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With The Mineola Twins, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, New York theater has left the closet behind. But will it play in Peoria?

by David Valdes Greenwood

Over the telephone from his home in New York, Paul Rudnick sounds enthusiastic about the future of plays by out gay artists: "I really think the chances are good. Gay plays are no longer seen as marginal. Now they're seen as plays, good or bad." Rudnick is in a position to make this assessment, not just because his own career roughly approximates the evolution of gay theater in the past decade, but because his hot off-Broadway show, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, has just settled in for an open-ended run.

Rudnick is not alone. With The Mineola Twins, Paula Vogel, the first out lesbian to win a Pulitzer (for her play How I Learned to Drive), has a hit show that -- critics be damned -- is selling out performance after performance. Vogel's and Rudnick's plays have recently been joined by two other high-profile queer shows: Snakebit, which harks back to the conventions out writers were once constricted by, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which suggests a future in which all such limitations can be cast off.

Post-closet theater in a day Hardy and determinedtheatergoers can experience the current crop of plays by out gay and lesbian writers in a single day. On Saturday, you can see a matinee of The Mineola Twins (at 2:30 p.m.) and then see The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told and Hedwig and the Angry Inch back to back (both have 7 and 10 p.m. curtains). The Mineola Twins Roundabout/Laura Pels Theater 1530 Broadway (at 45th Street) (212) 719-9300 Ends May 30 The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told Minetta Lane Theatre 18 Minetta Lane (212) 307-4100 Open-ended run Hedwig and the Angry Inch Jane Street Theater 113 Jane Street (212) 239-6200 Open-ended run Not recommended: Snakebit Century Theatre 111 East 13th Street (212) 239-6200

"Gay plays" might be the most appropriate way to describe the shows that are finally getting performed in the high-risk and fiercely competitive world of New York theater. After all, gay writers have written for the American stage since it existed. But for most of this century, the norm was a closeted male playwright (women of all orientations had to fight much harder to get produced) getting work done by remaining in the closet or being coy about their sexuality, writing only about gays who were doomed or pathetic. When out playwrights began to emerge, they followed the path of Edward Albee, writing predominantly about heterosexuals. (Even without queer content, Albee found his sexuality turned against him by critics.) The straight-play-first approach was long seen as unavoidable; Rudnick started that way with the charming I Hate Hamlet, and it has defined the career of Stephen Sondheim to this day.

What eventually allowed gays and lesbians to write about their community was, sadly, a tragedy of epic proportions. "There was an explosion of gay theater -- as a result of AIDS," says Rudnick. "For a while, our plays were seen as novelties or only linked to AIDS." Somehow, the heavy toll exacted simultaneously on the gay community and the arts world changed what producers would back financially. It was as if theaters were telling out gay artists that, by having suffered enough, they had paid the price of admission to the big leagues -- and earned the right to portray their own lives on-stage for a change.

From the mid-'80s and into the '90s, AIDS became the central theme of gay theater. From William Hoffman's As Is to Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, the anger and injustice of the epidemic was embodied by gay male characters. Rudnick and Vogel both had successful plays during this era (Jeffrey and Baltimore Waltz, respectively), but each managed to expand the strict, somber format of the AIDS play in the process. By adding magic and humor to a genre ruled by grim sobriety, they were able to hint at what was to come -- the seismic revolution of Angels in America, which made the theater of the gay experience witty, complex, and truly theatrical.

The difference between the era of AIDS plays and today's queer theater is that, though AIDS may factor in, these plays no longer depend solely on mortality to engage audiences. AIDS plays used the topic as a doorway to acceptability, establishing a softened coming-out process that focused viewers' eyes first on illness, then on identity. Many of the new plays expect a base-level awareness from audiences, taking matters of orientation for granted while addressing other issues: religion, family, and romance. Essentially, the artists have truly left the closet, no apologia or softening needed: their plays are evidence of the full human experience as seen from queer eyes. The current wave of theater is certainly gay, but it's decidedly post-closet in both authorship and content.

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Post-closet theater takes a variety of forms, predictable only for its unpredictability. Vogel's Mineola Twins is like an exceptional drag show, traditionally a male domain. Part quick-change comedy and part social critique, it uses the latter half of the century as its canvas. Perhaps because Vogel dared to use conventions associated with gay men, she seems to have unsettled New York critics; publications that lauded The Mystery of Irma Vep (a spoofy drag classic currently being revived) as good campy fun sniffed at The Mineola Twins for not being sharp enough in its commentary. Though assuredly light, the play effectively skewers politics, gender, and religion (among other things). In an interview with the Advocate, Vogel noted that it's hard to get lesbian work on the Great White Way at all, saying, "I think we're dealing with two problems: misogyny and homophobia." It is conceivable that some of that may have spilled over into press coverage of her work as well.

Fortunately, critics don't have to like a show for it to succeed. Directed by Joe Mantello and starring Swoosie Kurtz, The Mineola Twins is one of the toughest tickets in town. Word of mouth, plus the attraction of a star in the lead, is drawing people in. And they are coming not to see a lesbian polemic, but to see a story about family, the difficult bonds that unite and divide us. Two sisters, both played by Kurtz, grow up living their lives as cultural opposites, but are unable to shake their bond. Myra -- the sexy queer sister -- describes their Jacob-and-Esau-like natures: "Twin buns . . . as different at birth as Wonder bread and croissants." One ends up a clinic bomber and one a happily partnered lesbian, but Vogel never lets them forget they are products of the same womb: America. Moreover, she does this with laughter, not lecture.

Perhaps the critics just aren't yet ready to allow queer playwrights to write pure, unabashed comedies. When The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told was first workshopped in the Berkshires, and again when it opened at its original New York location, it was accused by some of being amusing but hollow, as if a gay writer has depth only if tragedy is involved. Time Out New York actually went so far as to say the play would bore straight people; the same review dismisses cast members Lea Delaria (due for a Tony nomination this year) and Julie Halston as "rainbow-set faves." But the play is sharper than such a homophobic assessment gives it credit for. "Why is everyone picking on Mormons?" one character asks. "It's New York, dear; you're the Jew," is the reply. Such constant biting humor won over Ben Brantley of the New York Times, which meant that the show not only finished its original run but moved to a bigger house.

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Rudnick pens a hilarious column in Premiere as Jewish maven Libby Gelman-Waxner, and he wrote the screenplays for the movies Addams Family Values and In & Out. With such credits in mind, audience members arrive at a Rudnick play expecting it to be full of double-entendres and deeply funny. But many are surprised to discover that the real topic of The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told is religion, not sex. The playwright sounds amused when he says, "There was this initial curiosity: what was Paul Rudnick doing talking about God?" He points out that he had already written plays dealing with sex, so it was time to move on. "Sex is like the back fence now -- at a cocktail party, mention sex and you'll be there swapping stories all night. Mention God and it's a much more provocative moment."

The play itself is full of provocative moments. After act one's zingy Adam-and-Steve retelling of the Old Testament, act two finds questions of faith disrupting the equilibrium of several gay couples celebrating the holidays. Rudnick, both in the play and in conversation, is interested in the way people shape their faith for comfort. "Angels, for instance, are like God without the problems," he says. "You have to ask how God could allow a Holocaust, AIDS, or Kosovo. But angels are nicer, the Beanie Babies of faith." His script examines that dichotomy, providing uneasy moments for believers and agnostics alike; Rudnick is sympathetic to the human need for a spiritual narrative, but he turns a critical eye on what we accept as our story.

There is actually a character with AIDS in The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, but his illness is just one of the connected life experiences that raise the central question of God. By contrast, in David Marshall Grant's first produced play, Snakebit, which has gotten a lot of kind press, AIDS becomes the central device. All the stock conventions are in place: a gay man who can't keep a relationship, a female friend who is both his closest confidante and the last woman he ever slept with, and a big mystery about HIV status. The melancholy protagonist is suspected of being the carrier of the HIV that may have infected his female friend and perhaps her six-year-old daughter. The specter of AIDS looms over them, eventually yielding both a don't-be-afraid-of-my-blood scene and a Philadelphia-esque speech in which he tearfully admits that he cruised the piers (out of low self-esteem, of course).

It is as if Marshall Grant feels compelled to earn his way onto the stage via the former apologetic route, to play by rules that are a decade old. He creates familiar nooses for his protagonist and then, perhaps aware that the situations are old hat, writes clumsy ways for him to wriggle out -- the blood is from a dog, not him; the little girl may just be lactose-intolerant, not HIV-positive. In the end, audiences get what they used to get routinely: a former sex addict turned into a noble but loveless gay man. For my money, it is no coincidence that positive press came more easily to this play than to Rudnick's or Vogel's. Snakebit allows old prejudices to be justified; it rides on a subconscious nostalgia for the good old days of sad-sack gay plays.

If Snakebit is a reminder of why we should be grateful for truly post-closet plays, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a portent of the future. Attracted to men as a teenage boy in East Berlin, protagonist Hedwig (then named Hansel) falls in love with an American soldier who wants to bring him out of the country -- but only after surgery to alter his gender. The botched operation yields a person with an inch of not-quite-penis in his groin but the outward physical appearance of a woman. Whereas the other plays all have a specific beat in which a character's orientation is announced, the moment never comes in the blistering 90 minutes of this play. Playwright John Cameron Mitchell (whom Time Out New York describes as being "in touch with his inner diva") leads his audience through gay sex and gender confusion without the protagonist's ever defining herself. This is because Mitchell has Hedwig's eyes focused on something else: the nature and meaning of love.

Inspired by Plato's Symposium and the idea that we are all halves looking for the person from whom we are split, Mitchell and composer Stephen Trask make Hedwig the representative for humanity in general. It could be the story of GI brides uprooted from their cultures, trailer-park teens seeking solace in the radio, or fading celebrities à la A Star Is Born -- or all three at once. Longing for love and trying to make peace with the cost of vulnerability, Hedwig tells a story that strikes a chord with a diverse group of audiences, from Madonna to skate punks to suburban couples in for a Saturday-night thrill.

These are not natural theater chums, of course, but the show manages to unite audiences in the sense that they are participating in something wholly new. "You paid for the whole seat," intones Hedwig, "but you only need the edge." The show may be universal in theme, but in form it is a creature nearly as exotic as Hedwig. A hybrid that comes off by turns as a drama, a musical, and a rock concert, it employs a cast largely composed of a band whose sound is best described as glam punk meets '80s cover band. It harnesses the energy of a live club show and attaches it to a compelling emotional story. It is everything Rent wanted to be but more authentically so, and quite unlike anything that has preceded it.

As distinct as Hedwig and the Angry Inch is, it is not hard to find the connection to The Mineola Twins and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told. In all three, queer protagonists wrestle with the big universal questions, each arriving at a place of strength -- not by solving the problems of the world, but by seeking answers within the self. Where the protagonist of Snakebit must be lectured by a straight friend on how to act like a man, Adam, Steve, Myra, and Hedwig draw from their own queer perspectives to make sense of the complicated world around them. The most memorable stage characters of all time endure for exactly that reason: we see the themes of our own lives through their distinctly personal visions.

It's too early to tell how enduring any play currently running in New York will be. But a more immediate question might be whether the rest of the country is ready for the post-closet theater experience. Is Charlotte -- recently divested of its anti-gay arts policies -- ready for a transgendered rock star? Will an Ark full of gays float in Omaha? Is Orange County ready to see its movie stars playing dyke moms? Rudnick, ever the optimist, is hopeful. "Even people who like these plays will say, `Oh, these will never be produced outside of New York.' But they said that about Jeffrey and it wasn't true."

"Gay or straight," he says, "There are curious audiences in every state of the union." As our best playwrights balance the potency of the personal with the power of the universal, the theatergoers Rudnick envisions will have plenty to look forward to.

David Valdes Greenwood wrote about Ryan Landry's Dollhouse Theatre in the March issue.

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