Stage of secrets: Quince goes deep with new satire

Quince Productions is injecting a little seriousness into its latest comedy, “The Submission,” which comes to Walnut Street Theatre next week.

Written by Jeff Talbott, “The Submission” begins as a story of a young white gay playwright, Danny, who writes a play under a pseudonym about growing up poor and African-American. When a major theater festival comes calling, wanting to perform his play, he hires an African-American actress to “play” the playwright. As the characters in the play carry on with the charade, the comedic situation quickly turns into a heated examination about prejudice, class, race and sexuality.

Quince artistic director Rich Rubin, who is also the play’s director, said “The Submission” is a bit more serious than the comedies the company is used to producing at this point in the season.

“It’s perhaps a little more though-provoking and a little more LGBT than our April shows usually are,” Rubin said. “It certainly, by the end, turns very serious in ways that I don’t want to give away.”

While most of the other characters in the play think the ruse is a bad idea, they all play along for their own reasons.

“[Danny] believes the play wouldn’t be taken seriously if they knew he wrote it,” Rubin said. “He plans throughout this scheme to eventually reveal to them what the truth is. It was in a moment of panic that he put the pseudonym on the play and then he’s kind of stuck with it. He’s afraid that the big festival that accepted the play will just chuck the whole play. But once it’s successful, that is the time to do it. For the actress who goes along with it, there are two reasons. One is simply it’s a job, and the other is while she is not sure how someone like Danny could have come up with this play, she thinks it’s an amazing play that deserves to be seen. She feels good in having a role in showing it to the public, even though she is dubious in the exact role she’s been asked to play. As far as Danny’s boyfriend and best friend, they really don’t have a choice.”

“They love the people who have the bad idea,” Talbott added. “We all get fooled by our affection for the people that we love. Trevor and Pete, who spend a lot of the play saying to their partners, “This is a terrible idea,” go along because they love them. For Danny and Emily, the two central characters in the play, they have the best of intentions. They think they are right and they are certainly both stubborn, but they are good people and want to do good things in the world. They want to convince the other person that their position is right. Even though the play has its painful moments, it’s about young people who are trying to do the right thing. They fail kind of miserably.”

Talbott added that the play walks a fine line between satire and serious drama.

“It wants to do both. It starts as a comedy and definitely starts as a satire but eventually is not funny at all. And now that I am six or seven plays and a couple of musicals in, it’s where my tastes lay. I like to lead my audiences down a path and then, as the path changes for me, let the path change for them. So hopefully the play feels like entertainment and then prompts a discussion.”

Talbott said the play came together because of a real-life interaction he had.

“I had an argument when I was much younger and in grad school with a classmate of mine that was the argument that sparked what became the play,” he said. “We had a discussion about prejudice and each other’s lives and who feels what. And I was very young and thought I knew a lot of things and he was very young and thought he knew a lot of things. We had a great big fight about it. At some point in my life, I sat down and started to write a play about theater and what I thought was going to be a satire. I started spinning my wheels about three scenes in because I thought the play couldn’t withstand itself and I remembered this discussion with the guy years ago, and that argument was really the thing that helped me write ‘The Submission.’ That central question the play kind of spins on — two people who both think they are absolutely right and absolutely are able to define for somebody else what their pain should be — became a way to give the play conflict and life. So the play is a little bit based on my life, but ultimately it just became me observing the characters having this discussion and shaping that discussion for them.”

“There is an ongoing debate through the show, as there is in life today, of the prejudice that he’s experienced as a gay man and if that makes him automatically understand what she’s faced as a black woman,” Rubin added about the issues tackled by the play. “His claim is that it does and her claim is, leave aside who you sleep with and you’re just another white man. Both characters understand very quickly when prejudices and inappropriate comments are aimed at the community that they belong to. They are a little slower to understand when they themselves do it with the other respective community. That’s another important piece of the dialogue that this play raises. As nice as it might be that the LGBT community was free of racism or African-Americans all over the world are free from homophobia, those things are not true, and how as someone who has experienced bigotry, you can unwittingly perpetrate it against others.”

Talbott said that, while this play might seem like it is throwing some satirical barb pointed at the theater community, it is more universal in its scope than audiences might suspect at the beginning.

“The more specifically you write, the more universal it becomes,” he said. “‘The West Wing’ is the best example of that. That seems to be only about life in the West Wing of the White House, but that show and the themes it touched on were so universal. I think that if you get the details right about a profession you are writing about, then it can talk about everything. The closer you get to getting it all right, the more everybody can relate to it.”

Talbott added that, while this play doesn’t have warm and fuzzy conclusions, the questions it raises are more important that wrapping it up with a feel-good ending.

“I do feel as a human being responsible for people being uncomfortable,” he said. “There are moments in the play that make people feel uncomfortable and that makes me feel uncomfortable that I have written something that causes that in some people. However, without question, what the play wants to do is to get people talking and people have very different views about what happened in the play and what that means to them. I love all kinds of theater but I think it’s useful every once in a while to go to the theater and be put into a position where you have to make some decisions after a play. And this play definitely wants to do that.”

Quince Productions presents “The Submission” with a special LGBT preview and reception at the April 9 performance, at Walnut Street Theatre Studio 5, 825 Walnut St. For more information or tickets, call 215-627-1088 or visit www.quinceproductions.com.

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