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Pride and prejudice
Last Sunday isn’t just another gay play
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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The Last Sunday in June
By Jonathan Tolins. Directed by Scott Edmiston. Set by Janie E. Howland. Lighting by Karen Perlow. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Sound by Dewey Dellay. With Trey Burvant, Tom Lawlor, Jeremy Johnson, Larry Coen, Will McGarrahan, Bill Mootos, Tyler Hollinger, and Tori Davis. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through July 3.
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Jonathan Tolins set out to write a satire and wound up with a serious comedy. Originally titled Another Gay Play, The Last Sunday in June had its inspiration in the late ’90s when a gaggle of gay men gathered in Tolins’s Christopher Street apartment to watch New York’s Gay Pride Parade started to crack self-referentially on how the situation seemed a set-up for "another gay play" full of bitchy repartee and ogling passing pecs. The play retains that Adaptation element, commenting on itself as Tolins’s gay men pay ironic homage to landmarks of the genre from Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band to Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! But along the way, Tolins became interested in how a community rooted in unashamed sex and the struggle for recognition, and no longer joined at the hip by the AIDS crisis, grows up individually and collectively. That the 2003 work has its local premiere in the immediate wake of the legitimization of gay marriage in Massachusetts is just icing. In the play, the Gay Pride gathering takes place in the comfortably appointed Christopher Street digs of attorney Tom and teacher Michael, a long-time couple on the brink of abandoning the urban "scene" for domestication in Nyack. It’s clear, though, that there’s more tension between them than these thirtysomething poster boys for gay commitment let on. To begin with, Michael hates Gay Pride and wants to plow through the parade to Pottery Barn. The more ebullient Tom is on the phone inviting folks over. And as if from Central Casting, they arrive. Joe is a young actor recently out of LA and the closet and reveling in every tenet of gay life. Brad is the jaded HIV survivor still spewing saucy bons mots and viewing a gay-male-centric world in categories of "cute" and "not cute." Opera-loving Charles is the dowager queen, persnickety but still with the smoldering spark of Stonewall. Over this mix of sniping, gym-pumped gay wit and wisdom is thrown the wet blanket of James, Tom’s lover from halcyon days and the author of a failed gay novel. Invited on a nostalgic whim by Tom, he arrives to announce that he’s rejecting gay life, its shallow hook-ups and bonhomie, to marry a woman. She too eventually shows up, a chic counterpoint to "fag-hag" stereotype who announces that though she gravitated toward gay men in college, she became disillusioned with the breed when they all turned into "the girls in my seventh-grade home room" squealing over cute boys. Tolins, who has written for Queer As Folk, is best known in theatrical parlance for The Twilight of the Golds, a 1993 Broadway flop that was made into a TV movie. The Last Sunday in June, more comfortably situated Off Broadway, ran for more than 100 performances. The first thing to be said about the play, before getting into whether it demeans gay culture (as the Village Voice’s Michael Feingold asserts) or simply takes a searching look at it 35 years after Stonewall, is that it is very funny. Rife with bold flirtation and cats let out of the bag, it fields a self-conscious assortment of wits slinging zingers like Frisbees. From the beginning, when Michael glances out the window to characterize marching lesbians as "Sapphic traffic," the playwright’s way with pith is evident. For my part, I also found his questions about the "next step" for gay men yearning to get beyond the hard bodies and the Queer Eye persona pertinent. In that regard, The Last Sunday is a bit like Wendy Wasserstein’s 1989 Pulitzer winner The Heidi Chronicles, whose heroine, having fought the good fight, wonders where all the feminists have gone. At SpeakEasy, director Scott Edmiston hits on both of the play’s cylinders: the well-timed, eye-rolling witticisms and the discontent beneath the Wilde-thing surface. In particular, it becomes increasingly obvious that there are nicks in the perfect coupledom of Tom and Michael, the former both vehement and vulnerable in the person of Tom Lawler, the latter deploying through Trey Burvant a deadpan that often trumps the flamboyance of Brad (an amiably waspish Will McGarrahan), Charles (a fussy yet forceful Larry Coen), and young Joe (a vinyl-panted Jeremy Johnson). As defector James, Bill Mootos tempers the character’s bitterness with reserve. And Tori Davis’s Susan, though out of her element, seems coolly at home. The evening is capped by the obligatory appearance of Tyler Hollinger’s bare-chested hunk — though that’s an ostensible gay-play cliché that harks back to the hetero likes of William Inge’s 1953 Picnic.
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