The Gay White Way

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

If you judged the world by watching network television, you might be astonished by surveys suggesting that homosexuals constitute 1% to 4% of the U.S. population -- not because the number is so much lower than apparent reality, as some critics argue, but because it is so high compared with gays' virtual invisibility on the small screen. Hollywood movies afford scarcely more notice. Yet in the theater, long a haven for gay artists provided they addressed straight topics, gay characters and stories have abruptly taken center stage. After decades on the fringe, gay-themed works are increasingly enjoying lavish Broadway productions and being embraced by mainstream heterosexuals. "The trend really peaked this year," says John Harris, editor of TheaterWeek. "All the hot properties seem to be gay."

This season's best musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman, merges a homoerotic love story with homage to bygone movies viewed from a campy gay perspective. The season's ablest comedy, The Sisters Rosensweig, sympathetically portrays a bisexual man who romances one of the title siblings, then leaves her because he prefers men. The season's foremost drama, Angels in America, which opened last week to thunderous and deserved acclaim, positions the gay experience at the center of America's political and spiritual identity.

Angels is the first gay-centered play to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama; the runner-up was the best show of the off-Broadway season, the equally gay and angry memoir of AIDS activist Larry Kramer, The Destiny of Me. A decade ago, the theater establishment collectively winced when its vital self- advertisement to Middle America, the telecast of the Tony Awards, opened with a best-play prize to the flamboyant Harvey Fierstein for Torch Song Trilogy. This year it seems likely that virtually every category may be won by shows with gay elements. Among the other contenders: Lynn Redgrave's one-woman Shakespeare for My Father, which alludes to the bisexuality of Sir Michael Redgrave, and the rock opera Tommy with its homosexual, pedophile uncle.

Broadway has welcomed gay material before. But a breakthrough in unabashed candor and commercial viability came with last season's best musical, Falsettos, which centers on a father who leaves his wife and son to take up with a male lover who dies of AIDS. While it sounds grim, the show is in large part a cheerfully neurotic comedy; its mordant wit in the face of death is yet another index of a gay aesthetic. The producers have shrewdly emphasized the show's celebration of families of all kinds in testimonial ads touting it as fit for rabbis and priests, Midwestern tourists and suburban firemen. Having long since turned a profit on Broadway, Falsettos has launched a once unimaginable tour.

What accounts for the surge? The gay civil rights movement, for one thing. The theater has always been home to a disproportionate share of gay artists because the environment was tolerant and, perhaps, because their lives already involved illusion, role playing and disguise. Many artists have come out of the closet in life and insist on doing so in their work. Says Destiny's Kramer: "Ten years ago, we would have been fashioning heterosexual material. Now people just won't lie."

AIDS has given gay male playwrights a clarity and tenacity of vision that comes from facing mortality. "Gay writers have life and death to write about," says Kramer, who chronicled his early activism in The Normal Heart and confronted having the AIDS virus in Destiny.

Above all, as Congress and the states debate gay civil rights and President Clinton prepares to certify the role of gays in the military, many gay writers see their milieu as inherently dramatic. Like Jews, blacks and women in prior decades, gays have promoted their struggle for equality into the spotlight. Says Angels author Tony Kushner: "We're at a historic juncture. In a pluralist democracy, there's a moment when a minority obtains legitimacy and its rights are taken seriously by the other minorities that together make up the majority. That's happening now for gays and lesbians. We're winning, and that gives things a certain electricity."

Angels has indeed electrified reviewers with its radical political perspective and literary style, but is at heart a fairly conventional drama about the intersections of three households in turmoil. The focal point is the apartment shared by two effeminate gay men, one afflicted with the disease but unflinching in his courage, the other healthy but panicky, guilty and increasingly unable to cope. The healthy lover works at the same courthouse as a religious Mormon law clerk: despite good intentions and political ambitions, the Mormon is rapidly losing a lifelong battle to suppress his own homosexual urges. His mentor is Roy Cohn, the right-wing dealmaker who promiscuously savored homosexual sex but vehemently denied a gay identity right up to the moment of his death from AIDS in 1986.

All three households are visited by supernatural visions. To the afflicted lover, a Wasp whose family name can be traced to the Middle Ages, ancestors appear; so does an angel. The Mormon wife is transported to distant spheres by a mystical street black who materializes and vanishes. Cohn is spooked by Ethel Rosenberg, the accused Soviet spy whose judicial execution he maneuvered for his patron, Red-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Cohn is at once the play's villain and hero. Ron Leibman, in the role of his career, makes the ruthless lawyer a delinquent child, waggling his tongue, mocking his superiors, cackling as he spews abuse, playing the telephone like an organ as he hypocritically curries or grandiosely dispenses favor. Stephen Spinella as the sick, saintly queen and Joe Mantello as his unhinged lover are endlessly watchable, nakedly real. Alas, David Marshall Grant and Marcia Gay Harden are ciphers as the Mormons, he as stolid as wood and she vibrating like Jell-O; neither offers insight into the pain that mainstream audiences are most apt to understand.

While the Broadway production is visually ugly, far less magical and on the whole less convincing than the Los Angeles staging that earned the play the Pulitzer, Kushner's witty, energized and unpredictable script makes 3 1/2 hours fly by. Indeed, one leaves the theater wishing that the drama's second half, of similar length, were already up and running.

The crucial question is whether enough people can be drawn into the theater in the first place so that Angels can work its enchantment. Broadway's biggest and boldest gay play ever is also its riskiest, from its explicit language to a discreetly staged scene of anal intercourse, from its scorn for the Reagan years to its disdain for seeking heterosexual acceptance. Says Kushner optimistically: "There's a healthy curiosity among straight audiences. People are braver now because they don't feel that they're going to be tainted." Theater insiders are worried that the natural audience of gays, sympathetic straights and theater mavens can keep Angels running only four or five months, barely enough to get to the scheduled opening of the play's second half. It remains to be seen whether Broadway's new openness to gay themes is one step ahead of America -- or unbridgeable miles.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York