Walking Fish Theatre Company is premiering a production in Philadelphia that explores a dark corner of gay history.
Mixing historical fact and fiction, “The Twentieth-Century Way” by playwright Tom Jacobson is set in 1914 in the city of Long Beach, Calif., where two actors, W.H. Warren and B.C. Brown, are enlisted to cruise public restrooms and lure gay men into sexual acts, then arrest them. These were the first documented incidents in the U.S. of police entrapping gays and set the stage for all kinds of gay-rights violations that would come after it.
Peter Andrew Danzig and Thomas Raniszewski star in the two-man production, directed by Karen Case Cook. Danzig said he wasn’t familiar with this chapter in LGBT history.
“Personally as a gay man, I didn’t know the history and the struggles that they went through in the [early 1900s],” he said. “Obviously, there are more relevant things going on now such as the fight for gay marriage and equality. This playwright did some down and dirty research and got into the history of that and how it destroyed lives. It definitely has potential to be controversial — but also thought-provoking. I think it really will, if anything, give people a sense of pride and where the history of homosexuality comes from and how far the fight has come. Although I think people now feel like there’s so much farther to go, it really shows a progression from then through now. I think people forget about how hard it was for gay men in that time to be who they were. This play reveals all those hardships. In those times when people were convicted of sodomy or homosexual acts, it was many times labeled as social vagrancy or the fine was for ‘unknown charges.’ In order to find the history of that, you really had to talk to people that lived in those times. It was so looked down upon that they didn’t even want to mention it in the papers. I don’t think people know how hard it was or what people went through unless somebody digs for it. I think this one is a real eye-opener. I’m excited to premiere it here and see the reaction from the audiences.”
Both Danzig and Raniszewski spend the duration of “The Twentieth-Century Way” portraying the actors, who in turn play a number of characters. Danzig said this made playing those two characters a unique challenge.
“It’s not uncommon for an actor to play multiple characters over the course of one play,” he said. “However, to do that without any scene changes, to be able to do that flawlessly, takes a great deal of research. There’s a lot of work that usually goes into one character. When there’s a variation of 15 or 16 different men all from different age ranges and places, it’s definitely a vicious cycle in that it takes a lot of research and a different approach to the play. I kind of have to break old habits and just jump in the deep end and see where it goes and where these characters lie within me. It’s definitely a stretch.”
Beyond the number of characters, the characters themselves span age ranges and socioeconomic and nationality backgrounds.
“There’s no limits on age, gender or race,” Danzig said. “Each of us has to dig in and learn these characters from Scotland and Turkey. They’re international, dated and rooted, and contemporary at the same time. It’s a seamless flow from character to character. The audience is going to be in for a real treat because these vignettes just continuously move forward. There’s no stopping and going to differentiate the scenes. It’s all based on the actors just fluidly moving between each character. There are five or six characters for each actor that really move the story. They always come back to these same five characters. They are five different men who are obviously homosexual in that time but come from different backgrounds and social standings. It shows the hardships that they traveled from and what was similar for each of these men, even though they came from different backgrounds. The fun part is that we continually move this range of characters but the story really follows the main characters, Warren and Brown, who are hired by the Long Beach Police Department to search out the characters that we are playing.”
Danzig said the most fulfilling part of the script and playing the role of these actors is making the characters sympathetic to the audience.
“Both of these characters are definitely homosexual themselves, but my character doesn’t know it at the beginning and is questioning,” he said. “To be put on assignment to find these men, charge them and throw them in jail is definitely conflicting for him. I know that Tommy’s character deals with a lot of these notions as well. It just kind of plays on the history of turning in people like yourself and how that emotionally damages a person and their confidence in who they are. It definitely speaks to people who are bigoted toward a certain group when they are secretly a member themselves.
“The thing that makes the audience sympathize with the characters is watching the journey. It truly shows the emotional and mental transformation in these men. They walk into the job taking it as any other job, and through the course of prosecuting these other characters and the wrongs that they are doing, they find out a lot more about themselves. So if anything there’s an enlightenment there. The audience will be able to sympathize with the characters knowing that nobody is perfect but at the right time everybody is faced with a decision in life, and there’s always one road and the other and you have to choose the one that is best for you or, in this case, what’s best for everyone in general. I think that’s going to help the audience identify with them because I think these men in the end really make the right choices.”
Danzig added that he hopes audiences will be able to appreciate the parallels between the struggles and injustices faced by gay men nearly a century ago and the issues facing LGBT society today.
“In the end bigotry is bigotry, and sadly that is timeless. I think that people are going to see a lot of correlations between the 1920s and now. Although it’s a very different time, I’d say the one thing that connects those men and the men of this time is emotional confinement and the restrictions that they faced. Yes, it’s a very different time and we’re all able to live our lives much more openly, but there are still emotional struggles and job situations that have similarities. It’s always human nature to fight what you don’t know and understand.”
Walking Fish Theatre Company presents “The Twentieth-Century Way” Aug. 10-20, 2509 Frankford Ave. For more information or tickets, call 215-427-9255 or visit www.walkingfishtheatre.com.