Right about now, many of us are mourning QFest, which, due to various circumstances (“Circumstance” happens to be the name of one of my favorite QFest movies, but I digress), did not go off this year. But have no fear, you can still get your gay entertainment groove on! Instead of actors on a faraway screen, this time they’ll be right up close, in the flesh, at GayFest!, the LGBT theater festival happening at several venues in the city through Aug. 23. That’s more than two weeks of tantalizing, thought-provoking and knee-slapping theater.
Bringing all that fun to the stage is Rich Rubin, a man rich in experience and talent. In addition to his role as a playwright and director, Rubin is truly a man about many towns, having worked as a travel writer for more than 20 years. His stories have appeared in Saveur, Caribbean Travel & Life, Bride’s, Modern Bride, Travel & Leisure and other publications. He is currently a regular correspondent for Man about World and the food and wine editor for Passport magazine. When not traveling, Rubin is the producing artistic director of Quince Productions, which produces GayFest!. He also serves on the board of the Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus.
PGN: So where did your story begin?
RR: I’m originally from St. Louis. I got to Philadelphia through a fairly circuitous route: born in Missouri, went to college outside of L.A., went to grad school and lived in Seattle for eight years and then moved to New York, as most people involved in theater eventually do. One week shy of my 20-year anniversary in New York, I moved to Philadelphia. This month I celebrated 10 years here.
PGN: Were you a theater major?
RR: No, I was actually an English major, with a concentration in playwriting.
PGN: Life in St. Louis was …
RR: Not as nice then as I believe it is now. It’s really come along; they have a good dining scene and they’ve developed things to do. Of course, being a kid stuck in the Midwest during the ’60s and ’70s, I’m not sure how much I would’ve liked it whatever they did.
PGN: Family?
RR: I’m the middle child with two brothers: one two years older, one two years younger. I think I may be the only one of my generation who has two parents still with us, so I’m grateful for that. My parents are … Not only do I think they’re the best — so does everybody else. It was great being the kid whose house everyone wanted to come to. My dad’s an accountant. He founded his own accounting firm. He’s about to celebrate his 90th birthday and he still goes to work there every day. My mother was always and is a housewife.
PGN: Where do you think you got your artistic gene?
RR: My great-great-grandfather was a singer, and my other great-grandfather was a journalist, which is my other line of work. So I guess the artsy side skipped a few generations, although I certainly didn’t inherit the singing gene.
PGN: Do you remember the first play you ever saw?
RR: When I was a kid, there wasn’t much in St. Louis. It wasn’t until I was in high school and a teacher took us abroad. One of our stops was in London and we saw a play called, “Hadrian the Seventh.” I don’t remember much about it other than it was a period piece and extremely theatrical. Seeing other eras presented on stage grabbed me immediately.
PGN: How great! I also got to travel to Europe when I was in high school and it changes your outlook on the world. What a great teacher to give you that experience.
RR: Yes, we studied for four weeks in Salzburg and then took side trips to Rome, London and Paris. It’s a shame more students don’t have the chance to do something like that. These days, most high schools don’t even require a foreign language. I think we were encouraged to have a broader outlook than kids are today.
PGN: That was your first, but not your last, trip out of the country.
RR: Definitely not. I’ve always loved to travel. When I got to college, I did a semester abroad in London and it was great because I got to devise an independent-study course. One of my courses was in modern theater and the other was in Shakespeare so I basically got college credit for going to see a lot of plays in London! I got to see John Gielgud playing Prospero and a young up-and-coming actress named Helen Mirren doing the Duchess of Malfi. It was an amazing time to be there.
PGN: Now you do a lot of travel writing. How did that come about?
RR: I was approaching a major birthday — I think it was 40 — and had been working as a playwright in New York and was experiencing the usual frustrations of someone in that line of work. I knew too many people who were 60 and 70 and still waiting for that big break. I decided I needed to do something with my writing or just give it up and go sell insurance. So I thought, I’ve always like to travel, let me do some writing about it and see what happens. So I sent out some stuff and the first piece I sent out was accepted by the Chicago Tribune and the second was accepted by Condé Nast Traveler. It was a great start with those two on a résumé. It built very quickly from there and within a year or two I was doing it to support myself. For a long time, it was the most wonderful job in the world. I was earning a good living but it was work — something my friends failed to realize — but the best work possible. And the best part was that I was doing features, not reviews, so I didn’t have to worry about getting anyone angry writing a bad review!
PGN: What was a crazy travel adventure?
RR: I stayed at the Ice Hotel in the north of Sweden. It was incredibly beautiful and they set up a dogsled trip through the woods for me. Since I was a journalist, the man who handled the dogs set up my own team for me to drive so I could have the full experience. So there I was flying across frozen tundra, and the dogs, sensing I didn’t know what I was doing, pulled every type of mischief they could think of. My other wild adventure was on the opposite end of the weather spectrum, on a little island in the Caribbean. I had a chance to join a team of scientists on a turtle watch. During my assignment, I was asked to watch for any turtles laying eggs. Sure enough, I saw one and as I was lying in the sand counting close to 100 turtle eggs I thought to myself, I may not have the pension plan that some of my friends do, but who else gets to do stuff like this?
PGN: And you get a taste of so many different careers: dogsled operator, scientist …
RR: Yes. I remember on the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize, I was doing a story on the banquet. As I was speaking to one of the chefs I caught a glance of myself in the mirror and realized, Oh my God, I’m backstage at the Nobel Prize ceremony. What a truly amazing life I live.
PGN: Were you always writing as a kid?
RR: Yes I was. I kept masses and masses of journals, which my mother begs me to throw out all the time and I keep saying no.
PGN: What’s the main difference between being a playwright and the director?
RR: I feel more in control as a director. As a playwright, I’m giving them the raw materials but it’s ultimately not me shaping the final product. But in the past 20 years I’ve worked more as a director than a playwright.
PGN: How did GayFest! come about?
RR: About four years ago I heard that the Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Theater Festival wasn’t going to be happening anymore. Quince Productions had already been established and always done LGBT works, but not exclusively. I thought that Philadelphia really needed an LGBT theater fest so we took up the mantle in 2011.
PGN: It seems odd that there are so many LGBT people in the theater and yet not a whole lot of theater addressing LGBT subject matter. Why do you think that is?
RR: Well, there aren’t too many mainstream theaters that are willing to take a chance; they think there will be a limited audience if they do a LGBT production. The only one I can think of that steadily does gay plays is the Wilma Theater.
PGN: It seems like the theater needs to catch up to television and films, where there seem to be more gay content and straight actors who are willing to do gay-themed productions — whether it be “Brokeback Mountain” or the Liberace story.
RR: It’s slowly changing. As far as the actors go, we have a rather small community here in Philadelphia, but most of the straight actors I know have no compunctions about playing a gay role or kissing another person of the same gender. We have an incredibly strong turnout for auditions for GayFest!, which is exciting, because there was a day when a straight actor wouldn’t be caught dead doing a gay role.
PGN: So what are some of the things people can look forward to this year?
RR: Well, we are known for offering Philadelphia or world premieres of new shows, but this year we have something a little different. We are doing the 50th-anniversary production of “The Haunted Host,” which is generally considered to be the first full-length gay play. For the fourth year in a row we’re doing a play by Daniel Talbott and it’s fascinating and mysterious and dark and funny all at the same time. I think he’s about the most important young writer out there. Our lesbian play is by Kathleen Warnock called, “Some Are People,” a play on summer people. She’s one of the leading lesbian playwrights of our time. It’s about a lesbian and her best friend, a drag queen named Miss Fitt. It’s a lesbian love story with drag-queen karaoke, which is not something you see every day. There are a lot of great productions this year. I’m really excited for it.
PGN: I understand you’re having several one-night stands.
RR: [Laughs] Well, not me personally! We have a lot of single-night performances, including the fundraiser “Standing on Ceremony.” The first One Night Stand is “The Homo Poe Show,” a gay spin on Edgar Allan Poe stories. We also have Rachel Tension, a wonderful young performer doing a night of tarot cards and hip-hop, and the fabulous R. Eric Thomas is doing a show called, “Always the Bridesmaid.” I could go on and on, there are so many incredible performances.
PGN: I read that you make a point of trying to draw in people who would not necessarily be considered your audience.
RR: Yes, and that includes both heterosexuals as well as the people who may not normally be theatergoers. People have told me, “Don’t bother with the bars. Those people just go there to drink.” I believe it is possible to both drink and enjoy the theater. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of attracting a wide audience.
PGN: I didn’t ask: When did you come out?
RR: We were raised — and this may be a little unusual for the Midwest — totally without biases or prejudices. My grandparents had run a business that dealt with a variety of people, so they’d always been pretty open-minded. I first came out to my mother when I was about 19 or 20 and watched as she became “super mother of a homosexual.” She read about every gay-rights ordinance out there. I waited two years to tell my dad and when I did, he was furious that I had waited to tell him. His response was, “What? You didn’t think I was sophisticated enough to handle it?” So the worst response that I got was that I hadn’t done it sooner.
PGN: What was your grandparents’ business?
RR: My grandfather ran a tavern. There was a little boot-legging and gangstering along the way, running rum from Canada to New York during Prohibition. In fact, you’ll find my Uncle Max inside the encyclopedia of crime!
PGN: What’s something that has inspired you to do the festival?
RR: It’s important for us to see our own lives on stage. I remember one young man, African-American, about 20 years, old who came up to me after seeing R. Eric Thomas’ “One Night Stand” and he said to me, “Nobody ever put my life on stage. Thank you for doing that.” It’s so important that we see each other’s lives. I remember one gay man who’d seen three out of four of the mainstage plays. I told him, “You only have one left!” He said, “I’m not going to see that, that’s a lesbian play. It’s not about me.” I said, “Neither are 1,000 plays about heterosexuals that you go to see.” So he went and afterwards he thanked me for badgering him to go. Moments like that make all the hard work worth every minute.
For more information about GayFest! ending Aug. 23, visit www.quinceproductions.com.
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