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Don’t look now
Marc Wolf asks and tells
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Another American: Asking & Telling
By Marc Wolf. Directed by Joe Mantello. At Trinity Repertory Company, in the downstairs theater, through February 10.


If it wasn’t glaringly obvious to everyone before January 1993, it certainly was afterward. A freshly inaugurated William Jefferson Clinton announced that he was going to fulfill a campaign promise and issue an executive order prohibiting the armed forces from barring gays and lesbians from service. His words sparked a firestorm of controversy that wiped the first of many smug smiles off the presidential kisser and removed any doubt that passionate homophobia is as American as apple pie.

Given the heat generated by the subject, Marc Wolf’s Another American: Asking & Telling is impressive as much for what it isn’t as for what it is. Wolf’s one-man performance at Trinity Repertory Company isn’t strident, something both theatrical obligation and the opportunity for self-righteousness could invite. It doesn’t military-bash either, and since Wolf is himself gay, that might have been tempting. Over a period of three years he conducted some 150 interviews, winnowing down to 18 those he included for verbatim depiction. The result, first staged in 1999, sheds more light than heat, illuminating just about every perspective on the issue short of that of a men’s-room attendant at the Pentagon.

Communication is the order of the evening here, whether it’s about the experiences of an angry lesbian who had to fight in court to get reinstated, a funny drama queen nicknamed Mary Alice who was the unofficial morale officer of his Mekong Delta squad, or the perky sociologist who came up with the phrase " Don’t ask, don’t tell " — to which he’d suggested adding, " Don’t seek, don’t pursue. " The policy the Pentagon eventually came up with was not to ask about sexual orientation at the time of enlistment. However, subsequent discovery would be grounds for discharge, not to mention getting the shit beat out of you — or, as one of these characters describes, being brutally raped with the apparent collusion of a stockade guard.

The evening opens with Wolf sitting at a small table, a glass of water and a mike before him, à la Spalding Gray’s low-key talking head. He clicks on a small tape recorder and soon we’re in animated Anna Deavere Smith territory, as we hear the beginning of an actual interview in which, after Wolf explains what he wants, a woman laughingly declares her paranoia and drills him briskly about whether he’s FBI, CIA, and so on, as though she recited the litany every day.

Another American is nothing if not informative. We learn that though gay Marines might be into all sorts of raunchy sex, they won’t kiss. We learn that, according to one wit, the military used to be " a lesbian social club. " She wisecracks, " They kept out married women and pregnant women, and they’re wondering where all these dykes came from. "

Directed by Joe Mantello as he was Off Broadway, Wolf morphs from male to female, tentative to swaggering, aided by Brian MacDevitt’s lighting design, which sometimes seems to change the contours of his face. More often he relies on voice and posture to convey both character and personality; that also gives us a vocal or physical hook, so we can recognize characters as they come back. One Marine always returns sitting with his arms folded atop the back of the chair; a lesbian couple are seated with one always ramrod straight, a cigarette held high and away from her partner, who comes across as shorter and sounds like a parody of Ross Perot. Those two frequently seem as comical as that sounds, but the second also provides the most poignant moment of the evening when she conveys what her first kiss with a woman meant to her.

That sort of balance, shifting dramatic weight back and forth, builds up the dramatic tension that such a potentially static performance has to have. By the time we get to the lengthier monologuists of act two — some of whom, such as the olive-munching sociologist, overstay their welcome — we’ve already glimpsed the profoundly life-altering issues that " don’t ask, don’t tell " represents.

Wolf balances content as well. From the armed forces he includes not yahoos but thoughtful men who oppose enlisting gays and lesbians. One officer argues, without detectable bias, that esprit de corps and a necessary sense of invincibility would erode. Another soldier uses an experience with a neighborhood child molester to explain why so many young toughs in the army confuse gays with pederasts.

Given that sort of fair-mindedness, Another American not only can speak to a wide range of listeners, it can get audiences as interested in others’ opinions as in their own. That may not be enough, though. In Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the Military, Randy Shilts quotes from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden: " A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can’t allow a question to weaken it. " Apparently that’s true even when the questioner is its commander-in-chief.

Issue Date: January 22-29, 2002
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