉 out of 5.

This Torch Song needed to have its torch lit!  I saw the original Torch Song back in the Eighties with a younger Harvey Fierstein and his unmissable, low, rumbling voice.  I remember as a young man in my twenties – I was blown away by every single scene.  I had never seen a drag queen – much less the preparation that drag queens go through to complete the transformation.  I had never been to a gay bar (sheltered, I know) much less a gay bar with a “back room.”  I couldn’t imagine an entire scene of a straight couple and a gay couple shacking up together and swapping partners – all played out in a scene that takes place on a stage-filling bed.  And then that big coming out scene with (in the original, Estelle Getty)  It changed my world – and clearly it opened the door for Will and Grace, Modern Family and the inclusion of gays in a hundred stories, movies and TV shows to come.    It changed the world for gay men in the entertainment world – for sure! Continue reading Torch Song Trilogy →

The Pipeline
Written by Dominique Morisseau
Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz
Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
June 26, 2017
Production website
💉💉💉💉 out of 5.

I go from the wonderment and colossal budget of Groundhog Day to the basement of Lincoln Center to a play that has a teachers desk, a lunch table and a couch, a VERY white wall and some very harsh florescent lighting.  And I will take the second play over the first any day.  Pipeline was another play that I knew very little about before the show.  I knew it was about a teacher (familiar ground) and about a black student trying to navigate life in a ROUGH urban school – or survive a very preppy private school (certainly much less familiar ground.) Continue reading The Pipeline →