Two Gay Plays In Brooklyn

The newly-founded Rainbow Repertory Theatre proudly bills itself as a company whose aim is to develop and promote the plays of gay and lesbian playwrights of color. However, its artistic director Reginald Jackson, himself a playwright, does not "want to just appeal to the gay community."

In fact, Rainbow Rep's first offerings--Kids and Enormous Insignificancies (both directed by Jackson)--have more straight characters in them than gay. "We [as gay people] really don't live in a vacuum," explained Jackson, "so I don't see any purpose in doing pieces in a vacuum."

Both one-act plays will be presented back to back March 6  and 13[1988], starting at 7 p.m., at the Alonzo Players Theatre, 317 Clermont Avenue, Brooklyn, under the umbrella title: "Kuumba: A Night of New Theatre." (Kuumba means "creativity" in Swahili.)

Kids, a play with music by Charles Pouncy, deals with self-identity and self-acceptance. The focus is on two adolescent brothers--Jacob, who is openly gay to the point of being effeminate and David, who, when confronted by his mother, denies his homosexuality. "This would be a wonderful piece for gay and lesbian youth of color to come to," said the 24-year-old director, a native of Queens, "because Kids is about them. It's about me, too. I've lived it. But they're living it now. They've got no sense of validation."

While Kids, with its musical soliloquies and humorous touches, can be quite entertaining, its companion piece, Enormous Insignificancies by Hector Lugo, about a Puerto Rican playwright dying of AIDS, can be very unsettling. "What do you want me to do," asks Gaston, the playwright (played by Lugo), as he lay on a psychiatric couch, "go up to this man, the only human being who has been kind to me, who I love, and say I've got--I'm going to die and maybe you've got it, too? I can't, I can't, I can't."

Enormous Insignificancies, recalled Jackson, "was originally done at City College for the one-act festival last year. I didn't see it, but I knew Hector. We were at the college together. [After reading the script], I told him if he was interested in rewriting it, I would consider doing it."

Although the playwrights involved with Rainbow Rep must be gay or lesbian, that rule does not apply when Jackson goes about the task of selecting the cast. "There are 11 people in the total production--five gays and six straights, at least that is their public image. I'm not going to pull people who are in the closet, out of the closet. My political stance is that I don't particularly condone being in the closet, but artistically it's irrelevant. As far as I'm concerned, the actors are asexual on stage. The audience shouldn't be trying to figure out who's gay and who's straight. That defeats the purpose."

A future project waiting in the wings is "a theatrical dialogue" between gay men and lesbians. "It'll be two different pieces," said Jackson,"running about 45 minutes each, comprised of poetry and prose exploring how we feel about each other, what are the myths, the stereotypes, the misconceptions, the questions, the fears that affect the whole relationship. I've got ideas on what I think will probably come up in it, but I have no idea what the overall gist or structure will be." That would be left up to the poets and playwrights "who would get together on a Saturday or a Sunday for three hours, four hours," continued Jackson, and "brainstorm" on how they would "create the written work into a theatre piece; linking the pieces and building a script."

This article was originally published in the Philadelphia Gay News (March 11, 1988).