The Pattern at Pendarvis
Written by Dean Gray
Directed by Joseph Megel
New Dog Theatre Company
August 3, 2018
Production website
💉💉 out of 5.

New York is full of gay theatre!  That’s for sure.  Gay men of the city love to hear themselves talk and talk!  These stories are mainly set in Greenwich Village or Castro Street, in Fire Island or Provincetown.  They are set in Boys Town in Chicago or on the beaches of Miami – but were there any gay folk outside of major cities?  Were there any gay people in Rust Belt, Corn Belt, middle of America?  Pattern at Pendarvis answers that question with a resounding or, perhaps, more quiet, “yes.”

Pattern at Pendarvis is fictionalized take on the life of Edgar Helium, a man in his early nineties who is catching fame for saving Pendarvis, a small mid-western town from destruction.  He is part of a preservation society that is saving this small coal town with deep Cornish history from the bulldozer.

But the true setting of the play is the proverbial closet where gay men lived for years and years until Stonewall opened the door.  Through accounts of Edgars careful relationship with his life partner Robert Neil we see how gay men lived in the fifties and early sixties.  We sense the strength and tenacity it took to put up one face for the pubic and another for home.

“We weren’t a disgrace; we knew how to act,” he says, later adding that, in the future, gays will “come into their own on merit. Their sex life has nothing to do with it. They have a makeup, in their genes, to be artistic, to be constructive.” 

Try putting that phrase on your next float at the Pride Parade and see how the audience respond . . .