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Queer madness
The 11th annual Out on the Edge Festival
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH



When you look at the world from the Edge, reality and illusion blur, gender expectations are subverted, identity is addressed with poignancy and grit, and wit is the common currency. That is, if the Edge is the 11th annual Out on the Edge Festival, which comes courtesy of the Theater Offensive, Boston’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender theater company. The month-long event is the Northeast’s leading festival of its kind, and this year’s edition, which takes place September 4 through 28 at the Boston Center for the Arts, attests to why.

Abe Rybeck, the Theater Offensive’s founder and artistic director, explains, " We look to bring in what’s special that we don’t already have here in town, something people don’t get their fill of here, something that will inspire local artists and audiences to take part in these kinds of work. Another thing that’s important is trying to constantly address the question: why queer theater at all, and what’s next? What can bring this wildly diverse [Boston] community together for some queer moments of intimacy in a dark room? "

The answer seems to be a line-up of performances with a diversity that rivals that of the intended audience. You won’t find much similarity in terms of tone, temperament, or even format among the festival’s six offerings, each of which was developed and is performed by queer artists and their allies. The festival is clearinghouse of queer theater with goods imported from stages across the planet. Not that Out on the Edge is importing works-in-progress. " They’re all shows that have been carefully put together over the years, " Rybeck enthuses of the performances he’s booked. " They’re just chomping at the bit, and Boston is the last morsel they’re ripping into. "

What’s next in queer theater is a question that Lucy Newman-Williams takes very seriously. Her first play, By Tooth or by Tongue, premiered last winter at the Source Theatre Company in Washington, DC, and it will open the festival, September 4 through 8. An actress turned playwright, Newman-Williams is directing and performing in her two-actress, multi-character coming-of-age story with Kosha Engler. Framed as a memory play, the piece is about a young girl, her motorcycle, a horrible accident, and the nurse who attends to her in more ways than expected as she recovers.

" For me, what’s important is to see good lesbian plays on stages across the country, " Newman-Williams asserts. " How do we find out about these plays in the first place? It’s wonderful to have established theaters to go to and say, ‘I know that I’ll find it there.’ And there’s not many across the country. Now what we need is epic love stories, and that’s what’s emerging. We don’t really have a reflection of our grander passions mirrored in films, books, and plays. I’m excited about providing that now. I want to tell our story, I want to have other people tell our story. I want to see it represented. "

Politics may afford lesbians what Newman-Williams calls " roughhewn progress, " but it’s art’s responsibility to refine it. " Laws may give us marriage. We need art to give us a beautiful mythology about our kind of marriage. " It’s all part of a contemporary need to " see who we are and keep lifting it, testing it, and giving ourselves more latitude and definitions. " She explains how that may even happen in a playing-to-type piece about a lesbian biker chick. " Tooth ennobles our private identity. It does that in more native territory. "

Newman-Williams can catalogue the iconic figures that have influenced her — from Ernest Hemingway to Tennessee Williams. (There’s also a dash of her own Aunt Betty Lou, from the performer’s native Virginia, tossed into the mix.) She believes, however, that her work is best described as the theatrical equivalent of Melissa Etheridge’s music. " There’s a lot of heat, a lot of sultry and bittersweet ache, but there’s that deliciousness of squandering innocence. She ennobled angst, gave it dignity. "

Angst is in no short supply in Unitard’s performance, but the New York–based trio give their sufferings a more irreverent comic spin. Unitard 3: Now More Than Ever — which plays the Edge Fest September 19 through 28 — is a sequel of sorts to the show the group brought to Boston, courtesy of the Theatre Offensive, last February. Nora Burns, David Ilku, and Mike Albo are returning now to air their further frustrations — with pregnant women’s superiority complex, with people who order a breakfast muffin as if they were a bride-to-be choosing her wedding dress, with those folks who just won’t shut up about themselves. And if last winter’s show is any indication, Unitard will do so with a rapid-fire hilarity and a cynical edge that bring to mind vintage Saturday Night Live. Not a yuppie consumer, new-age disciple, or swaggering hipster is spared from ludicrous lampooning in the troupe’s monologues and skits.

But Unitard aren’t about poking spiteful fun without purpose. Cultural concern lurks in the troupe’s levity. Speaking over the phone from Provincetown, where the trio are wrapping up a summer run, Albo explains the method of their comic madness. " When things bother me, it’s always through some specific thing. There’s one character I do who’s on crystal meth. I saw the drug plow through the New York gay scene and ruin so many people. I wanted to do something about it because it’s such a sick, weird drug. That drug is around in the gay scene, and like most things, what happens there is what happens to most of America. Being part of a gay-theater festival, it’s great to be able to voice those opinions in that environment. "

But that’s just an example of one character who happens to be gay. Burns doesn’t want you to think that Unitard’s performance is a platform for a political or social agenda. " I hate gay politics, social politics, because it’s outdated and seems a bit overwrought. Plus we’re not being gay as a political statement. We’re coming from a hip sensibility. "

Whatever the chosen sensibility of Dréd, whose D.R.E.D: Daring Reality Every Day will be featured September 6 through 8, she’s interested in following her heart rather than the zeitgeist. It’s almost a mission to her to put drag kings on the cultural map. And her schedule, which can take her from New York to Norway in a single week, offers proof that this drag king reigns.

Dréd (short for Mildred Gerestant) bills herself as a " gender illusionist. " Since 1995, when she had her first facial hair applied, an experience she refers to as a rebirth, she’s been wielding her gender-blending powers. In a live-wire cabaret act, she calls attention to the oppression that results from society’s rigid ideas of gender (not to mention race and religion) as she morphs from Shaft into a drag queen impersonating Diana Ross into P. Diddy quicker than you can ask, " Who’s that, uh, girl? " Over the phone from her Brooklyn home, the soft-spoken Dréd explains, " For me, it’s not about wanting to be a man, it’s about being a woman and empowering other women. I’m all for promoting women to express themselves. Whether it was how, before, we couldn’t wear pants or vote. It’s just change, change, change. We need to stop the double-standard thing.

" I parody a lot of African-American figures, really to bring attention to and take power away from the image by being a woman portraying them. By making fun, it’s showing how much of masculinity is a performance as well. I think it inspires men to treat women better. I do it mainly through humor because it breaks walls and makes people able to see things that are different from what they know. "

Around the World with Miss Thang, written and performed by Alison C. Wright, Dirty Stuff, created and performed by Jonny McGovern, and Resident Alien, a Bette Bourne performance of a Tim Fountain adaptation of the late Quentin Crisp’s work, fill out the Edge line-up. They too are among the most recent installments in queer theater’s historic legacy.

As Rybeck explains, " We are theater’s fountain of youth. For decades — centuries — queer culture has been counted on to invigorate theater, from Greece to Native cultures to Africa. There’s something about queer culture that asks: what’s a new way of creating? " He adds that since the 1980s this position has been reinforced by the queer community’s reaction to the AIDS crisis. " Most queer people know about how to respond to unthinkable horror with heartfelt activism. I think that’s what’s called for in the world today, and we know a lot about that. "

Having grown from its beginnings as a guerrilla-theater troupe in 1989, the Theater Offensive today encompasses a range of performances, theater workshops, and community programs, including True Colors Out Youth Theater and an AIDS-activist troupe. But despite the organization’s growth, Rybeck says it hasn’t strayed from its fundamental political intentions. " I think whether the content of each show is overtly political or not, people come away from the experience of the Theater Offensive with a set of questions that are by nature political. You know: what are we doing here? Theater Offensive was formed around the basic, totally political question of " How can we all get dates? " If we can achieve getting more and more people dates after each show, I’ll be perfectly happy. "

The Theater Offensive presents the 11th Annual Out on the Edge Festival of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Theater September 4 through 28 at the Boston Center for the Arts. For complete information, see the " Play by Play " listings.

Issue Date: August 29 - September 5, 2002
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