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Washington Post
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A poetic meditation on love from the Oscar-winning writer of ‘Moonlight'
How do you embrace joy after a lifetime of adversity? The simple answer — try not to overthink it — is impossible for the narrator of 'We Are Gathered,' Tarell Alvin McCraney's expansive meditation on intimacy, chosen family and the possibilities of queer desire. Wallace (Kyle Beltran) invites audiences of the play's world premiere at Arena Stage to lean in and help him through a personal crisis: He's crazy in love but uncertain about tying the knot. That's partly due to how Dubs (as he's nicknamed) met his beloved Free (Nic Ashe), cruising for sex in a public park. What kind of fairy tale is that? he wonders. He engages in arguments common among readers of queer theory, about whether marriage equality counts as liberation or whether we ought to seize the right to flout conventions.
New York Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘We Are Gathered' Promises to Love, Honor and Cherish
When JaDonna Harris and Marquian Harris married in 2015, they did it alone, before a justice of the peace. As their 10th anniversary approached, they contemplated a do-over that would include friends and family. But the cost was an issue, as was agreeing on a venue. Then JaDonna Harris received an email from Arena Stage. An upcoming play was looking for real couples interested in getting married or renewing their vows. She and her wife replied immediately. 'We were like, this is kismet,' JaDonna Harris recalled. That play, 'We Are Gathered,' is a new work by Tarell Alvin McCraney that began Friday, overlapping with Washington's World Pride festivities. A celebration of love, each performance will culminate with what Arena Stage is calling 'Love Takes Center Stage,' an immersive experience in which one or more couples will join the actors for a real marriage ceremony or vow renewal. One of the stars, Craig Wallace, has been ordained. Over the course of the show's 30 scheduled performances, several dozen couples will participate. After each show, Arena Stage will hold a reception with cake, champagne and dancing. The Harrises can't wait. 'We are happy to celebrate queer love, to celebrate the love in general all over the world and everybody's ability to find a person that they are attached to,' JaDonna Harris said. 'That's all that matters.' McCraney began to dream up 'We Are Gathered' during World Pride in Sydney, Australia, in 2023. A theater there was staging a revival of his 2012 play 'Choir Boy,' a drama about a young gay man at an all-Black preparatory school. McCraney admired the production, but he wished that the play, which deals with anti-gay prejudice, didn't feel quite so relevant. He decided that by the time the next World Pride came around, two years later, he would offer actors a script that felt more playful, more joyful. In searching for a subject, McCraney, now 44 and the artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, kept returning to the idea of marriage. When he was growing up, marriage wasn't available to gay men, but a 2015 Supreme Court decision had changed that. Now friends were asking him why he wasn't married and he was beginning to ask that question of himself. Recent opposition to gay rights and transgender rights — including book bans and a Florida law nicknamed 'Don't Say Gay' — had made that question feel more urgent. 'Those things were happening pretty regularly and beginning to remind me there isn't a lot of time and nothing is promised,' he said. 'I decided, OK, I'm going to find out what this means to me.' 'We Are Gathered,' a love story between W. Tre (Kyle Beltran), an architect, and Free (Nic Ashe), a musician, is one answer. What begins as an anonymous assignation in a dark park becomes a serious relationship. But owing to W. Tre's reservations, the knot stays untied. I visited rehearsal on a Saturday afternoon last month. As McCraney watched from a monitor (he was in Los Angeles), Beltran stood center stage in character and welcomed the audience. 'I'm inviting you to witness, to witness me here,' he said. The director Kent Gash, dressed in black, with rainbow high-tops, walked over to Beltran, asking him to adjust his body position and gesture. 'I think that just includes everybody more specifically,' Gash said. Inclusion is at the heart of the play, which is why Tiffany Fulson, Arena Stage's community engagement producer, and Hannah Viederman, the artistic producer, were seeking out real couples via emails, a newsletter and targeted ads on social media last month. So far they have vetted about 50 couples, straight and gay, young and old, local and far-flung. 'We've been really totally surprised by the great diversity of people that have showed up and said, I feel like this play in this moment is really speaking to me,' Viederman said. 'Every single couple that we've talked to has demonstrated to us that their love is deserving of having a place onstage.' In addition to learning his lines, Wallace became ordained via an online application approved by the District of Columbia. 'As an actor I'm responsible for telling the story, but as somebody that's officiating a wedding I'm responsible for their union,' he said. 'It's a step beyond what I usually do onstage.' He described himself as both anxious and excited about this extra role. 'If I blow a monologue one night, I have the matinee to get it right,' he said. 'I don't have the matinee to get their marriage right.' But the stress is worth it. Wallace and his partner of 30 years were married in January. They did it for legal reasons, but Wallace found himself overcome with emotion. He hopes that the participating couples will feel the same. 'I can't wait to see the looks on their faces,' he said. 'I can't wait to see them actually stand before 800 people and profess their love to each other.' Gash isn't quite sure what to expect. 'We're going to be discovering a great deal each night,' he said the week before performances began. McCraney has already discovered plenty. Before the writing and rehearsing, he was dismissive of weddings. They seemed like pointless displays of opulence. Now, he feels differently. 'This commitment is sacred and essential and a human right,' he said. 'It is about a community coming to witness people who have made a decision to be together forever and that's powerful.' Theater also draws its power from community, from witnessing. And for McCraney, that makes 'We Are Gathered' consummate theater. 'We always hope that we come in, and through our dreaming together, we leave different,' he said. The marriages make that real. Whether marriage equality will remain legal is an open question. Though the play was written before the 2024 election, it is being staged after, when queer and transgender people continue to be the target of hate crimes as well as policies and executive orders that seek to erode their rights. This has not escaped the cast and creative team. The play is both a romance and a political act. 'I hope it prompts us all to think that the commitment to loving someone belongs to all of us,' Gash said. That political aspect was appealing for Ashe, who appeared in 'Choir Boy' on Broadway and is a longtime collaborator of McCraney's. To perform in the play would be to perform a civic duty, with delight. 'It feels like an act of rebellion,' Ashe said. 'When you hear 'rebellion,' you think, holding up signs, raising fists. But the rebellion in this show is actually the joy. That these characters can laugh and love is rebellion enough.'
Los Angeles Times
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Review: Larissa FastHorse's ‘Fake It Until You Make It' has its historic premiere at the Taper
Timing is everything in comedy, and one wonders how much funnier Larissa FastHorse's 'Fake It Until You Make It' might have been had it been produced at the Mark Taper Forum in 2023 when it was originally scheduled. The world has shifted off its axis since that relatively halcyon time when identity politics, the subject of FastHorse's farce, could be debated, mocked, ranted over and defended without fear of governmental reprisal. An emboldened Donald Trump has returned to the White House on a vendetta against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, setting in motion a new version of the Red Scare, except the target color scheme now is anything nonwhite. As nonprofit agencies across the land are scrambling to figure out how to respond to anti-DEI policies and threats from the new administration, the delayed premiere of 'Fake It Until You Make It' presents a satirical war between two rival nonprofit groups working on behalf of Native American causes. Good intentions are no guarantee of good behavior. In 'The Thanksgiving Play,' FastHorse skewered with merciless hilarity white woke hypocrisy. Here, she examines the way virtue signaling and moral one-upmanship have warped the nonprofit field, turning public service into a competitive sport and corrupting even those who have dedicated themselves to lifting up their own communities. 'Fake It Until You Make It' doesn't anticipate the dire situation unfolding in 2025. But it does, helpfully, move beyond the rigid partisan categories that have clouded our thinking and made shared enlightenment seem completely out of reach. The cleverly constructed play, a co-production with Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, is freighted with historical significance of its own. It's the first time a Native American playwright has been featured on the Mark Taper Forum's marquee stage — and it almost didn't happen. (In a candid interview with Times reporter Ashley Lee, FastHorse revealed that had Arena Stage not stepped in after CTG faltered, there 'would have been a lot of hurt and unhealed pain, which would have made this process difficult.') When the play begins, River (Julie Bowen of 'Modern Family' fame), a white woman who runs Indigenous Nations Soaring, has taken out a restraining order to prevent anyone from messing with her cat. Wynona (Tonantzin Carmelo), a proudly identified Native woman who leads N.O.B.U.S.H., an organization seeking the removal of invasive plants, is the main target of River's ire. The two women work in the same office complex and are bitter enemies. Wynona has designs on River's cat, and River keeps planting a botanical species on workplace grounds that Wynona is on a fanatical mission to wipe out. Battle lines are drawn and immediately transgressed in a play that takes farce out of the bedroom and into administrative corridors and cubicles. The doors that slam, as farcical doors are built to do, open to work spaces, where a good deal of time is spent scheming and counter-scheming. Mistaken identity is a central conceit of the genre, and FastHorse takes this charade to another intellectual level. While reveling in the silly masquerade, 'Fake It Until You Make It' interrogates the meaning of racial identity and authenticity, leaving no dogmatic position unscathed by irony. FastHorse's nonprofit universe includes a range of characters of varied ideological commitments and tactical approaches. Theo (Noah Bean), Wynona's partner, is an eco-activist who returns from clearing thousands of acres of English ivy from California wilderness to find himself conscripted into Wynona's war against River. Theo, who's white, wants to marry Wynona, but her conscience won't let her start a family with a non-Native. She dangles, however, the reward of being his common-law wife if he pretends to be a Native applicant for a job at River's organization. She wants him to tank a big grant application to better her chances of being selected. Theo has misgivings, but his passion for Wynona overrides his scruples. Two other nonprofit leaders have their headquarters in this suite of offices. Grace (Dakota Ray Hebert), an advocate for race-shifting, has launched an organization to help people transition their identities 'ethically and safely.' A Native woman eager to try on other selves, she provides costume designer E.B. Brooks the opportunity to create a pageant of flamboyant international garb, designed to lay unmistakable claim to new cultural identities. Krys (Brandon Delsid), who identifies as gender-fluid, heads an organization that advocates for the Two Spirit community. When Mark (Eric Stanton Betts), the native applicant Theo impersonates, shows up at the office to apologize for missing the interview with River, Krys runs interference for Wynona. But Mark, a fellow Two Spirit soul with a lot of sex appeal, erotically complicates Krys' loyalties. The farcical math is elegantly worked out by FastHorse, who maps out the ensuing chaos with elan. The production, directed by Michael John Garcés, quickly reaches cruising speed on a vivid set by Sara Ryung Clement that is full of Native color and craft. But much as I admired the playwright's ingenious examination of identity politics through the looking glass of farce, I never quite succumbed to the comedy's demented logic. My resistance wasn't just a function of the radically changed political landscape that has made DEI concerns no laughing matter. There's a cynicism at the heart of 'Fake It Until You Make It' that distances us from the characters. FastHorse, to her credit, doesn't write schematic plays. She refuses to treat her Native protagonist as a hero. But in making Wynona so belligerently flawed and River so narcissistically self-serving, FastHorse diminishes our concern for the outcome of their battle. A pox on both their houses, I found myself indifferently concluding. Grace, who refuses to be confined by demographic category, is in many ways the most outrageously polemical of the characters. Yet she gains the upper hand in the debate over identity politics with a perspective that is as compassionate and cogent as it is controversial. Unfortunately, the way she's deployed as a sight gag makes it hard to take her seriously when it counts. Perhaps the real hero of the play is the playwright, who panders to no quarter. But a touch more emotional reasonableness in Wynona might have paid theatrical dividends. In farce, we expect to see characters, overwhelmed by situations of their own making, behaving at their clumsy worst. But we need to care about them sufficiently to stay attentive, and for that to happen we must believe that they are capable of self-awareness, if not growth. Farce is a notoriously cruel genre, as critic Eric Bentley has noted. It allows us, as he writes in 'The Life of the Drama,' to work out our 'psychic violence' through laughter. We know the brutality isn't really happening, so we go along with the vicious high jinks. But a corner must be preserved for affection, and FastHorse spares not even River's cat from unnatural abuse. Krys and Mark arrive at a moment of tender connection. The panting lust that allows them to override the lies that brought them together isn't enough farcical compensation, but Delsid and Betts have a sweet, daffy chemistry. Bowen's River and Carmelo's Wynona play their characters' shortcomings to the hilt. There's no danger of a saccharine ending. Amy Brenneman takes over the role from a fearlessly funny Bowen when 'Fake It' moves to Arena Stage in April. Carmelo, who could incorporate a moment or two of introspective reflection in her uncompromisingly ferocious portrayal, will travel with the rest of the cast to Washington, D.C. Bean's Tom bristles at the way Wynona plays the race card. ('You can't just say 'blood money' to win every argument,' he tells her.) But he's carnal putty in her hands, leaving the impression of a good guy with a big id and no spine. The play ends with a joke that made me wonder if Center Theatre Group has it in for cats. (I had hoped to expunge the memory of the dramatized feline murder that took place in 'Our Dear Dead Drug Lord' at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.) We could all use a good laugh right now in these disturbing political times, but I left the Taper with a wince.
