Flatfoots and Footlights

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Broadway audiences are often abuzz about celebrities in their midst. When Brad Fraser's Poor Super Man opened last week in Cincinnati, however, the TV- news crews and the theatergoers they accosted were talking about spectators so anonymous no one knew their faces. They were from the police vice squad, checking whether the show's frontal nudity, simulated oral and anal sex, and blunt language violated public decency. "A lot of people wanted to be at this performance," said Ensemble Theatre artistic director David White, "because they weren't sure there would be another."

In New York City or Los Angeles, Fraser's deft and epigrammatic work about a romance between a gay man and a straight, married one would not seem startling. Indeed, his equally raw Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love played off-Broadway for months in 1991. But as the crusaders of the culture wars point out, there is more to America than its coastal metropolises. In Cincinnati, where Oh! Calcutta! was shut down briefly in 1974, where a museum was prosecuted in 1990 for displaying the late Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, and where an antigay ordinance was enacted last November, the play is potentially shocking -- so much so that Ensemble Theatre, which commissioned the world premiere, voted at one point to cancel it. "A number of directors who are involved with big corporations in town felt queasy," says board chairman Paul Rogers. Ultimately the board decided that dropping the show would contravene the troupe's commitment to new plays (its season has also included a world premiere of Fragments -- A Concerto Grosso by Edward Albee, now running in New York City, and The Rights by Lee Blessing, now in Marietta, Georgia). Artistic director White offered one concession: no one under 18 would be admitted. White's position was bolstered by a donation of more than $6,000 from local gay businessmen, who lauded the theater's courage but chose to remain anonymous.

Almost lost in the furor was the play itself, an unflaggingly witty and often moving slice of life among the young, hip and artsy in Calgary, Canada. A gay painter (Michael J. Blankenship), blocked in his work, tries to jolt himself by taking a job as a waiter. To help the young couple who own the restaurant, he induces his closest female friend, a beguilingly bitchy columnist, to tout it in print. The place thrives. So does passion between the painter and the young husband (Damian Baldet, a conservatory student giving a captivating and confidently professional performance).

This isn't simply a coming-out story; it's about a much less categorical sexual phenomenon. The husband remains attracted to women, not men, save for this one man, whom he devours. The result is misery for everyone -- although no one is quite as miserable as the painter's roommate, a transsexual dying of AIDS. Mark Mocahbee has staged a supple, swift-paced and solidly acted production, minimalist save for screens that display the characters' unspoken thoughts. And the vice squad? They came, they saw and this time they decided the show may go on.