From powerful businessmen who seek out the services of a dominatrix for power play sessions to Gypsy Rose Lee's attention-starved mother ("With what I have in me, I could have been better than any of you. With what I've been holding down inside of me? If I ever let it out there wouldn't be signs big enough! There wouldn't be lights bright enough!"), some people struggle to keep a tight lid on their passions and insecurities. Wikipedia defines compartmentalization as:
"...a subconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid cognitive dissonance, or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a person's having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves. Compartmentalization allows these conflicting ideas to co-exist by inhibiting direct or explicit acknowledgement and interaction between separate compartmentalized self-states."Under certain circumstances, compartmentalization and denial go hand in hand. While fictional characters with secret identities such as Batman (Bruce Wayne), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Superman (Clark Kent), The Scarlet Pimpernal (Sir Percy Blakeny), and Zorro (Diego de la Vega) have been a great source of entertainment, one also encounters tales of libidinous male airline pilots who, having enjoyed multiple affairs with women in various cities, end up supporting two separate families without imagining that their secret will ever be discovered.
Prior to the onset of the gay rights movement, compartmentalization was a survival skill for many LGBT people. Kurt Herbert Adler (the second General Director of the San Francisco Opera) famously told a gathering of opera professionals that "There are no faeries working at the San Francisco Opera!"
When I moved to San Francisco in 1972, a standard joke was that the two most popular topics of discussion in leather bars like Febe's were opera and a new kitchen appliance called the Cuisinart. It was fascinating to witness an entire subculture of gay men dressed in business drag by day re-emerge in leather at night.
For many LGBT people, the freedom from living a rigidly compartmentalized lifestyle was an almost unthinkable goal. And yet, as we prepare to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the pain and psychological peril of a closeted lifestyle still haunt many LGBT youth. That anguish is beautifully captured in Charlie Bird's guest editorial in The Deseret News entitled "Everyone Loved Me as Cosmo the Cougar, But Would They Love Who I Was Behind the Mask?"
Those who have never been forced to lead a compartmentalized lifestyle often have difficulty imagining why anyone would subject themselves to so much psychological stress. But those who have embraced a compartmentalized lifestyle have just as much trouble predicting the pressure point that could force their entire charade to collapse. Rather than trying to explore all the ways in which a person's defenses can evaporate, let me offer a purely mechanical example from maritime history.
The naval architect who designed and supervised the construction of the RMS Titanic, Thomas Andrews, had used new technology for watertight compartments to ensure that the Titanic could remain afloat even if four contiguous compartments were flooded as the result of a boiler explosion or a collision with another vessel. However, on the fateful cloudless night in April 1912 when an iceberg buckled the iron plates on the starboard side of the ship's hull, a hole extending nearly 45 feet into the vessel's fifth boiler room compromised five of Titanic's watertight compartments. Approximately 2-3/4 hours later, "the ship that God himself could not sink" was resting on the floor of the North Atlantic.
Two recent productions focused on men with big brains capable of thinking outside the box with regard to matters far more challenging than their own emotions and insecurities. In one drama, the protagonist was a well-intentioned lawyer and braggart. The other was an astrophysicist struggling with a unique set of emotional challenges. In both cases, their brains and brawn were undercut by human weakness.
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In 1958's Suddenly, Last Summer (in which the widowed Violet Venable pays a doctor to perform a lobotomy on her daughter, Catherine, to keep the girl from talking about her gay brother’s violent death at the hands of a mob of starving Spanish children) and 1959's Gypsy, theatregoers were introduced to overbearing mothers and their easily intimidated, socially inept offspring. In 1963, I attended a performance of Arthur Kopit’s first play (Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad: A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition) at the Morosco Theatre. Directed by Jerome Robbins, the production starred Hermione Gingold as the gorgon-like Madame Rosepettle “who travels to a luxury resort in the Caribbean, bringing along her son and her deceased husband, preserved and in his casket.”In 1965, Kander & Ebb’s first Broadway musical, Flora The Red Menace, featured a scene in which Comrade Charlotte (Cathryn Damon) tried to seduce the hopelessly shy and stammering Harry Toukarian (Bob Dishy) in a comic number entitled “Express Yourself.”
These moments came to mind recently while watching the Contra Costa Civic Theatre's production of Humble Boy, a play by Charlotte Jones that received its world premiere at the Royal National Theatre in London on August 9, 2001. Inspired in large part by Shakespeare's Hamlet, Humble Boy focuses on a family whose patriarch has recently died. A biology teacher who was also an amateur beekeeper, James Humble is survived by:
- Flora Humble (Scarlett Hepworth), an extremely vain and power-hungry woman with a talent for manipulating people, who is recovering from a nose job. In her years working as the British equivalent of a Playboy bunny, Flora became increasingly obsessed with her looks and wardrobe. She lives in a lovely home in the Cotswolds with a lush garden that contains a collection of her husband’s beehives.
- Felix Humble (Steve Rhyne), an astrophysicist at Cambridge specializing in the quantum theory of gravity. Easily cowed by his mother, Felix (who was supposed to deliver the eulogy at his father’s funeral service) went into hiding rather than attempt to deliver a speech that would have him stuttering helplessly in front of a crowd of mourners. Though he may be a brilliant theoretician, Felix is pretty clueless about the birds and the bees.
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| Scarlett Hepworth (Flora) and Steve Rhyne (Felix) in a scene from Humble Boy (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
- Mercy Lott (Caroline Schneider), Flora’s devoted and frequently insulted friend who has a crush on George Pye. In a classically clumsy move, Mercy starts adding salt to the gazpacho she has made for an outdoor meal on the patio but, thinking that it needs more seasoning, mistakenly adds some of James’s ashes into the chilled soup. Her hyper-emotional attempt to say grace before the meal is a masterpiece of comic writing.
- George Pye (Ron Talbot), a local widower who has been having an affair with Flora for the past several years (with the blessing of Flora’s late husband). Though George lacks the social graces and intellectual prowess that would normally appeal to Flora, he’s a lusty businessman who doesn’t hesitate to urinate on the plants in her garden. For reasons initially unknown to the audience, Felix and George detest each other.
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| Steve Rhyne (Felix) and Li-Length Au (Rosie) in a scene from Humble Boy (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
- Rosie Pye (Li-Leng Au), George’s daughter. A single mother who works as a nurse, Rosie has a seven-year-old daughter that she named Felicity in honor of the child’s father. She has never informed Felix that he is the girl's father and, since George and Flora remember Rosie going through an extremely slutty streak following her mother’s death, they’re not convinced that Felix could have been capable of fathering a child.
- Jim the gardener (Russ Whismore), a gentle man in his sixties who embodies the spirit of Flora’s late husband, James. Jim is routinely ignored by everyone in the play except Felix.
Although Jones’s play describes Felix as being fat and unattractive. Humble Boy offers a beautiful showcase for Steve Rhyne (who was often seen as an enthusiastic performer in musicals staged by San Francisco's 42nd Street Moon). Rhyne’s handsome presence and solid acting gives him some extra leeway in taking his time with Felix’s stammering and letting the audience wonder if, instead of being an nerdy schlub, he might be a closeted gay man whose life has been dominated by a vainglorious mother. As Ken Sonkin explains in his director’s statement
“Chaos theory is the study of unpredictable and complex dynamic systems that nonetheless have an underlying order and are highly sensitive to small changes in external conditions. This sensitivity is often referred to as ‘the butterfly effect’ – the idea that the flicker of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil might, months later, cause a tornado in Texas. Chaos theory might also be said to apply to family and the ripple effect that exists in all of our households when something changes. Family systems are highly sensitive. The loss of a loved one creates a void that is experienced differently by family members and may, in fact, forever alter a family dynamic for better or worse."
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| Scarlett Hepworth (Flora), Steve Rhyne (Felix), and Ron Talbot (George) in a scene from Humble Boy (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
"While it’s all too easy to judge what we don’t understand, sometimes it’s hardest to understand those to whom we are closest. The characters in Humble Boy each possess a latent goodness. Jones asks us to consider what it means to be compassionate and to accept (even when we don’t understand). Each of her characters needs just a little nudge to reawaken their potential. With loose ties to Hamlet, Humble Boy is a meditation on our closest relationships in the 21st century. It’s a story about searching for our place in the ‘bigger picture’ as well as in the smaller pictures that make up our family photo albums.”Though Humble Boy contains plenty of rowdy and hilarious moments, it also offers touching insights into people who manage to rise above their circumstances and surprise themselves by aiming for something better in their lives.
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42nd Street Moon is currently staging a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1959 musical entitled Fiorello! With a book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott (who directed the original Broadway production), music by Jerry Bock, some delightful lyrics by Sheldon Harnick (“You remember her, she detested you. You remember him, he arrested you”), the show was originally choreographed by Peter Gennaro. Fiorello! made a star out of Tom Bosley (who won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical) and introduced a new generation of New Yorkers to the politician whose first name translates to “Little Flower.” |
| Colin Thomson stars in Fiorello! (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
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| Colin Thomson's La Guardia enlivens a picket line in Fiorello! (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
In 1943, the New York City Center (which spent nearly two decades as the home of the New York City Opera and New York City Ballet) made its debut with La Guardia conducting the New York Philharmonic in a performance of The Star-Spangled Banner. Many people who routinely fly in and out of LaGuardia Airport do not know it was named in honor of this man.
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| Colin Thomson stars in Fiorello! (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Sixty years after its premiere, Fiorello! has undergone some curious changes. Much of the first act takes place from 1900-1920, when women were fighting for the right to vote. The rampant misogyny of the era is clearly on display in the relationship between one of the protesters, Dora (Marisa Cozart), and Floyd (Christopher M. Nelson), a policeman quick to abuse his power. After they marry, Floyd loses some of his bravado whenever confronted by his wife.
In recent years, one of Harnick’s lyrics for Marie’s second act solo (“The Very Next Man”) came under fire from female singers who loved the song but found it difficult to include in their cabaret acts. Although the original lyric (see below) has been changed, you can still hear it as performed on the original Broadway cast album.
"And if he likes me?
Who cares how frequently he strikes me!
I'll fetch his slippers with my arm in a sling,
Just for the privilege of wearing his ring."
42nd Street Moon's production adds some timely enhancements. A series of projections by scenic designer Brian Watson delivers a convenient timeline for those with no memory of historic events from 100 years ago (it might have helped to include a headline indicating that the sinking of the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915, drew the United States into World War I). A subsequent slide dated September of 1929 alerts the audience to the impending financial crisis.
The production rests on the sturdy shoulders of Colin Thomson, who delivers a forceful portrayal of La Guardia as a man eager to ride to the rescue of everyone with problems but needs help solving a key problem of his own.
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| Amanda Johnson as La Guardia's first wife, Thea, in Fiorello! (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
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| Katrina Lauren McGraw as La Guardia's secretary, Marie, in Fiorello! (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
With costumes by Merissa Mann and choreography by Joyce Zaban, Karen Altree Piemme has directed much of the show with great gusto. Chris Vettel lends strong support as the Republican district leader, Ben Marino, with Catrina Manahan making a brief appearance as the tap-dancing showgirl, Mitzi Travers.
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| Chris Vettel as Ben Marino in Fiorello! (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
It's interesting to note that Fiorello! won the 1960 Tony Award for Best Musical over Gypsy, The Sound of Music, Once Upon A Mattress, and Take Me Along. It's no surprise that, within the next four years, Bock & Harnick would bring Tenderloin (1960), She Loves Me (1963) and Fiddler on the Roof (1964) to Broadway.
Performances of Fiorello! continue through March 17 at the Gateway Theatre (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer:
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