It’s like why do people who are adopted want to find their parents? You need to know your roots.We’re pretty sure Nick Jonas flushed his purity ring down the toilet, because his latest gig is about as far from virginal as you can get. “Now these young kids are trying to discover our physical history.
Fierstein, who plays a character whose lover dies in the UpStairs Lounge fire in “Gently Down the Stream,” Martin Sherman’s new play about three generations of gay men that starts this month at the Public Theater. “Our history’s never been written down,” said Mr. What’s behind this resurrection of the gay past? A thirst “to keep dusting off and finding out that we actually have a history,” said Harvey Fierstein, the Tony Award-winning actor whose groundbreaking gay-themed play “Torch Song Trilogy” will be revived this fall at Second Stage Theater. I don’t think there’s any time period that’s the perfect time period yet.” “Now we have this equality, but we also have this would-be dictator president and we also have Pulse happening. “You had cops that could come in and bash your face with a baton, and bars could be burned down,” Mr. An exception is Jeffrey Escoffier, 74, the Stonewall-generation author and historian who is a historical consultant on “Adonis Memories.” Most of the gay men behind these immersive shows are too young to fully remember the environments they’ve so carefully reconstructed. “Our first show we had some instances of the audience-actor line being blurred,” said Mackian Bauman, 22, an actor in “Adonis Memories.” “We had an opening speech beforehand - ‘Have fun, guys, explore the space, but remember, no touching the actors and we won’t touch you.’ But I got grabbed in the butt.” Bounville included Delany’s memoir “ Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” as a prop in “Adonis Memories.”Īs with any immersive show, there are perils to merging audience and actor. “There was also much more sexuality happening in those spaces than you online choosing your flavor for the night.” Mr. In today’s digital age, “you miss part of the experience of what cruising really was, which was to be in a public space with people and not be afraid if there’s rejection or if someone said, No, thank you,” Mr. Delany, a champion of “cross-class contact,” the notion that men of different races and incomes who wouldn’t normally talk to each other on the street would share sexual interests at places like the Adonis. Bounville said he was inspired by the gay author Samuel R. In addition to accessible and entertaining history lessons, the creative teams behind “Adonis Memories” and “View UpStairs” said they hoped immersing audiences in a gay yesteryear would remind theatergoers of what it was like to cruise in bars and other gay shared spaces with their eyes, not with their apps.
“I knew as soon as I got this material that there was a lot more to those spaces than I was aware.” Bounville, 40, who wrote and, with Adam Fitzgerald, directed “Adonis Memories,” said the stories he’d heard about places like the Adonis were often quite negative. I wanted to write a show that inspired people to learn from the past and pick up the torch and move forward.”Īlan L. “They were at the birth of a political movement, and now we are experiencing a resurgence of that militant civil rights activism. Vernon, 28, said of the UpStairs patrons.
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“All those people were facing very real oppression, but they were still figuring out how to be colorful and connected as a community,” Mr. (It was the deadliest instance of anti-gay violence in the United States until the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., last year.) Directed by Scott Ebersold at Culture Project, the piece is semi-immersive: The actors mingle with the audience in a campy gay bar reminiscent of the UpStairs, with cabaret seating near a piano where actors belt the ’70s-inspired score. “ The View UpStairs,” another musical, was inspired by the unsolved 1973 arson attack that killed 32 people at the UpStairs Lounge, a bar on the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Two men drafted into the Army before World War II explore their sexual desires in “Seeing You,” a new movement-based show by Randy Weiner, a “Sleep No More” producer, and the choreographer and director Ryan Heffington that begins performances on May 2. In addition to “Adonis Memories,” there’s Jeremy Lawrence’s “Lavender Songs,” a solo show set in a Nazi-era underground Berlin cabaret, where a drag queen addresses the audience during what might be his last performance.