"Fear Up Harsh" at the Adrienne Arsht Center elicits laughter and tears, but most importantly, asks its audience to interrogate itself

Using the power of Brecht's Alienation-effect, a blackout splits open, cracked by the sounds of war – semi-automatic rifle shots, multiple bombs exploding including a sonic BOOM! so loud that perhaps the elderly members of the audience should have been forewarned, and voices screaming through the mayhem as two silhouettes hold onto one another, crying out in hopeful prayer despite the wounds their rugged military bodies have endured – these volatile sounds – set off further by strobe lights, darkness, and the image of two soldiers, one injured big-boned marine in the arms of a smaller darker woman in beat-up fatigues, who comforts him through the chaos with an alternatingly deep and high-pitched voice that could only come from a frightened yet valiant human being striding immanent fatality, a panicked shrieking pieta – this image marked the opening scene of Carbonell Award-winning playwright Christopher Demos-Brown’s new offering Fear Up Harsh, jarring audience members artfully into the brutal reality of the combat zones that U.S. veterans and their enemies have experienced in their real lives in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past twelve years.

Without giving away the ending: the play tells the story of a permanently disabled marine whose post-war treatment of the female soldier who rescued him in battle by pulling him to safety through the aforementioned war zone, is, to put it mildly, less-than-noble. Yet the play calls the concept of “heroism” into question in a double fashion. It contrasts the wounded and medaled veteran family man Rob Wellman (played sympathetically by Shane Tanner) with his less fortunate subordinate, court-martialed lesbian Army soldier Mary Jean Boudreaux (played in a tour-de-force performance by Karen Stephens). And it further contrasts Wellman’s bravery rescuing his comrades in battle with the inhumane torture techniques his company used under orders during their “tour” in Iraq. Perhaps most interesting, in the scene that graphically depicts this, even the most sympathetic character in the play, Mary Jean Boudreaux, is complicit, as she urges her comrades to intensify their barbaric behavior.

Book review of "Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre" by Norma Bowles and Daniel-Raymond Nadon, eds.

CLICK HERE to read my book review in the Gay & Lesbian Review, Worldwide of "Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre," a new anthology edited by Norma Bowles and Daniel-Raymond Nadon.

Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre
Edited by Norma Bowles and Daniel-Raymond Nadon
Southern Illinois University Press.  328 pages, $35.

IN 1991, Fringe Benefits Theater Company co-founder and artistic director Norma Bowles began collaborating with homeless queer youth in Los Angeles to devise original theater pieces depicting the sometimes brutally harrowing, often boldly inspiring actualities of their young lives. These powerful early pieces were performed at Highways Performance Space as well as at area high schools. They were acclaimed by critics and community alike, and Sir Ian McKellen himself narrated the film Surviving Friendly Fire about the company’s unconventional process. A subsequent project, Cootie Shots, resulted in a play tour and ensuing anthology that was groundbreaking in that it brought GLBT stories into elementary schools throughout the U.S. as early as 1999.
To read more of the review, CLICK HERE

"Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco: Is There an Enduring Gay Ethnic Dance?", published by Oxford University Press

My essay "Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco: Is There an Enduring Gay Ethnic Dance?" is now available at Oxford University Press Handbooks Online. The essay can be found by clicking HERE

ABSTRACT: Exploring the ontological politics of disco, this chapter historically explains the use of improvised social dancing in the formation of an alternative ethnicity among gay men and lesbians. The chapter argues that improvised social dancing (and disco in particular) has helped create a shared sense of culture for gay people that mimics ethnogenesis, insofar as disco offered an oppressed group a shared sense of belonging, communality, and identity. Like traditional ethnic dances, disco (and its progeny—techno, house, trance, tribal, etc.) perpetuates not only aesthetics, but also belief structures, linguistic/behavioral patterns, and social relations by providing a space wherein queer interpersonal and social bonds have been created and sustained. In turn, these bonds have contributed to the construction of lines of descent and inheritance, as well as shared ideas about common ancestry and history that parallel ethnic configurations of kinship.

Lanford Wilson's "Fifth of July" directed by Darren Blaney, Virginia Princehouse Allen Theater, Pomona College Department of Theatre & Dance, Fall 2017

Some production photos of the 2007 production of Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July that I directed at Pomona College. 

Cast:

Ken: Danny Zucker
Jed: Alexander Glassmann
June: Molly McKinney... Read More
John: Chris Coughlin
Gwen: Caroline Almy
Sally: Annie Frietas
Shirley: Karla Davenport
Weston: AJ Krane

Direction, Set, & Lighting Design:

Darren Blaney

Costume Design:

Suzanne Schultz Reed

This studio production ran in late November 2007, and received a tremendously appreciative response from the community. Danny Zucker and Alex Glassmann both received awards from the Kennedy Center for achievement in acting, and the entire ensemble received a commendation from the Kennedy Center for excellence in ensemble playing. It was truly a magical experience working with these talented young actors. 

Additional shots can be found by scrolling onto the next page by clicking "read more"