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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.'
ABC News
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
New Wedding Banquet movie from Bowen Yang and Andrew Ahn re-imagines Ang Lee's classic with a 2025 lens
In 1993, homosexuality was still criminalised in many US states; Asian-Americans faced widespread prejudice; and Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet was released. What: A modern re-imagining of a rom-com that moves the conversation forward from its early 90s predecessor. Directed by: Andrew Ahn Starring: Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Han Gi-chan, Joan Chen, Youn Yuh-jung Where: In cinemas Likely to make you feel: Amused, heart-warmed and reflective In spite of its era, the cross-cultural celebration of queer love easily outperformed box office expectations, won the coveted Berlinale Golden Bear award and was nominated for both an Oscar and Golden Globe. Set in New York, the film follows a queer Taiwanese-American (Wai-Tung) who tries to appease his meddling parents by marrying a Chinese woman (Wei-Wei) desperate for a green card. The farce begins when his parents arrive and insist on planning an elaborate celebration; spending time with their son, his "roommate" boyfriend (Simon) and his bride-to-be. Andrew Ahn happened upon The Wedding Banquet as a kid, when his mum accidentally rented it from a video store. "We watched it together as a family, maybe a little awkwardly," the filmmaker laughs, "and it really stayed with me. "I don't even think I knew why in the moment, but in retrospect, it was so special that the first gay film I ever saw was also a gay and Asian film. "I think it really put me on the right path as a person and as a filmmaker." More than 30 years since its release, Ahn is behind the new adaptation of what is an "incredibly meaningful film" for him personally, as well as for the countless queer Asian-Americans (and Asian-Australians) who are so rarely reflected on screen. Ahn shot to prominence with his 2022 film Fire Island, a re-imagining of Pride and Prejudice set at the gay party destination, which delves into racism within the LGBTQIA+ community. And Ahn has brought back that film's star, SNL and Wicked favourite Bowen Yang, for his latest rom-com. His modern take on The Wedding Banquet, like the original, is in many ways a comedy of errors. Angela (Star Wars' Kelly Marie Tran) and her partner Lee (Killers of the Flower Moon's Lily Gladstone) are desperate for a baby, but can't afford further IVF treatments. Meanwhile, art student and closeted heir to a multinational company Min (Korea's Han Gi-chan) is worried about his expiring student visa, and is heartbroken when his commitment-phobic boyfriend Chris (Yang) dismisses his proposal as an attempt to get a green card, and rejects him. So, naturally, Min proposes to Angela instead, offering her the money for IVF in exchange for the chance to stay in the US, free from familial expectations. Simple, right? Until Min's grandmother (Minari's Youn Yuh-jung) suddenly flies in from Korea, insisting on a traditional Korean wedding — and everyone's invited. While his new film is in some ways a playful exploration of US immigration and visa rights, Ahn hopes it's also relevant for audiences outside the US. "I know there's a large Korean and Asian diaspora in Australia, and I often think about how we really have to fight for our culture, in a way," he says. "Because it's not something we're constantly living in, in the way that Korean people in Korea just, you know, exist in it." For Ahn, The Wedding Banquet marked a kind of "wish fulfilment". He was inspired by his brother and sister-in-law's traditional Korean wedding, and particularly their Paebaek ceremony. This ritual sees the pair wearing hanboks, bowing to their elders, catching chestnuts and grapes, and the groom piggy-backing his bride around a table. Ahn saw how embracing that custom brought his brother closer to his wife, his family and his culture, and remembers wondering if he'd ever be able to have that same experience with his own queer partner. "I wanted to have a Korean wedding in the film to show this culture, and maybe find ways to make it more inclusive, more queer-friendly." In Lee's original, Taiwanese and Chinese wedding customs are playfully parodied too, a detail that's not missed in Ahn's re-imagining. In the film's opening shot, a Chinese lion dancer is suddenly revealed to be a flamboyant drag queen — red sequins and all. "I really love this joke of something so traditional and then something so queer teaming up," Ahn says. Ang Lee (who later went on to direct Brokeback Mountain) ended his 1993 Wedding Banquet on an unconventional note: Wai-Tung and Wei-Wei continue their lavender marriage and, after accidentally falling pregnant on the wedding night, decide to co-parent their baby with Wai-Tung's partner Simon. Ahn says when re-watching the original as an adult, he was "really struck by this question of queer family-building". "I was in this phase of my adulthood where I was thinking about things like marriage and having children," he explains. While in the original film "gay marriage wasn't even a whisper of an idea", exploring modern queer families and relationships "felt like very fertile ground to make this update to the film". Now that queer couples can marry, he wanted to follow a couple asking, "Do we actually want to?" Ahn puts his own spin on the accidental pregnancy of Lee's original, too. "I wanted to explore: 'What if we see a queer couple planning to try and get pregnant, planning to try and have a baby?' Now that many queer people in the Western world can move away from coming-out stigma and fighting for marriage, health care and anti-discrimination rights, Ahn says he wanted to explore "how that conversation has changed". "I ultimately wanted to tell a story about queer family-building, and how there's a lot of joy … but also this inherent struggle that we just have to find a way to work through." The Wedding Banquet is in cinemas now.
