Quince Productions is bringing some landmark gay productions to Philadelphia for this year’s GayFest!, a festival of LGBT theater through Aug. 23.
One of the most notable is “The Haunted Host,” the story of a writer who is dealing with conflicting emotions when another playwright, who happens to look a lot like his deceased ex-lover, shows up at his apartment looking for a place to stay. It is widely regarded as America’s first contemporary gay play and is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
Robert Patrick, who wrote and starred in the play, and pioneered off-off-Broadway theater, recalled that when he first performed the work back in 1964 at Caffe Cino, he didn’t know the play would spark an artist movement.
“It was very casual at the Caffe Cino,” he said. “Very few people came to see the play. They were very loyal and very broad-minded. So when Lanford Wilson and I happened to write gay plays, we just took them and did them. It didn’t occur to us at all that we were making a worldwide theater revolution.”
Even though its beginnings were modest, Patrick said he could tell early on that his play meant something more than just entertainment to people.
“The first surprise was one night while I was on stage and while my costar has a long speech, I leaned on a table where a young man was sitting with his mother and father,” Patrick said. “And as I leaned there, he pointed at me and said, ‘Mom, Dad, that’s what I brought you here to see him. I’m like him. I’m a homosexual.’ And I realized what I was doing had much larger ramifications than just having a good time on Saturday night. That the play is still being done 50 years later is a delightful surprise.”
Another surprise Patrick had was when he attended a recent production of “The Haunted Host” in Palm Springs.
“To my delight, the audience was not aware that the play was 50 years old,” he said. “They just enjoyed it as a good play. That was most gratifying. The audience in Palm Springs, some of them refused to believe that the play was 50 years old. They thought it was current and modern and relevant.”
While modern audiences may appreciate the play, they might not fully grasp the context in which it was written.
Patrick recently attended a gay film festival and said younger attendees he encountered often didn’t realizes that there was a time when there were no openly LGBT characters or themes in the world of theater or film.
“Most of the kids I talked with didn’t even know there was a time when homosexuality was illegal,” he said. “I don’t think they quite conceive what a revolution it was when we wrote gay plays. They didn’t know that once, it was illegal for homosexuals to congregate.”
Another widely acclaimed show coming to GayFest! is “Confessions of a Mormon Boy,” the internationally acclaimed autobiographical one-man show written and performed by Steven Fales about his struggles resolving his sexuality with his Mormon faith.
In an effort to conform to the expectations of his Mormonism, he married a woman and had two kids before he finally decided to come out.
Fales said that his confessional show feels more relevant to audiences now than it was when it debuted 10 years ago.
“The play seems to be more timely,” he said. “I’m amazed that the themes I was dealing with when it first came out are still topical. We still have reparative therapy going on with a vengeance in Texas. We have spiritual abuse and religious violence against gays and lesbians all over the place. So I don’t think the piece is dated at all.”
After coming out, Fales was soon divorced and excommunicated from his church, then moved to New York City, where he supported himself as an escort.
While excommunication may not carry the societal weight that it did in the 1700s, Fales said in modern-day Mormon circles, it can be devastating.
“Mormonism is not just a religion,” he said. “It’s almost a race. When you are sixth-generation Mormon, before you know you are anything, you know you are Mormon. Before you know if you are even male or female, gay or straight, you know you are Mormon. Even though I might not have believed all the tenets of the church when they held the church court on me, when I was excommunicated it was a psychological fracture. It was a fragmenting thing. I really think I cracked. I was divorced, excommunicated and if I didn’t have the theater as a soft place to land, I don’t think I would have had any validation. I did have a spiritual experience in my church court as I was being tried as a homosexual, and that’s one of the most important messages of my play. Whatever God is, it’s so much bigger than any institution.”
While the work focuses on the Mormon way of life, Fales noted it has a universal message.
“Mormonism is the hook but it really is about the humanization of a Mormon boy —and that translates into the perfect Catholic boy, the perfect Baptist boy, anyone who tries to be perfect and then went to the other extreme and was trying to find the middle,” he said. “This play will resonate with those individuals.”
One can imagine that the Mormon Church probably isn’t singing the praises of “Confessions of a Mormon Boy” like many critics have.
But, Fales said, the institution isn’t speaking badly of it either.
“The Mormon way is to just ignore me. Their way is not to picket. If they give you a word, it means you have made such a big splash that they can’t ignore you. If you look at my original marketing, you can see that [the hit Broadway comedy] ‘The Book of Mormon’ took a lot of my stuff and ran with it. They made it so huge that the Mormon Church issued a two-sentence response. That’s it. They dismiss you as entertainment. They are very smart. They know that if they say anything, they are going to give you PR. The biggest backlash has been within my own family. That’s where it hurts. In my family, if you are not Mormon, you are not family. So I’ve experienced a lot of personal hurt.”
Fales has built upon the success of “Confessions” by making it part of a trilogy of autobiographical plays, which includes the follow-ups “Missionary Position” and ‘Who’s Your Daddy?” Fales said each of the plays can be appreciated by audiences who haven’t seen all of them.
“All three are written to stand on their own. ‘Confessions’ is probably the most important of the three. However, the other two have golden nuggets and together as a trilogy, they create an epic.”
Quince Productions presents GayFest! through Aug. 23 at various venues in Philadelphia. For more information and a schedule of all the shows, visit www.quinceproductions.com/gayfest.html.