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Allan Morgan

David Oiye

Ilena Lee Cramer

Sarah Stanley

Greg MacArthur

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beyond the golden age

My first experience with queer theatre came in the late seventies while I was living in Toronto, apprenticing to be a chef and studying at George Brown College. I had recently come out at work, at home and with the most difficulty, to my longhaired rocker friends in Guelph, Ontario. I was living with my new gay friends on Carlton Street across from Allen Gardens and experiencing for the first time the thrill of the ghetto. The magazines, the stores, the drugs, the music, the sex and somehow even the theatre. My friend Michael and I attended a performance of Hosanna by Michel Tremblay at Toronto Workshop Productions. WOW. I was mesmerized by the performances of Richard Monette and Richard Donat, thrilled to be in a theatre with other gay men watching a play by a Canadian author and felt that this was it, I had arrived. I was living the big city gay dream. I saw other plays at that theatre, but I remember few of them save for an hallucinogenic production of Oscar Wilde's Salome directed by Lindsay Kemp. I think the only reason that that one stuck with me was that the acid we had taken helped to etch parts of it permanently onto my gray matter. But it was Hosanna that truly remained with me, the seediness of it all and the yearning for something more.

Allan Morgan in Hosanna, 1983

Fast forward seven or eight years, I'd moved to Vancouver, and a career in the kitchen seemed unrewarding and banal. I followed an old dream and enrolled in theatre school at Vancouver Community College, Studio 58. It wasn't long before I felt I had made the right choice: I was in my third semester and the school had invigorated my life and my desire to learn. We were doing an exchange programme with Malaspina College in Nanaimo, presenting a production of Hosanna and I was cast as Cuirette. Opening night came and unbeknownst to us the play had been billed as Canada's answer to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, thereby opening the door to audience participation. My dear friend David McLean made his entrance and was greeted by a disgusted "He's queer!" yelled from the house. The response when I entered some seconds later was a disbelieving, "They're both queer!" A shaky start to a new life in the theatre, but a perfect example of queer theatre's power to offend and rattle.

That was more than 20 years ago now, and since that time I have had the opportunity to portray many different characters, some of them gay but most of them not. I have seen some incredible pieces of queer theatre, performed in many, and even directed a few. Where do I think queer theatre is now? What relevance does it have for today's audience? Is it still important? Does it still offend? Although it is easy to pretend that we are all on the same page, that audiences are no longer shocked by things queer, a recent foray to a theatre in Victoria proved otherwise. At the beginning of the second act of a new play, which had led into the intermission with a lovely grope of a young stud's crotch by an older mentor, it was obvious that several members of the audience had decided to leave, no doubt offended by the homosexual grope. There's still a long way to go, baby.

Queer theatre reached its peak, I think, in the late 80s and early 90s. The AIDS crisis was ballooning, the powers that be seemed to wash their hands of it and there was righteous anger within the gay community. Into this miasma several prominent voices began to howl. The playwrights behind As Is, The Normal Heart, and later Love, Valour, Compassion! and Angels in America ¹ established the queer experience in the mainstream theatre. In Vancouver a new company dedicated to queer professional theatre got underway. Its first production was A Plague of the Gorgeous, a series of playlets about HIV and AIDS by local queer writers.² I was fortunate enough to be in the cast. Opening night was a wonder, we all took rainbow flags onstage for the curtain call and I wept to be involved. There was anger in those plays, but also humour, grace and camp as well as a great feeling of "we're here, we're queer and we're thespians."

There have been plays in my career during which I have had moments of epiphany. Plays that raise the bar. Plays that become yardsticks by which I scrutinize new projects that I am interested in doing. Two that come to mind are Toronto, Mississippi and Lilies.³ Performing in these pieces changed my entire perception of who I am, and of my work in the theatre.

That all changed when I finally saw a production of Angels in America in Seattle in the late 90s. By that time I had lost many friends, the play had taken on mythic proportions in my mind, and for once the experience did not disappoint. I was left weeping in my seat by the theatricality of the angel's appearance at the end of Millenium Approaches and madly screaming, stomping, crying and applauding at the end of Perestroika several hours later. But most telling for me was the feeling that I had just seen the best and what more could be said? The author had written plays filled with history, complexity, humour, blazing intelligence and soaring spirituality. The event left me uplifted, yet also terribly sad. Sad that I was not in the cast and could only watch from the house as the actors finally left the stage after their prolonged curtain call. Sad also, that the bar had been raised so high that I thought that I might never reach it. Mr. Kushner had said it all.

Where are those voices now? Why has that "Golden Age" passed? Primarily, I believe, because we have been heard. We are everywhere now, on sitcoms, on reality TV, in Parliament. A majority of Canadians can now marry their same sex partners, adopt children and collect spousal pensions. AIDS is still with us and HIV cases are growing again but the cocktail makes us complacent. Where is the righteous anger that was queer theatre's fuel? I think now the eye of the storm has moved on. Moved on to the election in the States, moved to the IMF meetings around the world, moved to the war resistance movement. That is where you'll find anger and rage and a voice needing to be heard. Will it return? Yes, if the Conservatives in this country try and wrench away what we have won, or some of us finally get fed up enough with the gay culture's partying myopia. Maybe that would be the catalyst to stir some of us to write the words that would inflame, shock and question.

Flashback to 2 years ago. Once again I am cast as Cuirette in a new production of Hosanna, directed by Katrina Dunn for Touchstone Theatre here in Vancouver. It has been 25 years since I first saw the Toronto production and almost 20 since my first crack at it. What do I bring to this piece now? What lens do I see it through? Is the play still relevant? Yes it is, but now, for me it is not about the titillation of the seedy or the thrill of impossible dreams, it's about love. The attempt to find someone to be with and to make that love work in spite of all of our individual stupidities. The characters are gay and eccentric, but at its heart it's a simple love story.

As my feelings about Hosanna have been pared down to the bare essentials of the story, so too have my ambitions for my activism. We are not just gay people operating in a vacuum, we are humans operating in one. We are all vulnerable and apt to feel neglected. I am more interested now in helping to find ways to make myself and those I care about feel less alone. To find ways to celebrate our commonality and to strengthen what we find. As artists it is too easy to isolate and feel left out precisely at the times when we need community most. That, for me, is the struggle for now. I, like others in this field, respond to the queer community as it grows and changes. My heart sings or cries when I see my brothers or sisters in crisis or joy. That will never change. And, of course, I eagerly await my next epiphany, no matter how high the bar has been raised.

1. By playwrights William M. Hoffman, Larry Kramer, Terrence McNally and Tony Kushner, respectively.

2. Gordon Armstrong, Stuart Blackley and Kevin Gregg, Lisa Lowe, Peter Eliot Weiss and Colin Thomas.