Mauckingbird Theatre Company is kicking off its seventh year of bringing gay-themed stories to stages in Philly with a story that is a personal favorite of one of the company’s founders.
Artistic director Peter Reynolds and managing director Lindsay Mauck started Mauckingbird Theatre Company with the purpose of producing innovative and affordable LGBT-centric theater. They have since become highly regarded and acclaimed for their all-male versions of classics like “The Misanthrope” and “R & J” (“Romeo and Juliet”), lesbian adaptations of works like “Huda Gabler,” seminal lesbian plays like “Last Summer at Bluefish Cove” and one-man shows about influential gay writers Truman Capote and James Baldwin.
But Mauckingbird is embarking on the season with the lesser-known “Beautiful Thing,” a down-to-earth and sometimes-humorous look at first love, written by English playwright Jonathan Harvey and now celebrating its 20th anniversary. Set in a working-class neighborhood in Southeast London, the story follows Jamie (Griffin Back), Ste (Kevin Murray) and Leah (Sofie Yavorsky), high-school-aged neighbors growing up surrounded by violence, poverty and drugs. When the boys share a kiss, it allows a bit of hope to break through the misery.
“It’s a really special show to me,” Mauckingbird founder and director Reynolds said about the play. “I love all kinds of theater, plays and stories, and you can tell that from the types of productions that we’ve done. But this is my personal favorite story. It is not a classic play. It’s not a Shakespeare, but it’s my personal favorite story. It’s the story that I didn’t have when I was a young gay person: a story about two teenage boys falling in love. I think it’s beautiful and I wanted to mark the anniversary.”
Reynolds is also excited to get to work with an actor he previously directed.
“The thing about this play, Griffin Back, who is playing the lead, we met when he was 12,” he said. “He was in a production of ‘Ragtime’ that I directed. He played the young boy and now he’s grown up. That is exciting and thrilling for me.”
Gay-themed versions of classic dramas, tragedies and comedies are commonplace during a typical Mauckingbird season, but Reynolds said he likes being able to present an uncomplicated love story.
“I think it’s important and necessary, as our world gets progressively complicated all the time. It’s great to tell a simple love story. At Mauckingbird, we’re interested in good stories, whether it’s Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde. We’re really interested in a good story in the hopes that the audience goes, ‘Oh wow, and they were gay.’”
Reflecting on the 20 years Mauckingbird has been producing stage plays, Reynolds said he is proud of the company’s shows and listed the adaptations of some classics as high points in the company’s history.
“I’m really proud of our ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’” he said. “We had a theater in Madison do my edit of ‘Much Ado,’ which was exciting to have another company pick up our version. I was also really proud of “The Importance of Being Earnest.’”
Reynolds added that while there are other companies doing gay-themed versions of classic stories, as far as he knows, Mauckingbird is the only one dedicated solely to that purpose.
“We did a lot of researching and discovered that, from what we know, we are the only people in the United States specifically looking at classic texts through a queer lens,” he said. “There are many companies that will do a single all-male or all-female Shakespeare. But to the extent we have been doing this, we think we are the only one, which is exciting. We’ve done our contemporary pieces but we have such a commitment to looking at classic texts, not just through one gender lens but through a queer lens. That was exciting to find out.”
When asked about what it has taken to keep the company going for so long, Reynolds attributed most of its longevity to the audiences who continue to patronize productions.
“We started out in a rather unorthodox matter,” he said. “Eighty-five percent or more of our budget is box office. We really pay for our show through box office and through small donations from individuals and a couple of small grants. It was unorthodox when we began but it worked out well because the economy got so rocky when we started. So we never had the big granting that we counted on. We’re still in that boat but hoping we can get more granting coming our way. We’re still a pretty small operation running on box office and individual donations.”
When asked about the company’s future, Reynolds said he expects Mauckingbird to stage up to three shows a year, and is eager to continue producing high-quality LGBT-focused stories.
“My goals are pretty simple,” he said. “I want to continue to tell good stories through a queer lens and a queer perspective, and to be able to pay the wonderful artists who work for us better and more of a living wage. The trickiest part with the classic texts is finding the texts that can work through a queen lens. So we do quite a bit of readings to find the right story to tell that works for what we’re doing at Mauckingbird. We just want to tell good stories and pay artists what they deserve to be paid.”
Mauckingbird Theatre Company’s “Beautiful Thing” runs through Feb. 2 at the Adrienne Skybox, 2030 Sansom St. For more information or tickets, call the Mauckingbird box office at 215-923-8909 or visit www.mauckingbird.org.
Mauckingbird Theatre Company will continue its season with a gender-bent production of William Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Aug. 22-Sept. 14 in the Randall Theater at Temple University.