"The Temperamentals" by Jon Marans - A New Play

I started off predisposed to like this because Jon Marans wrote one of my favorite plays of all time, "Old Wicked Songs," which I saw at the Promenade Theater in New York City at least four times during its run... 

And I did like it, because Marans has given a fitting dramatization to the early days of the gay rights movement in California, the 1950 formation of the Mattachine Society by Harry Hay and Rudi Gernreich and their early confederates.  This is a minimalist production - no sets, just a bunch of chairs pushed around a stage in a small theater set up in arena style - but it is a production that works in powerfully evoking that time almost sixty years ago when a handful of men decided it was time to start getting organized to win legal rights. 

Their early efforts never caught on in a big style - at its height, the pre-Stonewall gay rights movement remained tiny and mostly ineffectual, although some individuals and small subgroups did have a few significant achievements, such as persuading the American Law Institute to recommend decriminalization of private consensual sex as part of the Model Penal Code - but they did lay a foundation that was ready to be built upon by the Stonewall generation of the late 1960s and 1970s.

And they were an interesting group, with Hay himself and Gernreich (the mysterious anonymous member to most of the others) the most interesting.  Hay, with a communist past and a radical fairy future, was one of those impossible people who are necessary in any successful movement, and Thomas Jay Ryan plays him with that maniacal gleam in the eye that also comes across in the few film interviews I've seen of the man.  Michael Urie is spectacularly good as Rudi Gernreich, the talented fashion designer who risked all to be part of Mattachine but whose cover was maintained sufficiently for him to have a big career without ever being publicly gay.  Tom Beckett, Matthew Schneck and Sam Breslin Wright play supporting roles with gusto.  The entire thing is beautifully directed by Jonathan Silverstein, and produced with the technical support of the Barrow Group in their performance space at 316 W. 36 Street.

The production has been sufficiently successful that the run has been extended into August, so there is time to get tickets.  Anybody interested in an exciting dramatization of the roots of the modern gay rights movement should make an effort to see this.

Comments

[Bill Hawley]

I also very much enjoyed the show. The acting and the written play itself are superb, and the director and producers have put together a must-see theatrical experience for gay men, lesbians, and homophiles.