Growing Tribes: Reality Theatre and Columbus’ Gay and Lesbian Community

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Shannon Savard, M.A.

Graduate Program in Theatre

The Ohio State University

2018

Thesis Committee:

Dr. Beth Kattelman, Adviser

Dr. Jennifer Schlueter

Copyright by Shannon Savard

2018

Abstract

Reality Theatre provides a rich example of a professional theatre company which operated in a

Midwestern city and directly engaged with both the local gay and lesbian community and performed primarily gay and lesbian plays, challenging the trend of what Judith Halberstam terms metronormativity in queer studies. Reality's Tribes represents a series of community-based performances which were explicitly created by, for, and about Columbus, Ohio’s local gay and lesbian community. Tribes was a performance created collectively by the members of Reality

Theatre and included sketch comedy, vignettes, monologues, and songs written in direct response to happenings in the local gay and lesbian community as well as the larger political arena. The series of performances which were adapted and restaged eight times over the course of fourteen years was directly rooted in the gay and lesbian community of Columbus, Ohio. This thesis examines Tribes through the lenses of Jan Cohen-Cruz’s conception of community-based theatre and the theatre as a space of gay and lesbian community building. Reality Theatre carved out a space in Columbus’ theatrical landscape which presumed the gay and lesbian viewpoint to be the norm and reimagined mainstream pop culture forms to fit it. The company used camp, queer humor, and the privileging of gay and lesbian perspectives as community-building strategies. Informed by the queer and feminist performance criticism of Jill Dolan, Tim Miller and David Román, I advocate for a critical allyship for community-based gay and lesbian theatre in order to combat the heteronormative and metronormative forces which erase the history of gay and lesbian theatre and the communities with whom they engage.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my adviser, Beth Kattelman for introducing me to Reality Theatre and for her guidance through the research and writing process; my second committee member, Jen

Schlueter for her support and enthusiasm for this project; Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd who agreed to be interviewed and generously shared their stories; and the staff in the Special

Collections reading room of the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute without whom this project would not have been possible.

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Vita

2015………………………………………….B.A. English and Theatre, William Smith College

2016………………………………………………………….M.A. Teaching, Secondary English, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

2016-2017……………………………………………………………...……University Fellowship The Ohio State University

2017 to Present………………………….Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Theatre, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Theatre

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Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………iii

Vita………………………………………………………………………………………………..iv

Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 2: Tribes as Gay and Lesbian Community-Based Theatre……………………………...12

Chapter 3: Reality Theatre as a Gay and Lesbian Communal Space……………………………39

Chapter 4: Troubling Past Criticisms of Tribes……………………………………………….…61

Chapter 5: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………76

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..83

Appendix A: Reality Theatre and Tribes Production History………………………………...…88

Appendix B: Annotated Scene Listings of Tribes Scripts……………………………………….93

Appendix C: Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd Interview Transcript………………………....106

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Chapter 1: Introduction

In May of 1985 Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd, two recent graduates of Ohio

University, placed an announcement in the Columbus Dispatch for auditions for their new theatre company. Frustrated with the minimal professional theatre opportunities in Columbus, Barnhart called Shepherd and armed with their experience in low-budget student theatre, they were able to pull together five other cast members to begin a season of experimental original works and premieres of local playwrights.1 Barnhart and Shepherd’s Reality Theatre soon became established as one of two semi-professional theatre companies in Columbus (the other being

Contemporary American Theatre Company, or CATCO).2 One spring night in 1986, the cast of

Reality Theatre were gathered at Mellman’s, a hole-in-the-wall bar in Columbus’ Short North neighborhood, after a rehearsal to discuss their plans for their second season of plays. In a recent interview, Shepherd recalled Barnhart turning to her to say, “We should do a show about gay people!”3 Barnhart wrote in his director’s note in the program for a later rendition of said show:

“The topic of Homosexuality came up and I said ‘Someday I would like to be involved in a play that treated the subject with pride, honesty, and understanding.”4 Little did they know, the show that started as a discussion over late-night drinks would become Tribes, a fourteen-year-long, ever-evolving, and wildly popular community-based theatre production. The seven productions of Tribes that Reality Theatre collectively created as a company and presented to audiences largely made up of members of the gay and lesbian community in Columbus each consisted of dozens of vignettes, monologues, songs, and sketch comedy that engaged directly with the local gay and lesbian community, politics, and pop culture. This thesis will focus on Columbus,

1 Barnhart, Frank and Dee Shepherd. Personal Interview, 31 Jan. 2018 2 Fiely, Dennis. “Local Theatre Scene to be Busy, Ambitious.” Columbus Dispatch, 15 Sept. 1985. 3 Shepherd. Personal interview. 4 Barnhart, Frank. “Directors Note.” Tribes Program. 1989. Reality Theatre Collection. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, OH.

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Ohio’s Reality Theatre, specifically on their fourteen-year-long performance series, Tribes.

Reality Theater will serve as a case study of a company with a repertoire that consisted largely of gay and lesbian plays operating in the Midwest from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s. The study will link geography, queer cultural production, and community, ultimately examining the ways in which this company functioned as both a space and voice for Columbus’ gay and lesbian population.

This research aims to fill a geographical gap in both theatre history and gay and lesbian history. The history of gay and lesbian performance in the Midwest is largely undocumented and routinely erased with theatre historians favoring cities with large and well-established gay and lesbian communities. Multiple scholars have explored the work of the Ridiculous Theatre

Company, Theatre Rhinoceros, the WOW Café, and Split Britches in addition to that of dozens of individual theatre artists. New York and California-based theatre artists’ participation in activist organizations responding to the AIDS crisis such as ACT UP have been well documented. However, when it comes to gay and lesbian theatre companies and artists operating outside of New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, particularly during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, information is sparse. While multiple gay and lesbian-oriented theatre companies existed across the United States during the last two decades of the twentieth century, little has been documented in scholarship beyond the fact that these companies existed. The

Richmond Triangle Players of Richmond, Virginia; The Theatre Offensive of Boston,

Massachusetts; Oh SNAP! Productions of Omaha, Nebraska; and the HAG Theatre of Buffalo,

New York were all in operation by the 1990s. The Lionheart Gay Theatre of Chicago began working in 1979. None of these, as of yet, have received critical attention. Chicago’s About Face

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Theatre has attracted scholarly attention over the last decade for their recent work with LGBTQ youth, but their work in the 1990s with their adult company has gone uncommented upon.

The pattern in theatre scholarship of ignoring artistic activity in the middle of the United

States in favor of that on the coastal urban centers such as New York, San Francisco, and Los

Angeles perpetuates what Judith Halberstam calls metronormativity. Metronormativity illustrates a larger problem in queer studies in which binary oppositions are reinforced by scholarship: urban/rural, East Coast and West Coast/Middle America, forward-thinking/backward, queer- inclusive/heteronormative.5 Ultimately, the exclusive focus on queer artists in large urban centers reproduces the popular narrative of the repressed, small-town, gay man or lesbian who must escape to the progressive cities on the coasts as the only way to find the freedom to express himself or herself. This narrative works to erase the existence, histories, and creative work of gay and lesbian people in communities outside of coastal urban metropolises.

In order to uncover and understand the histories of the ways in which gay and lesbian theatre functioned outside of the gay Meccas of New York and San Francisco, there needs to be an adjustment to the lens through which gay and lesbian theatre is viewed. While the works of individual gay artists such as Terrence McNally, Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer, and Harvey

Fierstein have received recognition for their commercial success, publications, and subsequent productions by companies across the United States, gay and lesbian theatre history beyond

Broadway can most benefit from an examination of its activist aims. Specifically, this project will serve as an investigation of Reality Theatre as activism-driven, community-based theatre in the sense of their engagement both with the gay and lesbian community and the local Columbus

5 Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. NYU Press, 2005.

3 community. Furthermore, I aim to trouble the binary framework of late twentieth century queer activism which divided groups into either a gay assimilationist or radical queer ideology. Reality

Theatre’s long-running series, Tribes, provides an example of community-based activist theatre which conforms neither to the gay assimilationist nor the radical queer camp. I use the term

“activist” in the sense that that the members of the company, through their art, advocated for a marginalized community and actively worked toward changing the social circumstances and opportunities within their city for gay men and lesbians. Reality Theatre’s activism and resulting on-going restagings of Tribes were primarily responsive to the local gay and lesbian community as opposed to in direct reaction against a homophobic and heteronormative society.

Literature Review

Performance studies scholar Jan Cohen-Cruz defines community-based art as “a field in which artists, collaborating with people whose lives directly inform the subject matter, express collective meaning.” In community-based performance, the text is born out of the stories and experiences of an ensemble connected by a sense of shared identity, whether through place, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, profession, political orientation, or circumstances. Cohen Cruz builds on community-based theatre practitioner, Richard Owens Greer’s notion that this type of production is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”6 Ultimately, Cohen Cruz posits that community-based art and performance most often manifests as cultural expressions of identity politics.7

The field of gay and lesbian community-based theatre, or theatre by, for, and about gays or lesbians, has historically faced significant criticism and has generally been devalued for the identity politics-driven productions that Cohen-Cruz describes. Most of the major concerns or

6 Greer, Richard Owen. “Of the People, by the People, for the People: The Field of Community Performance.” High Performance, vol 16, no. 4, 1994, pp. 23–27. 7 Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Community-Based Performance in the United States. Rutgers University Press, 2005.

4 criticisms of gay and lesbian artists creating for queer audiences revolved around insularity.

David Román and Tim Miller outline the dismissive responses to Miller’s work dealing with his experience as a gay man in the United States. Miller’s work and that of other gay and lesbian artists has routinely been dismissed as “preaching to the already converted” and having a limited scope of address. Much of community-based performance, Miller and Román note, is labeled propaganda with no artistic value, giving the audiences for whom it is performed little to no cultural clout as critics.8 Both Barbara Baracks and Jill Dolan share similar concerns about the insularity and limited reach of feminist and lesbian performance after the first Women’s One

World International Feminist Theatre Festival in 1981. Baracks warns that a focus exclusively on feminist issues to an audience of women predisposed to support said issues would limit the number of participants in the festival.9 Jill Dolan cautions that the insularity of community and identity-based events can limit the potential for larger cultural change. In her second edition of

The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Dolan places a call to action for critics and emphasizes allyship between artists and critics. She abandons the idea of the critic as an objective arbiter of taste in favor of readings which question what the work means, what it does, and the possibilities it presents.10 Lara Shalson advocates approaching criticism and community-based theatre with a focus on the critic's relationship to the insider/outsider divide. Since communities do not exist inherently by simple nature of shared identity or place but are actively created counterpublics, the critic can play a role in either validating or inhibiting community formation around performance based on how they choose to approach the perceived issue of insularity.11

8 Miller, Tim and David Román. “Preaching to the Converted.” Theatre Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2, 1995, pp. 169-188. 9 Baracks, Barbara. “Deja WOW.” The Village Voice, 14 Oct 1981, p. 103. 10 Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. 2nd ed., University of Michigan Press, 2012. 11 Shalson, Lara. “Creating Community, Constructing Criticism.” Theatre Topics, vol. 15, no. 2, 2005, pp. 221-239.

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Ultimately, as Miller and Román suggest, criticism which dismisses community-based performance as insular and “preaching to the already converted” undermines efforts to create a gay and lesbian community culture, and framing the work simply as propaganda undermines the messages of the social movement reflected in the art. When gay and lesbian audiences are painted as “the converted,” the assumption is that the group is stagnant and unchanging rather than a community that is participating in an ongoing process of shaping its collective identity.

Community-based theatre is often a space of queer cultural production and community building.12 Community-based theatre scholar John Fletcher describing Miller's solo performances writes, “He situates an impulse to act as community—in mourning, in defiance, in joy—as being as integral to queerness as same-sex attraction.”13 Fletcher posits that community- based theatre like Miller's becomes—borrowing Jill Dolan's terminology—a “utopian performative” where the audience connects with one another in the shared experience of confronting and defying discrimination and injustice. Not only is an activist community called into being, it is faced with conflict which continually reinvigorates and creates space to question that community as it grows together.

Gay and lesbian community and activism form around sexual ideology and sexual systems which encompass many aspects of an individual's life beyond sexual activity itself.

Feminist scholar and cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin claims that sexual ideology is influenced and formed by various factors such as the church, the family, the psychiatric institution, the law, and the media. Beyond the forces which determine normative sexuality,

Rubin describes “territorial and border wars” which she defines as “the processes by which erotic

12 Miller and Román, 176-178. 13 Fletcher, John. “Identity and Agonism: Tim Miller, Cornerstone, and the Politics of Community-Based Theatre.” Theatre Topics, vol. 13, no. 2, 2003, pp. 189-203.

6 minorities form communities and the forces that seek to inhibit them.” These processes ultimately “lead to struggles over the nature of boundaries and sexual zones.”14 Sexual minorities are stratified by both normative forces and internal border wars into hierarchies of respectability.

These struggles among sexual minorities have informed the ways in which the gay and lesbian community have performed their activism. In his article, “Must Identity Movements Self-

Destruct? A Queer Dilemma,” Joshua Gamson traces the emerging conflicts among gay, lesbian, and queer activist groups in the 1980s and 1990s, identifying two often conflicting agendas. The first activist strand Gamson identifies is the longer-standing and predominant movement of lesbians and gay men who, following suit with the Civil Rights Movement, established a public collective identity as a minority group. They advocated for assimilation and civil rights as minorities and emphasized their similarity to the straight population. On the other hand, in line with deconstructionist thought and the emergence of queer theory in the late 1980s and 1990s, the radical queer movement aimed to problematize normative sexuality and gender roles altogether. They rejected civil rights strategies in favor of carnivalesque demonstration, public transgression, and parody in order to destabilize the boundaries of gender and sexuality.15

Rationale and Methodology

One of the goals of this project is to challenge the metronormativity of current gay and lesbian theatre history scholarship. Reality Theatre provides a rich example of a professional theatre company that operated in a Midwestern city for over a decade and directly engaged with both the local gay and lesbian community and performed primarily gay and lesbian plays. Tribes

14 Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Lesbian & Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale and David M. Halperin. Routledge, 1993, pp. 3-44.

15 Gamson, Joshua. “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma.” Social Problems, vol. 42, no. 3, 1995, pp. 390-407.

7 represents a series of community-based performances that were explicitly created by, for, and about Columbus, Ohio’s local gay and lesbian community.

My research of pulls from archived documents housed in the Reality Theatre Collection within the Special Collections at the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research

Institute including newspaper reviews from mainstream and gay publications, programs, publicity materials, letters from audience members, scripts from multiple performances, and interviews with founding artistic directors Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd. Interviews with the artistic directors provide insight into the nature of their interactions with their intended audience, the specific challenges of producing gay and lesbian theatre in Columbus in the 1980s and 1990s, their approaches to activism, and the role Reality Theatre played in community building. Much of the written documentation of the company’s activities exists in reviews of their performances published in mainstream newspapers, many of which were hostile toward the “campy” style and the content of their plays. However, Reality Theatre’s longevity and responses from gay and lesbian audience members indicates that they had gathered a strong community following. While the newspaper reviews documented the final products that the company presented, the interviews provide insight as to how these productions were able to take place within and how they were received by this particular community.

From a theoretical standpoint, this thesis will examine Reality Theatre’s Tribes through the lenses of Jan Cohen-Cruz’s conception of community-based theatre and the theater as a space of gay and lesbian community building. Informed by queer feminist criticism introduced by Jill

Dolan, I will highlight the ways in which Reality Theatre functioned within the gay and lesbian community in Columbus as well as how information about the company was distributed to the larger public. While many of the mainstream press coverage of Tribes either dismissed Reality

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Theatre’s work as too insular or not doing enough to “promote their message,” my research will interrogate the cultural work that Tribes was doing with its intended audience.

Outline of the Project

The first chapter of this project will provide an introductory overview of Reality Theatre within the context of gay and lesbian theatre history, community-based theatre, debates surrounding gay and lesbian activism in the late twentieth century, and the larger theatre community in Columbus in the 1980s and 1990s.

The second chapter of the thesis will examine Reality Theatre’s Tribes as community- based theatre. Through analysis of scripts, playbills, promotional material, and interviews with

Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd, I will trace the company’s creative process, interactions with the gay and lesbian community and the Columbus community, and the way in which that relationship was translated into performance. I hope to reveal the ways in which the performances over the course of several years were responsive to the changing tastes, dynamics, debates, issues, and events impacting the gay and lesbian community in Columbus.

The third chapter will explore the way in which Reality Theatre and Tribes functioned as a space for gay and lesbian community building. The inquiry will be largely centered around responses to Tribes from the gay and lesbian community, pieced together through local gay publications, anecdotes from the interviews, grant materials, and the company’s extended runs of performances. Reality Theatre’s responsiveness to their audiences was key to their activism and it shaped on-going productions and reinforced the local gay and lesbian community identity. In this section, I will also delve into the demand for comedic queer cultural production from

Columbus’ gay and lesbian community. Considering the historical and cultural context in which

Reality Theatre and their audiences were operating—through the AIDS crisis, NEA censorship

9 of queer arts, and a dearth of gay and lesbian representation in media—I posit that comedic performance played an important role in communal acts of celebration, critique, and resistance.

In the fourth chapter, I will argue that neither Reality Theatre nor their productions of

Tribes can be read within the binary strands of activism and cultural production that classify works as either fitting into a gay assimilationist or radical queer mold. While mainstream papers often criticized the group specifically for not taking an assimilationist stance or trying to convince the general public to have tolerance and empathy for gay and lesbian individuals,

Reality Theatre seems to have been operating for a different purpose. Neither category quite fits

Reality Theatre’s work because it was not aimed at nor created for a straight audience. Reality

Theatre’s Tribes was not created in response to an oppressive or erasing heterosexual public but rather in an ongoing attempt to create work that was by, for, and about gays and lesbians living in Columbus. In a way, this form of activism focuses on creating a space specifically for the gay and lesbian community and cultural expression. Therefore, the lens through which the mainstream press read them, in the binary mode of assimilation versus radicalism, is a misreading of the work that they were doing. I aim to unpack the messages that the general public received about Tribes from local theatre critics, contrast them with responses from gay and lesbian audiences, and offer a reading of their work which takes into account the goals of the company itself and redefines Tribes in terms of the cultural work that it was doing at the time it was produced.

Finally, the fifth chapter will serve as a conclusion and suggest the ways in which this case study of Reality Theatre’s use of community-based theatre with Tribes may illuminate alternate approaches to uncovering the histories of gay and lesbian theaters working outside of major centers of queer culture such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This chapter

10 will explore some of the reasons that Reality Theatre had gone unacknowledged as part of gay and lesbian theatre history in the past and offer potential directions for further research using that information.

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Chapter 2: Tribes as Gay and Lesbian Community-Based Theatre

Using Jan Cohen-Cruz’s conception of community-based performance as a field in which theatre practitioners, collaborating with people whose lives directly inform the subject matter, express collective meaning, the following analysis will demonstrate Reality Theatre's engagement with community-inspired gay and lesbian cultural production through the performance series, Tribes. In total, Reality Theatre’s Tribes was produced eight times; the first production was staged in 1987 and revived with the same script in 1989. A second version called

Another Tribe was staged in 1991, and the company presented a combination of both the original and the 1991 version under the title of The Best of Tribes at the Gay and Lesbian International

Theatre Festival in Tucson, Arizona in 1993. The subsequent productions of Tribes followed a sketch comedy model and included Comedy of Tribes in 1996, Comedy of Tribes: I’ll be Homo for the Holidays in 1997, Tribes 2000, and Tribes 2001 (both titles reflect the years in which they were performed). Tribes, from its initial production in 1987 through its final showing in 2001, drew its material directly from the lives, experiences, and observations of the gay and lesbian community in Columbus, Ohio. Cohen-Cruz’s community-based performance values identity and place-informed content and an ethic of cultural and communal connection over individual artistic genius.16 Their work, in alignment with Cohen-Cruz’s definition, represented a cultural expression of gay and lesbian identity which emphasized the local over the universal and the collective over the individual artist or experience. The company employed personal experiences and queer performance techniques similar to those used by their contemporaries in gay and lesbian theatre for that cultural production. At the same time, many of Reality Theatre's scenes, particularly in their later productions, were heavily grounded in the local politics and goings on

16 Cohen-Cruz. “Introduction” Local Acts: Community Based Performance in the United States. Rutgers University Press, 2005, pp. 1-13.

12 of Columbus, Ohio in the 1990s and early 2000s. Tribes utilized queer performance practices and the specific experiences of the gay and lesbian community in Columbus to produce community- based theatre directly rooted in the place it represented. In order to honor the specific population and geographic locality which inspired the series, Reality Theatre carved out a space in the city’s theatrical landscape which presumed the gay and lesbian viewpoint to be the norm and reimagined mainstream pop culture forms to fit it.

In the context of Tribes, the types of queer performance practice that the company was using can best be understood through the form and the specific content of their pieces, and this can apply to both the creative process and the final performance. The main queer performative characteristic of Reality’s work for this particular series is that it—to borrow the phrase from

Kate Davy’s “Reading Past the Heterosexual Imperative”—presumed a gay and lesbian worldview and resisted being read through and thus being assimilated into dominant heteronormative social codes.17 Not only was the content written by, for, and about gays and lesbians, the entire premise of Tribes was that homosexuality was a given, not an exception. Gay and lesbian people were represented from a gay and lesbian perspective with language and iconography specific to gay and lesbian culture. Once this gay and lesbian worldview was established in the work, Reality Theatre queered different forms of pop cultural entertainment.

Their work resembled Jill Dolan’s description of how feminist and queer theatres have historicized popular genres, taking familiar cultural material and reinscribing it in alternative gay and lesbian social arrangements.18 In other words, the work took popular formats of

17 Davy, Kate. “Reading Past the Heterosexual Imperative.” On and Beyond the Stage: A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance. Ed. Carol Martin, Routledge, 1996, pp. 136-156. 18 Dolan uses Bertolt Brecht’s concept of historicization: a process of denaturalizing historical texts to create a critical distance which allows the spectator to contemplate the structures of social relations. Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. 2nd ed., University of Michigan Press, 2012, p. 113.

13 entertainment, such as a game show or horror film trailer, and cast them with gay and lesbian characters and contexts.

Community-Based Performance and Process

Not only did Reality Theatre’s productions of Tribes represent community-based and queer theatrical practices, their creative process reflected that same aesthetic and ethic. In a 2018 interview founding artistic director Shepherd recalled the idea for the original production of

Tribes coming out of a conversation she had with her co-director at a local bar after a rehearsal during their first season. Barnhart turned to her to say, “We should do a show about gay people!”19 Barnhart wrote in his director’s note in the program for the 1989 rendition of said show: “The topic of Homosexuality came up and I said, ‘Someday I would like to be involved in a play that treated the subject with pride, honesty, and understanding.’”20 Eventually, the ideas cooked up in Mellman’s bar turned into Reality Theatre’s first show explicitly about the gay and lesbian community. Cohen-Cruz wrote that community-based production is often a response to a collectively significant issue or circumstance,21 and Barnhart’s program note implied the initial inspiration for Tribes was just that. The idea was born out of a perceived lack of adequate cultural expression and acting opportunities in which gay men and lesbians were portrayed openly and in a positive light.

The process of devising the various scripts over the years for Tribes, modeled community-based theatre practices as much as the final products did. Inspiration for the scenes came directly from stories from Columbus’ gay and lesbian community—of which the majority of the company members were a part—as well as observations about the gay and lesbian

19 Shepherd. Personal Interview. 20 Barnhart, Frank. “Directors Notes.” Tribes Program. 1989. Reality Theatre Collection. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, Ohio. 21 Cohen-Cruz 2.

14 community in the United States as a whole. The first production of Tribes followed the same content devising model as their previous company-created plays. There was no single writer for any of the scripts; rather, each performance was created collectively by the director and actors in the company in addition to local writers and musicians from the gay and lesbian community.

Since the 1970s, feminist and lesbian theatre companies have commonly taken a collective approach to developing new work as opposed to traditional hierarchical and script-centric methods. These companies frequently valued multiple narratives over the singular, stories told from marginalized perspectives over the dominant, and performances which evolve in response to community feedback over a fixed finished product. Much of Reality Theatre’s creative process aligns with groups like the WOW Café, London’s Women’s Theatre Group, and Split Britches who all worked to produce theatre by, for, and about women and lesbians.22

Throughout their early seasons, Reality Theatre produced several company-created works including This is Not a Test (1985), Neon (1986), Our Target Is (1986), and Moral Minority

(1987) which explored the aftermath of nuclear war, contemporary urban street life, terrorism, and censorship respectively.23 Rather than aiming to produce one unified storyline, the content was generated around a central theme. Each of Reality Theatre’s company-created shows began with an exploration of a specific topic. Earlier productions were centered around particular social issues, situations, or populations. Shepherd described the company’s typical process as deciding on a theme and developing characters and situations that could fit within that framework. For the first rendition of Tribes, the guidelines were, as Shepherd put it, “It’s gotta be gay!”24 The multi- faceted approach the storytelling and the collective authorship undermined the traditional

22 Sisley, Emily L. “Notes on Lesbian Theatre.” On and Beyond the Stage: A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance. Ed. Carol Martin, Routledge, 1996, pp. 52-60. 23 Grossberg, Michael. “Reality Theatre Sets Stage for 2nd Experimental Season.” Columbus Dispatch, 11 May 1986. 24 Shepherd. Personal interview.

15 theatrical methods depending on the sole artistic genius of the playwright and the singular plotline. Their community-based ethic with an emphasis on the collective and the ensemble was reflected in the brainstorming and the writing process.25

The rehearsal process began with company conversations and brainstorming sessions.

Each writing period for Tribes, Barnhart said, started with the following questions: “What’s some of the stuff that’s going on? What’s in the news? What’s happening locally?” Often, a company member would suggest a specific scenario for the group to explore or give a general synopsis of their idea for a scene. The subsequent rehearsal time was reserved for what Barnhart described as “unknown stuff,” or the questions which remained to be explored in a sketch. In other words, the rest of the company members’ character work and improvised interactions would fill the spaces of “unknown stuff.” Once they had generated enough material for a scene,

Shepherd would write down the key pieces of the improvisation into a script so that it could be recreated, revised, and further rehearsed later.26 Reality Theatre’s focus on the collective in their brainstorming periods and open-endedness of the explorations of “unknown stuff” reflects the company’s dedication to process rather than product-based rehearsal techniques.

Overview of the Tribes Scripts

The product of the first creation and rehearsal period for Tribes in 1987 was an episodic performance of thirty-five unique stories presented in the form of monologues, poetry, dramatic scenes, comedic sketches, and songs. The first act focused exclusively on perspectives and issues present within the gay and lesbian community, covering topics such as bar culture, homophobia within the gay community, and the joys and pains of romantic relationships. The second act, on

25 Upon joining the company actors received a handout defining what it meant to be an “ensemble actor.” Key components were collaboration, community formation, and valuing the needs of the collective over individual agenda. “What is an Ensemble Actor?” Handout. 1992. Reality Theatre Collection. 26 Barnhart and Shepherd. Personal interview.

16 the other hand, delved into gay men and lesbians' interactions with the straight community, exploring family relations, growing up closeted, gay-bashing, and workplace discrimination.

While some of the pieces in the first production of Tribes were comedic and upbeat, such as the movie trailer for “Flaming Zombie Queens” and “What They Really Mean Is...,” a mock- scientific study of gay mating habits in bars, the majority of the performance took a serious, and often somber, tone. Advertised to its audiences as “an original portrait of courage, integrity, and gay culture,”27 the first Tribes primarily explored the fear, loneliness, and frustration of the gay and lesbian experience.28 Because of its popularity, Reality Theatre staged a revival of the first

Tribes script in the summer of 1989.

Further illustrating the community-responsive nature of their work, when they revisited and updated the script for Another Tribe in 1991, the rewrite was more balanced between comedic sketches and monologues and chronicles of struggle, the specter of death in the age of

AIDS, and the dangers and anxieties that come with living as openly gay or lesbian. In Another

Tribe, Reality Theatre began to expand the variety of formats that their individual pieces would take, borrowing from existing television genres like talk shows, competitive game shows, and commercials. In contrast with the 1987 and 1989 versions of Tribes, a recurring set of characters appeared across a series of four sketches interspersed throughout the show. The four-scene series titled “Activist” set up a relationship between two men, one a vocal gay rights activist and the other who is closeted at work, and followed them through the conflicts that arose in their pursuit of gay rights.29

27 Reality Theatre Presents Tribes. Flyer. 1989. Reality Theatre Collection. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, Ohio. 28 Reality Theatre. Tribes. Script, 1987. Frank Barnhart Collection. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, Ohio. 29 Reality Theatre. Another Tribe. Script, 1991. Frank Barnhart Collection.

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The subsequent renditions of Tribes in 1996, 1997, 2000, and 2001 took an entirely comedic approach, borrowing scenes from the two earlier scripts and further expanding the entertainment genres from which the individual sketches drew. The shift toward comedy came from audience response and demand. The pieces that were most well-received by critics and audiences alike in the early shows were the comedic ones. “Flaming Zombie Queens” and “What

They Say Is” from the original Tribes (1987/89) 30 and “Cruise Olympics,” “GaySpeak 2000,” and “Name That Breeder” from Another Tribe (1991)31 became part of several of the later renditions. Following the trend of their successes with gay and lesbian audiences with comedies like Holly Hughes’ Well of Horniness and multiple works by Charles Busch and Charles

Ludlam, the company-created shows specifically for Columbus’ gay and lesbian community took into account the kind of representations that those audiences were most eager to continuously return to see. Furthermore, the content of the later Tribes comedies became more centered around the gay and lesbian community specifically located in Columbus, current events, and pop culture.32

Across the six different versions of Tribes several distinct themes emerged, characterizing the productions specifically as by, for, and about Columbus' gay and lesbian community and queer performance practice. The first two themes which reflected Reality

Theatre’s queer performance practice included creating scenes which either directly depicted or were interpreted through the lens of gay and lesbian subculture and queering popular forms of

30 Grossberg, Michael. “‘Tribes’ Explores Gay Life but isn’t a Gay Theatre Evening.” Columbus Dispatch, 15 May 1987. 31 Grossberg, Michael. “‘Tribe’ Takes a Superficial Look at Diverse Gay Community.” Columbus Dispatch, 20 May 1991. 32 Tribes 2000 and Tribes 2001 were produced by Act Out Productions, Frank Barnhart’s company he formed after leaving Reality Theatre in the mid-1990s. He continued to participate in Tribes stagings after resigning as Producing Director. Both Barnhart and Shepherd were involved in every production of Tribes, and it maintained its original goal and spirit of being by, for, and about Columbus’ gay and lesbian community throughout its various renditions.

18 entertainment. Throughout the Tribes series, Reality Theatre took popular entertainment forms and reinvented them to make space for gay and lesbian characters and experiences which were often excluded from those genres. In terms of their community-based theatre content drawing from the shared identity and geography of the primary audience, each rendition of Tribes responded to local situations and the present moment. The content of the scenes often commented upon national current events impacting the gay and lesbian community in a broad sense or were drawn from local happenings having to do with Columbus’ gay and lesbian community. Finally, Reality Theatre’s repetition of characters and conceits across multiple performances reflected a continuous relationship with a local audience whom they expected to be returning audience members year after year.

Engagement with Gay and Lesbian Subculture

Across all of the versions of the script, Reality Theatre approached gay and lesbian subculture in their scenes in ways that celebrated it, interrogated it, and expressed their frustrations with aspects of it. Beginning with the original Tribes (1987), their pieces “At the

Bar,” “Internal Viewpoints,” and “The Dominance/Submission Factor in Gay Relationships” all explored underlying issues existing within the gay and lesbian community and existing representations of its culture. The poetic monologue “At the Bar” began with a gay man's description of his surroundings at what he called a typical gay bar and gradually revealed common insecurities that everyone—and it was implied everyone else there—had ultra-bright white teeth and was thin with fashionable clothing. The man continued to describe the relationships, or lack thereof, formed at the bar: “At the gay bar/they complain that the music/is too loud to talk/so they go home and screw/and forget to talk,”33 highlighting the often over- sexualized atmosphere which he found non-conducive to in-depth communication. “The

33 Tribes 1987

19

Dominance/Submission Factor in Gay Relationships” unpacked problematic conceptions about gay male sexuality. Throughout a monologue explaining how pop cultural representations of gay culture like the film Cruising (1980) perpetuated the stereotype that gay relationships imitated a fantasy of dominance, the speaker was interrupted by a man reenacting that same stereotypical dominant role with lines like “Lick my boot, you worm” and “That's a good boy, take it all.”34

The interruptions of the monologue and overbearing presence of the “dominant” actor reflected the struggle to undermine popular cultural misconceptions about homosexuality. “Internal

Viewpoints” turned that gaze inward to the gay and lesbian community as the actors called one another every gay slur in the book and then turned to the audience to complain, “I hate it when people discriminate against gays.”35 The piece called attention to the ways in which members of the gay and lesbian community perpetuate the mainstream culture's harmful attitudes about homosexuality within their own spaces.

Later, several pieces in Another Tribe (1991), took a more celebratory approach to gay bar culture. In the monologue, “When I’m Out,” a lesbian woman defended the bar scene, describing it as a social club. She connected both the physical space of the bar as a place to go and the openness that gay and lesbian-centered space affords her in the line, “I like going out. I like being ‘out.’ I feel great when I see a bunch of lesbians and gay men together. I feel strong and well, happy.”36 This monologue, in contrast with “At the Bar,” expressed the importance of the gay bar as a communal space. The gay bar setting was featured in many of the pieces of the earliest iterations of Tribes likely because it was a recognizable gathering place for gay men and lesbians in the 1980s and early 1990s. Particularly in Columbus, as Frank Barnhart recounted, there were very few community spaces for gays and lesbians outside of the bars when the

34 Tribes 1987 35 Tribes 1987 36 Another Tribe 1991

20 original Tribes premiered.37 Therefore, the bars would have been the most logical site for the celebration of gay pride and the community. “Dancing on the Edge,” a high-energy song that appeared in both the original and the second version of the show portrayed a gay man taking to the dance floor to find love.38 The 1991 “Cruise Olympics,” on the other hand, took the celebration of the bar culture further in treating gay men and lesbians picking up potential partners as star athletes, praising their technique in connecting with the other person.39 The piece elevated the practice of cruising to the level of respect and fanfare given to professional and

Olympic sports.

As gay men and lesbians began to gain visibility throughout the 1990s the cultural spaces they could openly inhabit together began shifting. As illustrated by the Columbus Dispatch’s reporting, mainstream awareness of the gay and lesbian community in the city was growing significantly. Between 1985 and 1991 the number of articles focused on the gay and lesbian community in the traditionally conservative-leaning publication increased three-fold, and the community’s presence in the eye of the general public continued to grow moving forward.40 The impetus to write Another Tribe came from Reality Theatre's desire to present an updated picture of the gay community. As Dee Shepherd was quoted in an interview promoting the show,

“Homosexuality has become much more open than when we did the original show.”41 To reflect the community's broadening presence, the settings of the pieces in the Tribes performances moved beyond the bars and so did their representations of the gay subculture.

37 Barnhart. Personal interview. 38 Tribes 1987 and Another Tribe 1991. 39 Another Tribe 1991 40 “Columbus Dispatch, The (OH).” NewsBank. 2018. Accessed 23 March 2018. 41 Grossberg, Michael. “‘Another Tribe’ takes updated look at gay life.” Columbus Dispatch, 23 May 1991.

21

Even after being criticized for their overuse of inside jokes and gay cultural references from multiple outlets of the mainstream press including the Columbus Dispatch,42 The Other

Paper, and entertainment-focused Nite & Day, Reality Theatre remained focused on producing content reflecting and catering to the gay and lesbian community. In response to reviewers’ complaints that the work “doesn’t always stop to explain itself to visitors from the non- subculture”43 and that many of the inside jokes may fly over the heads of non-gays, “semi- affectionately labeled breeders,”44 Another Tribe and several subsequent productions included a playful, comedic solution. The piece, “GaySpeak 2000,” was presented as a commercial for a translation device for those who feel left out of conversations with friends “of the homosexual persuasion.” The audience for the imagined product was straight, putting the responsibility of the work of learning on the user. The gay men in the scene never stopped to educate the confused straight friend about the meaning of their slang words, nor did the piece claim that they should have to within their own cultural spaces as the reviewers demanded they do.45

Tribes 2000 and Tribes 2001 took a look specifically into lesbian subculture in “License

Renewal” and “Relationship Survivor.” In “License Renewal,” a woman was pulled over in her car for having “expired rainbow flags” and was asked to prove that she was a lesbian. Rather than any explicit displays of sexuality, she was asked to show Melissa Ethridge tapes and name her favorite brand of beer.46 By making music and drink preferences the required identifying documentation the piece implied that these tastes were valued as lesbian cultural capital. The officer's warnings to the driver for carrying a purse and wearing high heels assigned gender non-

42 Grossberg, Michael. “‘Tribe’ takes superficial look at diverse gay community.” Columbus Dispatch, 20 May 1991. 43 Ades, Richard. “Reality explores the trials, joys of being gay.” The Other Paper, 29 May 1991. 44 Weiss, Steve. “Backstage.” Nite & Day, 12 June 1991. 45 Another Tribe 1991 46 Tribes 2000

22 conforming presentation cultural clout as well. “Relationship Survivor” continued this trend of identifying and bolstering lesbian cultural capital as it presented a dating game-style competition in which the main challenge to contestants was to describe how they would take care of the bachelorette at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. The premise of the question assumed all of the participants to be familiar with that particular festival, placing it in the category of basic shared cultural knowledge. Further elevating the cultural capital and presumed shared knowledge of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, later in Tribes 2000, “Womyn’s/Wimmin’s/Women’s

Festival” poked fun at the over-investment in identity politics the event historically had. As two women searched for a place to sit they found that they didn’t fit into the sections reserved for multi-hyphenated identities including but not limited to “differently-abled, chem-free, smoke- free;” “vegans recovering from finding meat in their vegetarian Chinese takeout;” or “bisexuals who only sleep with men but get the lesbian discount.”47

Also satirizing the lesbian community’s sometimes extreme dedication to identity politics, Comedy of Tribes’ “Politically Correct Kitchen,” assumed its audiences to be engaged with current discourse in feminist politics. The characters on the Womyn’s Collective

Cooperative Cooking Show attempted to accomplish the seemingly simple task of making chicken fajitas. However, they ran into problems as characters objected to the use of nearly all of the ingredients for political reasons. The chicken company’s board of directors had no women, one of the chefs had vegan dietary restrictions, and some of vegetables might have been picked by exploited migrant workers. Finally, they were left with only with a single home-garden-grown avocado.48 The piece acknowledged these political issues and treated each as a legitimate concern on its own. At the same time, it highlighted the sometimes absurd lengths the feminist

47 Act Out Productions. Tribes 2000. 2000, Frank Barnhart Collection. 48 Reality Theatre. Comedy of Tribes. 1996, Frank Barnhart Collection.

23 and lesbian communities go to in order to absolutely ensure respect for all identities, circumstances, and issues at once.

Queering Popular Entertainment Forms

While most of the scenes in the Tribes performances engaged with gay and lesbian experiences and culture, one of the more unique elements of the series was the way in which it applied queer performance techniques to a variety of popular entertainment formats. Working from the formats of movie trailers, nature documentaries, televised sporting events, classic holiday tunes, and children's television programming Reality Theatre created queer scenarios where not only were the characters gay, the very relationships and rules of the forms they were employing were parodied and called into question. Through a process similar to the lesbian feminist historicization Jill Dolan describes in The Feminist Spectator as Critic, many of the scenes, particularly in the later versions of Tribes, reinscribed the traditional social arrangements of the various forms with gay and lesbian relationships.49 In these new arrangements, gay was the default while straight characters were othered, and the world depicted in the performance was always conveyed from a queer perspective.

One of the most consistent ways the Tribes series used the reinscription of popular forms with gay and lesbian social arrangements was through their engagement with the movie trailer format. From 1987 through 2000, four of the scripts included the scene, “Flaming Zombie

Queens.” In this horror movie preview-style sketch, Sheila, an unsuspecting straight woman going about her typical day found out that all of these people around her from her neighbor to her hairdresser were gay. Each person who came out to her was met with a scream of terror. The

“monsters” here were portrayed as relaxed and friendly, posing absolutely no physical threat to

49 Dolan. Feminist Spectator as Critic. 113

24

Sheila, making her over-reactions all the more absurd.50 The piece was a jab at the prevalent homophobia and cultural anxieties about the supposed danger that gay and lesbian people presented to society. As the gay and lesbian community became more integrated into the local and national mainstream, Reality Theatre adjusted their approach to the horror film sketch. In

Another Tribe's “Invasion of the Well-Meaning Straight People,” the script was flipped and it was the gay and lesbian protagonists experiencing the exaggerated terror. Through interactions with Sheila and her friends two gay and lesbian couples learned that the claims of acceptance from the straight community were conditional and often still wrought with heteronormativity.

After coming out to Sheila, a gay couple screams in horror at her remark, “Although you’re both so cute, I can’t help thinking, what a waste!” Later, a friend confided in Sheila that she was gay and immediately after professing her acceptance, Sheila accused her friend of coming on to her.

In a later interaction, Sheila introduced her husband to a lesbian couple and he greeted them with, “Now, you’re the masculine one, and you’re the feminine one, right?”. In the end all of the gay and lesbian characters scream in horror as they were approached by straight allies claiming that “They accept your lifestyle as long as you don’t flaunt it, become a teacher, or force it on other people."51 The monsters in this version of the horror flick were straight women and men who believed themselves to be allies but continued to reinforce gender norms, read gay relationships through a heterosexual lens, and implied that gays and lesbians should remain more or less closeted.

Continuing the queering film genres and the events surrounding movies, Tribes 2000 presented Oscar's-style announcements for nominations of “Best Movie” throughout the two-act show. However, the films were retitled to represent gay and lesbian relationships and culture,

50 Tribes 1987 51 Another Tribe 1991

25 completely shifting the context of the implied movie plots. For example, the 1999 supernatural horror drama, The Sixth Sense, became The Sissy Sense (He Sees Gay People). The 1997 slasher film, I Know What You Did Last Summer, dealing with serial killers and covered up accidents, became I Know Who You Did Last Summer (And It Made Me Scream), a tale of blackmail and jealous lovers. The romantic comedies, Sleepless in Seattle and Shakespeare's Taming of the

Shrew were translated into Sleeveless in Seattle and Flaming of the Shrew, shifting the premises of the stories from heterosexual comedies about love to stories about chiseled, sexy gay male heartthrobs and fantasies.52

In a similar vein, Comedy of Tribes: I'll Be Homo for the Holidays (1997) retitled and gave new lyrics to Christmas and winter holiday songs, rearranging the relationships implied in the classic tunes. In a rewrite based on “Frosty the Snowman,” Solstice, “the gender non-specific lesbian identified snowperson,” created a similar image of a person made of snow coming to life.

However, rather than a fun children's story, the cast sang of the sexual escapades of this bewildering snowperson to whom no one could assign a definite pronoun. Solstice, the snowperson remained a mysterious, suddenly animated, person-shaped body of ice to the singers, but much of the song focused more intently on the ambiguity in gender presentation of this being sleeping with multiple lesbians.53 The song's interrogation of the impossibility of categorizing this snowperson as either a man or a woman poked fun at the gender-nonconformity within the gay and lesbian community and the obsession within American culture surrounding gender roles and norms.

Tribes 2001’s “Uncle Fey’s Neighborhood” took a similar approach to adapting and reappropriating a form traditionally geared towards children. The scene borrowed thematically

52 Tribes 2000 53 Comedy of Tribes: I’ll Be Homo for the Holidays 1997

26 from the long-running television show, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. The cast consisted of a combination of humans and puppets who interacted with one another. All of the language that the character, Uncle Fey—a spin-off of Fred Rogers—used was kid-friendly and emphasized being a good neighbor, friendship, and being helpful. Underneath the seemingly innocent narration, all of the action was explicitly sexual and performed in gay and lesbian pairings between both human and puppet characters. Neighborhood friend Butchy Lou french kissed the mail woman, Miss Lipstick. Uncle Fey was determined to cure Mr. Wiggles the penis-shaped puppet of his cold and “helped” his friend by “warming him up” (rubbing the puppet's body) until he sneezed (ejaculated) everywhere.54 The comedy was based less in the spoken content of the scene than it was in the re-casting of the characters of the familiar American children's television format and context. Linguistically and visually, the story as it was explicitly told fit within the G-rated genre. The shape of the puppets and queer meanings implied by actions like

Mr. Wiggles' sneeze created comedic dissonance between the innocent language and the gay and lesbian worldview through which the production was written to be viewed.

Also dependent on the production's establishment of a queer, as opposed to heteronormative, worldview, Another Tribe’s (1991) “Gays in the Wild” flipped the othering often present in TV documentaries exploring different cultures or wildlife. Reality Theatre's spoof of National Geographic specials opened asking the questions “Lesbians and homosexuals:

What do they look like? How do they communicate? How do they behave when we’re not around?”55 The scientist's studiousness and amazement at what was presented as average conversations at a bar between gay and lesbian couples positioned him as the Other to the audience member who would have been viewing an everyday conversation. The investigator's

54 Act Out Productions. Tribes 2001. 2001, Frank Barnhart Collection. 55 Another Tribe 1991

27 analytical and specialized language set him apart from the ordinary-looking gay couple he observed, and his assumption that the audience shared his view of the couple as exotic and strange made him the butt of the joke. The piece undermined the typical heterosexual context and the role of the documentary's expert by positioning the gay and lesbian couples as the norm with whom the audience could identify and the straight man as the outsider attempting to explain the culture he didn't belong to.

Commentary on Gay and Lesbian Events and Politics

In addition to pulling material from gay and lesbian culture in general and utilizing queer performance techniques, much of the content in the Tribes series commented explicitly and often provided comedic critique on politics and current events impacting the gay and lesbian community specifically in Columbus, Ohio. Frank Barnhart described writing and performing these sections as akin to “Saturday Night Live, but all gay.”56 Like the long-running television series, the scenes in Tribes were skits no longer than a few minutes long which commented on contemporary culture and government policy. While some scenes were explicitly centered around national and local politics, others used references to current events and ongoing debates as fodder for jokes embedded in the context of unrelated scenes. Tribes interrogated many events in national politics from the implications of the Attorney General's 1986 guidance on workplace protections for people with AIDS to ongoing debates surrounding President Bill Clinton's Don't

Ask, Don't Tell policy, which regional newspapers across Ohio reported on with regularity. They also occasionally narrowed their scope to focus on events that only gay and lesbian audiences in

Columbus would recognize like controversies over the State House flying the rainbow flag during the 1999 Pride March and the city's gay men's despair in not being cast in another

Columbus theatre's production of Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion!. The theatrical

56 Barnhart. Personal interview.

28 commentary on contemporary politics and local events in Tribes was representative of Reality

Theatre's commitment to specifically engage with the gay and lesbian community in Columbus.

The pieces that centered around current politics impacting the gay and lesbian community in Columbus and around the country often inserted personal perspective into on-going debates and issues. For example, the original Tribes (1987) contained pieces responding to the intersecting issues of workplace discrimination and the AIDS crisis. Presented as back to back pieces, “Wolves on the Edge” and “Watch Me Burn” offered a poetic indictment of a state and country which refused to give protection to gay men and lesbians in employment and those affected by AIDS. “Wolves on the Edge” described how being forced to remain closeted at work put excess pressure on people and discouraged interpersonal connection between members of the gay and lesbian community in the lines, “Call it hell-at-work/living and breathing eight hours a day/with the secret on your back” and “think of all the gay wolves at work/who dare not to talk to one another.”57 The fear and secrecy described in the poem resonated with major concerns within Columbus' gay and lesbian community as is demonstrated by a 1985 interview Stonewall

Union's executive director, Mark Walton gave to the Columbus Dispatch. Walton said,

“Discrimination in employment remains one of the top issues on the gay rights agenda; many homosexuals still fear the loss of jobs if their sexual orientation is learned by employers.” In

1984, the Columbus City Council rejected Stonewall Union activists’ plea to pass an ordinance banning discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation.58 In reference to the damage that a hostile society and work environment has done to gays and lesbians the poem's language paints violent imagery of wolves who are burned, beaten, and sliced.59

57 Tribes 1987 58 Curtin, Michael. “New Gay Leader Sees A Lot of Work Ahead.” Columbus Dispatch, 4 Aug. 1985. 59 Tribes 1987

29

The scene immediately following, “Watch Me Burn,” echoes similar imagery of burning, with the titular line as its refrain, to represent the ideologically-driven violence enacted against gay men. The poem was a direct response to the 1986 ruling from the U.S. Justice Department which declared that people diagnosed with AIDS would not be included for protection under

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. The decision meant that the gay community was doubly in danger of workplace discrimination. The Akron Beacon Journal reported that, according to the

Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, employers were permitted to dismiss a person living with AIDS “merely by voicing fear that the disease will spread in the workplace without violating the law.”60 “Watch Me Burn” called out the government for ruling on the basis of fear.

The poem connected the idea of protecting oneself from the plague of AIDS to superstitions in the lines, “from the heart of plague/comes smoke/they are preparing again/to protect themselves/from rats and bats and black cats/from queers who spread disease.” As the performance continued, the poem repeated this criticism that straight people must be protected from gay men in the last stanza: “The biggest fear of/civil liberties committees is/that an innocent non-gay/might burn to the assumption/faggots are for/burning anyway.” This stanza echoed the final lines of “Wolves on the Edge”: “And the judge said fine/and the jury said fine/And all God’s preachers said fine/while the wolf died to attest to their sin.”61 While both pieces criticized the government for protecting straight people at the cost of gay lives, “Wolves on the Edge,” expanded its scope to highlight a wider cultural problem of homophobia by pointing to the jury, or the general public, and preachers.

Later versions of Tribes took a more comedic approach to ongoing political disputes but were no less likely to critique policies impacting the gay and lesbian community. Commenting

60 “State Laws Viewed as Recourse to AIDS Ruling.” Akron Beacon Journal, 24 June 1986. 61 Tribes 1987

30 on the continuous debate surrounding President Bill Clinton's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, which sparked controversy when it was introduced in 1993, “Don't Ask, Don't Tell Toy Factory” added a satirical voice to the second act of Tribes 2000. Although the piece tackled a seven-year- old policy, the issue remained in the national conversation and news about its impact frequently circulated Ohio publications. The 1998 Supreme Court's rejection of former Navy aviator, Tracy

Thorne's challenge to the policy after he was discharged for coming out in an interview with

Nightline;62 the Pentagon's implementation of mandatory anti-harassment training for all troops;63 and the 2000 presidential primaries kept Don't Ask, Don’t Tell at the forefront of public conversation.64 Inspiring the toy factory-themed scene, the Boy Scouts of America made the news by adopting their own policy similar to Don't Ask, Don't Tell. In May of 2000, one month before Tribes 2000 opened,65 the Supreme Court was in the process of ruling whether or not the

Boy Scouts could exclude gay scouts and troop leaders in states with civil rights laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. 66

Combining the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Controversy and the Boy Scouts of America's concerns about homosexual influence on young boys, Tribes placed Barbie and G.I. Joe under the rules of the policy. The conversation between the doll and (as the character specified) action figure revealed that they were both frustrated by the ways in which they were being forced to modify their appearances and behavior. Barbie complained that she had been instructed to grow

62 Carelli, Richard. “Military’s Policy on Gays Stays Intact.” Associated Press, reprinted in The Plain Dealer-Cleveland, 20 Oct. 1998. 63 “Pentagon Revises Guidelines on Gays Anti-Harassment Rules Mandatory for All Troops, Beginning in Boot Camp.” Akron Beacon Journal. 14 August 1999. 64 Resnick, Eric. “Don’t Ask Becomes an Issue in Primary Campaign.” Gay People’s Chronicle, 14 Jan. 2000. 65 Tribes 2000 ran from June 2-23, 2000. Grossberg, Michael. “In Seventh Edition, Popular ‘Tribes’ Given a Makeover.” Columbus Dispatch, 1 June 2000. 66 Resnick, Eric. “Supreme Court to Rule if Scouts Must Obey Rights Laws.” Gay People’s Chronicle, 5 May 2000.

31 her hair out, was given huge “hooters,” and was squeezed into bridal gowns and cocktail dresses.

G.I. Joe was upset that his only clothing options were tan and green army fatigues, which were not his colors, and that he had to distance himself from his love interest, Drag Queen Ken.

However, since Midge—Barbie’s girlfriend—had been discounted and then taken off the shelf, they felt they needed to comply with the toy factory's repressive policies.67 Midge's situation mirrored that of the 1,145 servicemen and women who were discharged in 1998 according to a report from the Pentagon.68

The narrative that G.I. Joe and Barbie presented was that even these iconic boys’ and girls’ toys were not naturally drawn to hypermasculine and hyperfeminine gender roles. Rather, they performed these roles begrudgingly in order to avoid anyone questioning their sexual orientation, reflecting the hostile anti-gay atmosphere that had grown out of Don't Ask, Don't

Tell. A 1999 article printed in the Akron Beacon Journal reported that “gay rights and civil rights groups say hostilities have risen since the policy's adoption, and that soldiers who complain about being harassed are often subjected to questions about their own sexuality.”69 Eric Resnick of Ohio's Gay People's Chronicle emphasized that the Inspector General's survey of 72,000 troops found that 37 percent of members of the armed forces either directly experienced or witnessed anti-gay harassment and 85 percent believed the military tolerated this kind of behavior. In an interview with Resnick, Michelle Benecke, the co-director of a Don't Ask, Don't

Tell watchdog group, said, “It's flawed because the gays and lesbians—those affected by the harassment—are still not able to self-identify. One inspector general admitted that he would see

67 Tribes 2000. 68 “Pentagon Revises Guidelines.” Akron Beacon Journal. 69 “Pentagon Revises Guidelines.” Akron Beacon Journal.

32 to the discharge of anyone identified as homosexual by the surveys.”70 Given that risk, it is likely that the amount of harassment actually experienced was under-reported. Service members, like

Barbie and G.I. Joe in the Tribes scene, would risk losing their position if they complained.

If Barbie and G.I. Joe, who represented the epitome of representations of traditional femininity and masculinity presented to American children, struggled to conform well enough to gender norms to keep themselves safe, the scene implied that any sign of gender nonconformity or queerness was grounds to interrogate one’s sexual orientation. At the same time, Barbie emphasized the lengths she had to go to—throwing up to fit into tiny dressed—because of the toy factory’s requirement that she keep her sexuality under wraps even though it had never previously been a secret. She exclaimed, “Who’s to ask? What’s to tell? Everyone knows anyway. I’m tired of living this lie,” echoing a common feeling among members of the gay community and their allies.71 In response to her son’s discharge from the Navy, Pat Thorne argued, “Everybody knows there are gays in the military. There have always been gays in the military and there always will be gays in the military because gays are a part of our civilization.”72 Ultimately, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Toy Factory” highlighted the absurdity of the forced secrecy and strict reinforcement of traditional gender roles encouraged by Clinton’s policy.

A Focus on the Local

While some of the Tribes pieces engaging with current events spoke to issues circulating the news in Ohio and across the United States, many of Reality Theatre’s scenes dealt specifically with happenings in Columbus. These pieces, in particular, grounded the Tribes series

70 Resnick, Eric. “Pentagon Report Finds Widespread Harassment in the Military.” Gay People’s Chronicle, 31 May 2000. 71 Tribes 2000 72 Carelli. “Military’s Policy on Gays Stays Intact.”

33 in community-based theatre, as they directly reflected the news coming out of the gay and lesbian community in their city. The premises of several scenes depended on the audience's shared knowledge of their community and Columbus news for their comedy to work. Just as often, scenes set outside of the Ohio city had references embedded into them, acknowledging their contemporary audience and locality. The specific focus on Columbus combats what Judith

Halberstam calls metronormativity by breaking the typical binaries within which American culture tells stories about gay lives: urban/rural, coastal/middle America, queer- inclusive/heteronormative. Halberstam outlines the dominant narrative connecting queerness and geography as small-town or otherwise non-metropolitan gay men and lesbians live lonely repressed lives in homophobic places and can find happiness and acceptance by escaping to major cultural centers. By constantly reinforcing the connection between queerness and the metropolitan scholarship, art, and literature work to make gay men and lesbians outside of the narrow framework presented by metronormativity invisible.73 Through their sketches about gay and lesbian people and celebration of their culture as it existed in Columbus, Ohio, Reality

Theatre disrupted the dominant narrative in both queer and straight discourse about LGBTQ lives that queerness only exists in major coastal metropolises like New York City and San

Francisco and that gay men and lesbians living outside of those areas must either escape or remain closeted or repressed. Reality Theatre’s engagement with the gay and lesbian community in their Midwestern city and the insertion of their local culture into Tribes challenged metronormative standards. In doing so, the Tribes series placed a higher value on the community

73 Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. NYU Press, 2005.

34 that could be cultivated in and around the theater rather than perpetuating the prevailing ideas that gays and lesbians must escape to queer Meccas on the coasts to find “their people.”

One practice that emphasized Reality Theatre's focus on the Columbus community was their creation of characters who appeared across multiple productions. The recurring characters placed in new situations in each updated version of the script demonstrated the company's ongoing relationships with their audience. The women of “Clintonville 43202,”—a lesbian soap opera based on Columbus’ Clintonville neighborhood which, according to Barnhart and

Shepherd, had the “largest population of lesbians per capita than any other location in the United

States”—appeared in Comedy of Tribes (1996), Comedy of Tribes: I'll be Homo for the Holidays

(1997),74 Tribes 2000, and Tribes 2001. Each “Clintonville 43202” sketch captured the current moment in Columbus' lesbian community. In 1996, the love triangles and the blown up SUV were based on actual events making a buzz around town, according to Frank Barnhart.75 In 2001, the run of Tribes and the airing of the last episode of Xena Warrior Princess were happening concurrently. The women at their Xena watch party on stage represented many other gatherings across the country. The sketch gave a nod to the ending of an era for the television show claimed by the lesbian subculture. Actress Lucy Lawless told Entertainment Weekly, “That friendship between Xena and Gabrielle transmitted some message of self-worth, deservedness, and honor to people who felt very marginalized, so it had a lot of resonance in the gay community. I get a lot of people coming out to me, thanking me for what I did.”76 Reviving the same set of characters

74 The “Clintonville 43202” sketch in I’ll Be Homo for the Holidays is not included in the annotated breakdown of the Tribes scripts in Appendix B. Frank Barnhart claims the announcement in the Christmas-themed performance of “43202” was “Clintonville 43202, where they put up the tree and go down on the bush.” 75 Barnhart. Personal Interview. 76 Abrams, Natalie. “Xena Warrior Princess: An Oral Herstory.” Entertainment Weekly, 17 June 2016.

35 from production to production to mark significant events in the Columbus community spoke to the popularity of those characters among audiences.

Although he never directly mirrored the Columbus gay and lesbian community the way that “Clintonville 43202” did, Meri Weather Fopsalot Colonial Dandy often revealed Reality

Theatre's relationship with their Columbus audience. Fopsalot’s adventures took place in colonial America, and he flirted with, advised, and befriended key historical figures such as

Francis Scott Key, Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, Molly Pitcher, and Betsy Ross. Often in the sketches there were jokes and references to Columbus events that would only be recognizable to an audience made up of members of the city's gay and lesbian community. For example, in

Tribes 2000, Fopsalot helped Betsy Ross come up with the design for the American flag, the first draft of which was a rainbow flag. He declared that one day a rainbow flag would fly on statehouse lawns across the nation, but for the time being Betsy's first attempt would be “perfect for a specific cultural group, but she needs something to represent all Americans.”77 Fopsalot's proclamation would have resonated with Columbus audiences because the year before Stonewall

Union was given approval to fly the rainbow flag at the Ohio Statehouse during the Annual Pride

March. As the parade passed the capitol, an anti-gay protester climbed the pole and burned the flag. Barnhart explained, “It became a really big deal, and they were discussing if they were ever going to allow flags of different events and things to fly.”78 The Capitol Square Review and

Advisory Board debated which groups should be allowed to fly their flags at the Statehouse and drafted an official policy for flag requests.79 The protester, Charles Spingola, was arrested and

77 Tribes 2000 78 Barnhart. Personal interview. 79 Mayhood, Kevin. “Capitol Clash Over Flag Raises Questions.” Columbus Dispatch, 29 June 1999.

36 the trial and appeals dragged out until June of 2001.80 With the on-going controversy over the politics of the placement of flags in the news and Columbus gay and lesbian community, even a subtle reference would have caught a Tribes audience’s attention.

One-liners referencing events in Columbus the topic of another Meri Weather Fopsalot sketch in Tribes 2001. Although it did not seem to make it into the headlines of local publications, two separate sketches of “Gay Network News” indicated that there was a significant amount of excitement in the gay and lesbian community about a new “beer truck” that would be at the Gay Pride Festival. Following these two enthusiastic reports, the Colonial Dandy scene opened with Fopsalot and Molly Pitcher who had returned to her job as a waitress after the

Revolutionary War. Fopsalot spent half of the scene convincing Pitcher that he could make her job easier by constructing an “ale cart,” which he lamented would probably later be called a

“beer truck.”81 The scene connected with the Columbus gay and lesbian audience in two ways: first, with the nod to the buzz around the Pride beer truck and second, by continuing the running joke that Meri Weather Fopsalot was somehow responsible for major events in American history.

His connection to both the pride flag and the beer truck also made him into a fictional forefather of Columbus’ gay and lesbian history.

While most of the content that Reality Theatre produced in the Tribes series would have been directly relevant to the gay and lesbian community in Columbus, occasionally their sketches were even more specific to the gay members of the theatre community in the city. As part of their 1996 season, CATCO, another professional theatre company in Columbus, put on

80 “City of Columbus v. Spingola.” CaseMine, Gauge Data Solutions,19 Jun, 2001, Accessed 23 March 2018.

81 Tribes 2001

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Terrence McNally's Broadway hit, Love! Valour! Compassion!.82 According to Frank Barnhart, nearly every gay actor in Columbus auditioned, but CATCO selected an almost entirely straight cast to play all gay characters.83 In response, Reality Theatre included a piece called “Love,

Valor, Compulsion” in Comedy of Tribes. The scene opened on an Alcoholics Anonymous-style support group for gay men who had never been cast in Love! Valour! Compassion!. Although the building absurdity of the compulsive auditioning—with one member of the group admitting to doing so hundreds of times and another announcing that he planned to fly all the way to Tel Aviv for a production84—could have entertained the entire audience, the scene was clearly written for those who were aware that the actors onstage had actually not been cast in CATCO's show and perhaps had faced a similar situation themselves.

Through their Tribes series Reality Theatre built an ongoing relationship with and representation of and for Columbus' gay and lesbian community. Drawing from their contemporary gay and lesbian culture and queer performance techniques, they were able to create a space that privileged a queer worldview in ways that could not be found elsewhere in popular entertainment at the time. Their engagement with national politics and Columbus current events demonstrated their responsiveness to the current moment and experience of their community. Ultimately, it was the combination of honest representation of gay and lesbian experience, the comedic queering of pop culture, and the direct connections between the content of the performances and the people in the audience that kept people coming back and kept

Reality Theatre restaging increasingly community-engaged renditions of Tribes periodically throughout its fourteen years.

82 Grossberg, Michael. “CATCO Outlines Plans for Season.” Columbus Dispatch, 17 Jan. 1996. 83 Barnhart. Personal interview. 84 Comedy of Tribes 1996

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Chapter 3: Reality Theatre as a Gay and Lesbian Communal Space

Reality Theatre’s engagement with Columbus’ gay and lesbian community through

Tribes helped them build a consistent audience base. Over time the company’s work increasingly catered to gay and lesbian perspectives and became specifically rooted in Columbus, Ohio.

However, they did not begin as a gay and lesbian theatre company. In fact, Reality Theatre never self-identified explicitly as a gay and lesbian theatre company. Their original purpose, according to their mission statement was to be “a professional experimental theatre primarily dedicated to the performance of original scripts by Columbus and Ohio playwrights and off-Broadway style theatre.”85 However, as they progressed and continued to work in Columbus theatre, the local gay and lesbian community quickly became their most faithful and consistent audience, ultimately guiding the kind of work that they would produce. Jan Cohen-Cruz writes that in in the field of community-based performance it is most typical for practitioners to initially draw inspiration for their work from the standpoint of addressing a specific issue within a community.86 It seems that in the case of Reality Theatre, the impulse to put on gay and lesbian plays as a major part of their repertoire, was guided by their audiences. Reality Theatre was largely dependent on Columbus' gay and lesbian community for their survival as a company.

Rather than reacting directly against a predominantly straight theatre scene in their city, they were able to provide not only content, but a space which was responsive to the existing gay and lesbian population. Ultimately, Reality Theatre's converted warehouse black box became a communal space—I would argue—with, rather than for, gay men and lesbians in Columbus.

85 Reality Theatre Application for Greater Columbus Arts Council Project Grant. 31 Aug. 1989. Reality Theatre Collection. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, The Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, Ohio. 86 Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States. Rutgers University Press, 2005, p. 2.

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After almost two complete seasons of producing company-created work and relatively unknown experimental theatre, Reality saw their first major box office success with their first play about gay men and lesbians, Tribes, which premiered on May 14, 1987. The final show of their second season played to sold out houses. As Frank Barnhart recounted, “We couldn't sell tickets fast enough, and that was the first show we'd ever had like that. That was when we realized that, oh, there's actually an audience. There's actually a market for this.”87 In the director's note in the program for the 1989 revival of Tribes, Barnhart, recounting the conversation at Mellman's bar where he first suggested the company try writing a show about gay people, wrote, “Little did I know that at that very moment an idea was planted that would go on to become TRT’s most talked about production and break box office records.”88 Part of

Barnhart's surprise that a viable audience and market existed for gay and lesbian work stemmed from the historical context in which they were working. At the height of the AIDS crisis, anti- gay sentiment was particularly high, and being “out” carried significant risk. In his director's note he wrote about the first production of Tribes, “Reality was hailed by audiences and critics alike for our willingness to tackle such a controversial topic and to present it with such integrity and compassion.”89 Even in his less-than-supportive review, “‘Tribes’ Explores Gay Life but isn’t a Gay Theatre Evening,” where he described the production as “yet another failed experiment in heavy-handed message theatre,” Michael Grossberg of the Columbus Dispatch wrote, “One must applaud the city’s only experimental theatre group for tackling an unpopular subject.”90

87 Barnhart, Frank and Dee Shepherd. Personal Interview. 31 January 2018. 88 Barnhart, Frank. “Directors Notes.” Tribes Program. 1989. Reality Theatre Collection. 89 Barnhart, Frank. “Directors Notes.” 90 Grossberg, Michael. “’Tribes’ explores gay life, but it isn’t a gay theatre evening.” Columbus Dispatch, 15 May 1987.

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By the second staging of Tribes in 1989, the first performance had generated enough conversation and excitement among the gay and lesbian population that Reality predicted before the show even opened that they would need to add performances in order to meet the audience demand. By their company meeting in March, they were already planning to continue performing Tribes beyond the end of their scheduled run in July.91 Even major theatrical publications like Backstage noted the sudden increase in the number of people in the audience. In his review of the 1989 Tribes, Chris Jones wrote, “It was truly wonderful to see this usually sparsely-populated theatre bursting at the seams, with the gay community out in force.”92 In

1990, Frank Barnhart reported that 75 percent of Reality Theatre’s audience was comprised of members of the gay and lesbian community who supported the company throughout the season

“and not just during productions about homosexual concern.” 93

Reality Theatre as a Gay Community Space

Part of the appeal of Reality Theatre and the Tribes series was that they provided a space for the gay men and lesbians to gather and be affirmed within the context of a supportive community they were unlikely to find often in Columbus in the mid-1980s. Tim Miller and

David Román propose that community-based theatre, like Tribes, provides audiences with the opportunity to enact community. When artists and spectators with shared identities are in alliance together the theatrical space allows for a “communal ritual enabling members of a community to gather and perform the necessary constitutive rehearsal of identity.” For Miller and Román the ongoing act of coming out and sexual identity formation are inherently performative rituals of participating in and being the subject of acts of witnessing. These acts of witnessing apply to

91Company Meeting. Meeting Minutes. 2 March 1989. Reality Theatre Collection. 92Jones, Chris. Backstage. Nite & Day, June 1989. 93 Application for Greater Columbus Arts Council Community Arts Fund. 1990. Reality Theatre Collection.

41 both artists and their audiences, placing equal importance on the community formed among audience members as the theatrical work on stage. Within the queer community-based theatre space queer, community, and theatre can all coexist without hierarchy or competition.94

In the Tribes series Reality Theatre built queer community through intentional exclusion of heterocentric practices within their theatrical space, similar to the way in which John Fletcher describes the methods of Cornerstone Theatre and Tim Miller’s performances. Fletcher defines the process of creating an “us” as developing a group of strangers into a community through the shared experience of a performance event. In the case of Tribes, the “us” that is intended to be cultivated is assumed to belong to the local gay and lesbian community. Meanwhile, the “them” created in contrast is the heterosexual majority, flipping the typical heteronormative structure of public settings which erase queer identities. Fletcher says of the heterosexual population in relation to Miller’s work, “This ‘them’ is always already excluded from being able to participate in the ‘us’ of Miller’s community; their exclusion is in fact essential to the functioning of the utopian performative.”95 This “us” created within the Tribes performances could create an alternative “space apart” where a gay and lesbian worldview was privileged and audiences could participate in collective meaning-making within the context of that linguistic and communal space. To borrow Jill Dolan’s description of the utopian performative moment, in the context of the performances of Tribes, members of Columbus’ gay and lesbian community could enter the theatre and expect the “suspension or erasure of differences in the name of the shared participation in the space apart.”96

94 Miller, Tim and David Román. “Preaching to the Converted.” Theatre Journal, Vol. 47, No. 2, 1995, pp. 169-188. 95 Fletcher, John. “Identity and Agonism: Tim Miller, Cornerstone, and the Politics of Community-Based Theatre.” Theatre Topics, vol. 13, no. 2, 2003, p. 194. 96 Dolan qtd. in Fletcher 194-195.

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Reality Theatre’s success with the first staging of Tribes seems to have come from members of the gay and lesbian population of Columbus seeking community in the throes of the

AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s. According to Barnhart and Shepherd, well into the 1990s, there were very few public spaces dedicated to gay and lesbian people in the city apart from the bars.97

As a result, there was little variety in the kinds of activities available to gay men and lesbians which would allow them to be open about their identities without jeopardizing their safety. In a

1985 interview on the impact of AIDS on the city a spokesman from Columbus’ Metropolitan

Community Church noted the changing trends in the number of gay men attending services, saying that “We have a lot more activity now. People are very definitely looking for alternatives to the bars.”98 Stonewall Union’s calendar listed multiple gay and lesbian-inclusive church services, support groups for people with AIDS, and chemical-free, family friendly gatherings around the city.99 For Reality Theatre part of the draw of pursuing more gay and lesbian work was that they knew that people were searching for alternative forms of entertainment. By providing an affirming space dedicated to producing gay and lesbian theatre, they could address needs that the bars could not necessarily meet for people. In describing why gay and lesbian audiences were particularly attracted to Reality Theatre Barnhart explained,

“In some ways it was sort of a safe environment for them because if their friends asked

them the next day ‘what did you do last night,’ they could say I went to the theater, as

opposed to I went to a gay bar, I went to a bar. But you would see couples come and

you’d be performing plays and there would be same sex couples out there holding hands

or have their arms around each other because it was a place that they could do that.”100

97 Barnhart and Shepherd. Personal Interview. 98 Curtin, Michael. “New Gay Leader Sees A Lot of Work Ahead.” Columbus Dispatch, 4 Aug. 1985. 99 Stonewall Union News, June 1989. Reality Theatre Collection. 100 Barnhart. Personal Interview.

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The theater provided a space where it was perfectly acceptable to be openly gay without negative social consequences. Unlike the gay bars, theatre could offer a widely culturally acceptable activity and place to gather as a community. Without the stigma that the bars carried, the theater could relieve the pressure of secrecy and threat of potentially outing oneself as gay or lesbian simply by their presence in the space. At the same time, the theater offered a supportive space— like Miller and Román describe—where the artists and audiences could bear witness to one another and claim their shared identities.101 There, spectators were invited to participate in the

“space apart” where gay and lesbian identities and experiences were not only acknowledged and valued, they were celebrated.102

That space and that sense of safety it created were particularly important, considering the climate surrounding censorship of the arts in the wake of the NEA Four controversy of the early

1990s and the frequent police raids of gay bars in the state of Ohio. However, that did not mean that the fear of being raided could easily disappear, as is illustrated by an anecdote that Shepherd and Barnhart recounted in their interview. During their run of a double bill of T-Shirts and Well of Horniness, they received a few threatening phone calls, so they hired an off-duty police officer to sit in the audience. Barnhart recalled,

“There was a pre-recorded message that Kathleen Turner had done that the NEA had sent

to theatre companies all over the country asking them to play it before the show started. It

was all about the art police and all these sorts of things, and so before the show, all the

lights would dim to half, we would play this very ominous thing and then the show would

101 Miller and Román 180. 102 Dolan. Performing Utopia, 455-457.

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start. It was just a way to make the audience aware, and so the audience thought that the

police officer was there to raid us!”103

Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, and John Fleck’s National Endowment for the Arts grants had been revoked because of their discussions of homosexuality violated Senator Jesse Helms’ decency clause.104 A production of Equus in Cincinnati had recently been shut down by the police citing the boy’s nudity on stage as indecent, so the conversation about censorship and police in the theater was at the forefront of the minds of members of the gay and lesbian community and the

Ohio theatre community. Shepherd described the mood in the black box as the police officer they had hired took his seat in the front row: “You could just feel this wave over the audience. The people in the audience are going ‘...oh my god...is this? This is just like Cincinnati,’” Barnhart added, “the moment that I took off my clothes, all 90 people in the theatre, actually, they were watching me, they were watching the police officer to see what his reaction was.”105 Despite the impossibility of maintaining an uncompromised sense of safety, John Fletcher writes that performance which aligns political activism with queer identity encourages the impulse for gay and lesbian audiences to act and react as a community whether in defense—as the audience here seemed on the edge of their seats and ready for—in defiance, in celebration, or in mourning. 106

Within the cultural context of the AIDS crisis in which they were working, Reality

Theatre provided a space for community mourning, recognition of grief, and support. Barnhart said of Reality’s work dealing with HIV and AIDS, “I think for our time period in the ‘90s and

103 Barnhart. Personal interview. 104 Helms’ decency clause forbids the National Endowment of the Arts from providing federal funding to works which may ''promote, disseminate or produce obscene or indecent materials . . . or material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or nonreligion.'' Wicker, Tom. “In the Nation; Art and Indecency.” New York Times, 28 July 1989. 105 Shepherd. Personal interview. 106 Fletcher 190

45 what was going on, it was lending a voice—I don’t mean to make it sound more grand than it was—to people who didn’t have one…” The physical space of the theater itself had a hand in producing the effect of community grieving and acknowledgement of what people were struggling through at the time. Barnhart continued,

“I can remember moments that stand out to me where we would be doing some of these

shows and there would be something particularly dramatic with a character who might

have AIDS would die, and you would hear the occasional person sobbing in the audience

because it was just so close. I mean, it was a tiny theater; it was one of those where if

you’re in the front row, you could do this [reaches out his hand] and touch the actors.

You were so close to what was going on physically but then emotionally too, and

people’s nerves were just very raw at that time because it was all new.”107

The closeness of the actors and the audience in the small theatre perhaps could draw out strong emotions the way that Barnhart described and Shepherd echoed, emphasizing that, “You reached a point where probably everyone who’s in the audience has been touched by this disease in one way or another, and so it just hit very close to home for people.”108 However, that same closeness within the safe and affirming space created in the theater likely further encouraged a sense of community. In a 90-seat theater it would have been impossible to forget the presence of the rest of the audience or to entirely disappear in the crowd. Since that audience was largely made up of people from the community most impacted by the AIDS crisis, Reality Theatre’s house, lobby, and stage could provide a place to gather, bear witness to one another’s pain and loss, and grieve together.

107 Barnhart. Personal Interview. 108 Shepherd. Personal interview.

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Similar to the way the bars had become hubs of gay and lesbian-specific cultural information, Reality Theatre adapted part of their space to serve, for all intents and purposes, as an informal community resource directory. In addition to a place to sell tickets, Reality Theatre’s lobby became a place where one could get information about the services available to gay men and lesbians all around Columbus. They kept a caddy stocked with every pamphlet for AIDS- related care, affirmative mental health professionals, and gay-friendly businesses in the entire city and a bowl of condoms.109 Knowing that it was a place that people gathered, the company could work with local advocacy and health organizations in order to ensure that reliable information could spread through the community.

According to Shepherd and Barnhart, testimony from individual audience members about what Reality Theatre meant to them as gay men and lesbians often reached them years after they had seen shows. Barnhart admitted,

“I didn’t really have any sort of sense of the impact. This was just a few years ago—Dee

and I were at Pride because I did the Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival for about six years

and I had a booth down at Gay Pride, and Dee was down there helping me, and we were

handing out flyers. There was an article—so this would’ve been in maybe 2006—it was

an article in the Dispatch that Michael Grossberg had written that was about gay theatre

history in Columbus, and he had mentioned Reality Theatre. The amount of people at

Pride who came up to us and who had seen the article and were talking about how much

they missed Reality Theatre and what it meant to them when that was there...” 110

109Shepherd. Personal interview. 110 Barnhart. Personal interview. Having searched the Columbus Dispatch archive, it remains unclear which article Barnhart is talking about. It is possible that this article was published in a different year, by another author, or in a different newspaper.

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They recounted stories of other audience members who approached them years after the shows they had seen had closed to tell the directors about how they felt watching Reality Theatre. The company had inspired multiple people to come out after seeing their work. Some audience members drove from cities and towns across Ohio to come to the productions. One young man recalled, “I was seventeen years old and I was driving, I would drive to Columbus to see shows at Reality Theatre.” One older gentleman frequently took the Greyhound bus service from

Marion, Ohio to Columbus to see Reality’s shows. He always took the hour and a half trip into the city alone, but he kept returning time and time again.111 These were the kinds of consistent and loyal audiences that kept Reality Theatre’s doors open and allowed them to continue producing new work for seventeen years.

The company often faced criticism from newspaper reviewers from the Columbus

Dispatch and The Other Paper for alienating straight members of the audience and for telling too many inside jokes in their work. In a conversation about this very topic with Columbus Dispatch theatre critic, Michael Grossberg, Dee Shepherd recalled that she explained,

“Straight people come to Tribes, but I’m not doing Tribes for them. I’m just not. I said, I

can’t say that about any other show, gay or straight, and I said that we do have straight

people that come because I know them. I know they’re straight, and they come to our

shows, and they like them and appreciate them. I said, I’m not doing Tribes for the

straight community. They can come and enjoy it. I’m not doing Tribes for you, Michael.

I’m doing it for the gay community. This is our way of thanking the gay community. So I

don’t care if you like it or not.”112

111 Barnhart. Personal Interview. 112 Shepherd. Personal Interview.

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The very act that Shepherd defended in the face of criticism was the one that Fletcher writes is most vital to community formation around the utopian performative. To imagine a world which makes the gay and lesbian community the “us” requires that the straight community be the

“them.”113 The activist impulse behind Tribes and the intervention into the theatre community in

Columbus was to create a space where gay and lesbian perspectives were valued and affirmed in their own right. Furthermore, the many renditions of Tribes, for Reality Theatre, were an act of gratitude toward the community that offered them support in the work that they were creating.

That sense of gratitude and an awareness of their role as part of the gay and lesbian community was reflected in many of the company’s choices of which shows to produce and the genre of content they created on their own. As a theater they were responsive to the gay and lesbian community as much as they were their own needs as artists. This consideration aligns with the with Cohen-Cruz’s explanation of community-based performance where “the intended audience is akin to and is as important as those by whom [the work] is shaped.”114 According to Barnhart,

Reality’s mission statement reflected that community-inspired drive as one of its key components was “dedication to providing gay and lesbian theatre.”115 This exact wording does not appear in Reality Theatre’s mission statements, but by 1992 “the presentation of gay and lesbian theatre,” was consistently included in Barnhart’s descriptions of the company’s goals in grant applications.116 However, the choice of the word “providing” as opposed to “producing” or

“creating,” I believe, indicates the way that he, as the producing director, thought about and approached the work. Even if they did not officially identify as “providers of gay and lesbian

113 Fletcher 194 114 Cohen-Cruz 2 115 Barnhart. Personal Interview. 116 Application for Organizations, Ohio Arts Council. 29 Jan. 1992, Reality Theatre Collection

49 theatre” to the organizations from whom they received funding, they envisioned themselves as an organization in service to that community.

Cultivating Community with Comedy

Throughout Tribes, and particularly in response to audience demand in later performances, humor played a large role in both the community formation through shared references and creating a sense of subcultural resistance among the gay and lesbian community which came to support the shows. In Women’s Comedic Art as Social Revolution, Dominica

Radulescu defines parameters for feminist comedy which provide a useful lens for examining the ways in which Reality Theatre was using humor to develop community. Feminist comedy as

Radulescu sees it includes common elements such as the exploding of gender stereotypes and a critical eye to the oppression of women in society. She adds that feminist humor is subversive in the way that it “produces a laughter of recognition which is comforting for women and has the potential of being uncomfortable for men, and it has a profoundly carnivalesque dimension in its displacing of hierarchies and mixing of aesthetic categories.”117 Reality Theatre’s inversion of the hierarchy which oppressed members of the gay and lesbian community provided a linguistic, visual, and communal space in which those marginalized voices were repositioned at the top.

The mainstream press’ frequent complaints that Tribes excluded straight audiences were not invalid; the exclusion of heteronormative perspectives in favor of queer ones was an intentional community building strategy. The in-group jokes, twisting of popular culture and current events, and flipped social structures contributed to the building of community through a shared laughter of recognition. Through humor, the members of the audience could identify problems they faced

117 Radulescu, Dominica. Women’s Comedic Art as Social Revolution. McFarland & Company Inc., 2014, pp. 9-14.

50 collectively and have an opportunity to share the experience of being able to laugh at many of those situations turned ridiculous.

Radulescue’s definition of feminist theatre does not entirely translate to Reality Theatre’s strategies of subcultural resistance through comedy. The main complication is presented in their use of camp. Rather than “exploding gender stereotypes,” the camp style often represents a more ambivalent relationship to dominant gender structures. Camp allows for an exploration of normative gender performance and “passing’ in cross-gendered acts as well as a subversion and critique of heteronormative structures.118 According to Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp," the comedic style is an artistic and performative sensibility that converts the serious into frivolous, suggests a comic vision of the world. It is primarily characterized by its love of exaggeration and extravagance, the glorification of the “instant character,” and a special attention to double meanings and artifice.119 In his essay, “Resurrecting Camp,” John M. Wolf describes the connection between queerness, camp, and community, proposing the following definition:

“Camp is a queer sense-making practice that subverts dominant gender norms and heteronormative practices and institutions.” Wolf clarifies that for him the word “queer” in this context represents persons, bodies, audiences, communities, and those brought together under an affirmation of their same-sex desires. He draws connections between the queer performance style and larger societal structures in quoting Esther Newton, who claims that camp provides alternative frameworks which “pertain primarily to gender and sexuality, relying specifically on humor, incongruity, and theatricality to reconfigure hegemonic, dominant, preferred readings of

118 John Wolf references Brett Framer’s (Spectacular Passions) exploration of the queer community’s ambivalence to normative gender structures as it is represented through camp performance. Wolf, John M. “Resurrecting Camp: Rethinking the Queer Sensibility.” Communication, Culture, and Critique, vol. 6, 2013, pp. 284-297. 119 Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Routledge, 1966, pp. 275-292.

51 the text.” Newton describes camp humor as “a system of laughing at one's incongruous position instead of crying.”120 In summary, Wolf concludes that camp is a form of queer resistance and a survival mechanism within a society that strictly enforces and polices the systems surrounding gender and sexuality.121

Drawing from Sontag and Wolf's descriptions of camp as a practice, I argue that Reality

Theatre's frequent employment of the style worked to cultivate a specific comedic language among their gay and lesbian audiences in which they could engage with social and political issues impacting the local community. Reviews from three of the company’s most popular shows: Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Psycho Beach Party and Holly Hughes’

Well of Horniness, reveal that Reality’s camp—in keeping with Busch and Hughes’ style— emphasized gender performance and cross-dressing. One reviewer, Dane Benson called Reality's

August 1990 performance of Vampires, “a campy comedy of cross-dressing and catchy lines performed in a revue format in the minuscule RT.” Matching up with Sontag's description of camp as the love of exaggeration, particularly of sexual characteristics, Benson described the actors as “endowing their roles with mega amounts of hyperbole and burlesque.”122 Dennis

Thompson's review revealed that the 1990 production of Vampires specifically casted men in drag who imitated traditional femininity, saying of the lead actors, “All three expertly captured the physical mannerisms of the opposite sex.”123 Jay Weitz of the Columbus Dispatch further emphasized the gender play in Vampires, warning audiences that “If you find gender bending

120 Newton, Esther. qtd in Wolf 285 121 Wolf 284-286 122 Benson, Dane. “Vampires Takes Views to the Edge.” Newspaper Clipping. August 1990. Reality Theatre Collection. 123Thompson, Dennis. “Vampires, a Campy Success.” Upper Arlington News, 15 Aug. 1990.

52 inherently offensive, do everyone a favor and stay home.”124 However, Reality's exploration of gender performance was not limited to cross-dressed men. Women also performed exaggerated versions of both masculinity and femininity in Well of Horniness and Psycho Beach Party. In his review of Psycho Beach Party, “Summer Camp, with Women,” Richard Ades acknowledged the camp performance and hyperfeminine style could be used for comedic effect when played by women as well. He wrote, “The female lead roles in Party are played by—get this—females. It’s a novel approach, but somehow director Michael Schacherbauer and cast make it work.”125

Reality Theatre often used a similar style of performative gender-bending in their company created work. The use of camp in Tribes comes through most clearly in Michael Grossberg’s reviews of the 1996 and 1997 productions. In response to Comedy of Tribes Grossberg wrote that the actors weren't afraid to “camp it up or to poke fun at gay and lesbian foibles.”126 His review of Comedy of Tribes: I'll Be Homo for the Holidays revealed that some of Reality's camp accentuated the artifice of gender performance, not attempting to hide the fact that they were often men playing women. Grossberg highlighted the incongruity of one of those instances in the holiday show in writing “the mind boggles at Frank Barnhart's non-female impersonation of

Minnelli in Liza Kind of Christmas.”127

The comedic effect of Reality Theatre's camp seemed to be what drew in audiences. One reviewer wrote of the 1991 double bill of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Well of Horniness,

“Although I noticed an occasional audience member who seemed baffled, most people who come to Reality know what to expect, which could be anything. The players were greeted by the

124 Weitz, Jay. “Vampire Lesbians Offers Lots of Controversial Camp.” Columbus Dispatch, 11 Aug. 1990. 125 Ades, Richard. “Summer Camp with Women.” The Other Paper, Aug. 1991. 126 Grossberg, Michael. “Few Who See ‘Tribes’ Will Be Able to Contain Laughter.” Columbus Dispatch, 1 Aug. 1996. 127 Grossberg, Michael. “‘Comedy’ Gets Giggles Instead of Big Laughs.” Columbus Dispatch, 5 Dec. 1997.

53 most responsive audience I have seen there, filling the space with constant laughter.”128 Camp was the style with which the company was able to find major box-office success. Michael

Grossberg reported that the first three performances of Vampires sold out and that “the quasi- experimental, increasingly campy theatre troupe [...] added a 10 p.m. Saturday performance of

Charles Busch’s transvestite comedy.”129 In addition, Reality Theatre staged revivals of Vampire

Lesbians of Sodom, Well of Horniness, and Psycho Beach Party over the next three seasons.

The type of comedy that was in high demand lead the local newspapers to specifically define who the audiences were that would be interested in Reality Theatre’s shows. Dennis

Thompson wrote that a mainstream audience would not be interested in Vampires, implicating the company's reputation for breaking from the mainstream. His review opened, “Vampire

Lesbians of Sodom is not the title of a movie about to be confiscated by the Franklin County

Sherriff’s Department. Nor is it a play likely to pop up soon at your local community theatre. But then people do not go to Reality Theatre to see Neil Simon.”130 Steve Weiss more explicitly named the gay and lesbian appeal of the play, writing, “These plays, containing a spirit of bitchy homosexual humor, are targeted at a specific audience and certainly are not for all tastes.”131 In response to the second play of the double bill Richard Ades reported, “Due to ‘Well’s’ gay orientation, about a quarter of the humor may be too ‘in’ for some members of the audience to catch.”132 The specifically targeted jokes and the camp style that audiences filled the theater to see solidified Reality Theatre as a space for the gay and lesbian community.

128 Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and Well of Horniness. Newspaper Clipping. June 1991. Reality Theatre Collection. 129 Grossberg, Michael. “Reality Theatre Scores with ‘Vampires’.” Columbus Dispatch, 10 Aug. 1990. 130 Thompson. ‘Vampires,’ a Campy Success.” 131 Weiss, Steve. “Backstage.” Nite & Day, June 1991. 132 Ades, Richard. “The Well’ is Worth Repeating, ‘Sodom’ is not.” The Other Paper, 26 June 1991.

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In their promotion of Another Tribe (1991) and each of the subsequent Tribes productions, the company relied on the community’s collective memory of the laughter they shared during the performances. Often they would mention the ways in which sequels were tied to past productions, and particularly popular sketches and characters would be reprised to fit the current context. They seemed to use a similar strategy to retain their audiences for some of their works as they did with their multiple renditions of Tribes. In terms of building a subcultural resistance to daily heteronormativity, their communication with their audience in promoting their shows tied in memories of past popular productions. Doing so could contribute to a recognizable cultural vocabulary among the gay and lesbian community. For example, in their fliers for the

1993 production of Red Scare on Sunset, one of Charles Busch’s lesser-known plays, they listed that he was the same playwright who wrote Psycho Beach Party and Vampire Lesbians of

Sodom, both of which Reality Theatre had done two years earlier with sold out crowds.133 They used similar strategies with other playwrights whose work they produced multiple times such as

Charles Ludlam, Larry Kramer, and Harvey Fierstein. Beyond developing a vocabulary of playwrights and their work, Reality Theatre drew on their own past productions, invoking memories of shared community experiences in their space.

Reality Theatre’s Growing Public Presence

At the same time as Reality Theatre was providing a space for gay and lesbian community building within the context of their shows, their heightened presence in the public eye—by virtue of being a professional theatre company—increased visibility for the gay and lesbian community in Columbus. After the success of their first performance of Tribes, the 1989 revival was advertised as part of the Stonewall Columbus Gay and Lesbian Awareness Week.

133 Red Scare on Sunset. Flier. 1993. Reality Theatre Collection.

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Stonewall also invited the company to perform Tribes as part of the city’s GayFest, the first outdoor street fair to take place in conjunction with the Pride March, and Pride week in 1989.134

A 1989 letter to Frank Barnhart from Michael McFadden,135 executive director of Stonewall

Union, read: “Thank you for your revival of Tribes. We have received so many complements on the play and the performances. We are very proud to advertise Tribes as part of Stonewall

Awareness Week. If only the weather had been more cooperative! I’m sorry the rain cancelled your performance during GayFest.”136 His recount of the number of complements received at the community center reveals that Tribes generated a significant amount of conversation and excitement among members of the local gay and lesbian community. To have a revival just two years after the first staging of the show indicates that there was an overwhelming audience demand for the content it displayed. Evidence of the demand for the kind of performance Reality had to offer is reinforced in the summary of GayFest and the awareness week events printed in

July 1989 Stonewall Union Newsletter which reported that “each performance of the play Tribes at Reality Theatre was packed to capacity.”137 The advertisement of Tribes in conjunction with

Stonewall Awareness Week and GayFest indicates an organizational relationship between the theater and the official body representing and advocating for the gay and lesbian community in

Columbus. The organizational relationship both helped to establish Reality Theatre as a part of the local gay and lesbian community and to build an audience base among people seeking entertainment which would both represent and resonate with their own experiences. The rest of

McFadden's letter of appreciation reveals the growing physical presence that Reality Theatre had as part of the gay and lesbian community. He concluded the note with, “It takes courage to take

134 Stonewall Union News. Vol. 3 no 5, June 1989. Reality Theatre Collection. 135 McFadden’s letter is dated 1988, but the events that he describes according to the Stonewall Union Newsletter and the Columbus Dispatch occurred in 1989. 136 Michael McFadden to Frank Barnhart. Letter. 18 July 1988. Reality Theatre Collection. 137 Stonewall Union News, Vol 3, No 6, July 1989, Reality Theatre Collection.

56 the stand you have. It makes our case that much stronger that you are a part of it. With your continued support, Stonewall will remain a strong voice as we continue the important work for

Lesbian and Gay civil rights.”138 Their participation in GayFest and the march again brings their performance of solidarity even further into the public eye. Given the lack of attention paid to the gay and lesbian community in the general public, McFadden’s note that Reality Theatre’s support made the case for gay rights stronger rings true. The company had a public platform which could reach thousands of people per year through their shows. Furthermore, their work doing gay and lesbian-oriented theatre increased the visibility of the community among the city’s wider population through announcements and reviews of their plays in the mainstream newspapers. During the years of the first two productions of Tribes, 1987 and 1989, Reality

Theatre’s activities accounted for thirty and fifteen percent of the Columbus Dispatch’s mentions of the gay and lesbian community.139 While their primary audience base could be found within the gay and lesbian community, their performance listings and reviews in the city’s largest newspaper provided a different lens through which the general public could view that community. Their discursive presence challenged the norm that the gay and lesbian community was only written about in relation to the AIDS crisis. As McFadden pointed out, the company provided a strong voice in solidarity with the gay and lesbian community against a backdrop of discrimination and pathologization often perpetuated by the press.

On a more personal level, as they began to learn that they could generate audience among members of the gay and lesbian community, Reality Theatre made efforts to meet their public where they were. In other words, they would promote their shows in the various gay bars around

138 The letter also included thanks to the company members who stood up to macers during the March. McFadden Letter 139 “Ohio-USA.” Columbus Dispatch. Newsbank. NewsBank Inc. 1985-1989. Accessed 9 March 2018.

57 the city by hanging posters and setting up tables where they would hand out fliers. They had their upcoming performances listed in free publications and gay newspapers that people might pick up from those bars or gay bookstores to read.140 Frank Barnhart said, “Marketing was very easy at that time because you knew where your audience was. And so hanging up some posters at the bar actually generated audience for us.”141 Their presence in the already established community spaces of the bars allowed the company to build connections with the community on the level of the individuals they interacted with while spending time there and handing out fliers. The bars, in turn, could also act as a hub of information about cultural activities targeted specifically toward gays and lesbians. Reality’s posters and listings of their shows in the free publications available at the bars offered a way of extending the existing community beyond the bars and into the theater.

Regardless of how Reality Theatre defined themselves, however, throughout Columbus and even among broader regional audiences, they were perceived as a gay and lesbian theatre.

Although Barnhart claimed that the company never self-identified as a gay and lesbian theatre company, the community around them defined them as such. Furthermore, with an audience that was at least 75 percent gay and lesbian from 1989, the theater itself was a gay and lesbian- identified space.142 When speaking about the occasional struggle to find actors because of the content of the work they did, Shepherd noted, “After a certain point there were actors in town who eventually we did work with who were like, oh I could just never do a show at Reality

Theatre because people are going to think I’m gay if I work there.” Shepherd added, “Even if you’re doing a show that isn’t gay-specific or anything like that. It was like, ‘Oh no! Somebody

140 Shepherd. Personal interview. 141 Barnhart. Personal interview. 142 Reality Theatre Application for Greater Columbus Arts Council Project Grant. 31 Aug. 1989. Reality Theatre Collection.

58 might think I’m queer.’”143 The fear on the part of the actors, that Shepherd describes, provides insight into the way that the company was seen in the Columbus theatre community. Even when they were doing work not explicitly related to gay men or lesbians, the public perception of them still tied their work to that specific community. In the eyes of the actors afraid of the stigma surrounding Reality Theatre’s primary work, it may have been more accurate to describe them as a gay and lesbian theatre that sometimes produces work by and about straight people. It seems the work that they did and the community they served defined them as a gay and lesbian theatre company to the public outside of Columbus as well. While they were listed in the Purple Circuit, a publication created by Bill Kaiser of all of the known gay and lesbian theatre happening around the United States, as “gay-friendly” or “allies,”144 Reality’s work was recognized in the same context as self-identified gay and lesbian theatre companies throughout the country. In 1992, the group was invited to perform Tribes at the Gay and Lesbian International Theatre Festival in

Arizona, about which Barnhart told the Columbus Dispatch, “I’m not sure how they heard of us, but they sent us information to apply. Being chosen was a surprise… We do a lot of gay and lesbian theater, but we are not in the same category as most of the other groups invited to participate—which identify themselves as gay and lesbian theaters. That’s not the only thing we do, and we want to continue to do other types of material.” Their inclusion in that festival placed them in conversation with groups who were well-known for doing gay and lesbian theatre throughout the 1980s and 1990s and has now received significant critical attention such as

England’s Gay Sweatshop and New York’s WOW Café.145

143 Shepherd. Personal Interview. 144 Barnhart. Personal interview. 145 Grossberg, Michael. “Reality Theatre to present ‘Tribes’ at festival in Arizona.” Columbus Dispatch, 12 Aug 1992.

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Ultimately, Reality Theatre and the gay and lesbian community in Columbus had a mutually beneficial relationship. Reality Theatre provided a physical space for the gay and lesbian community to come together and a center of queer cultural production. The theatre could serve as a place of safety, temporary escape through comedy, artistic and discursive resistance in a culture of fear and discrimination, and community gathering. The gay and lesbian community kept Reality Theatre in business as their primary consistent audience base, formed the group’s public identity, and shaped the work that the company would go on to produce throughout their seventeen year existence.

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Chapter 4: Troubling Past Criticisms of Tribes

As the two previous chapters have outlined, Reality Theatre's Tribes series was created out of an ongoing relationship with Columbus’ gay and lesbian community and utilized queer and community-based performance methods to produce work by, for, and about that community.

In building and catering to the tastes of a primarily homosexual audience base, Reality Theatre became a space for the gay and lesbian community. When the various performances of Tribes were reviewed by mainstream publications, the critics either disregarded the company's aims in order to evaluate the productions with the criteria of popular entertainment in a heterosexual context, or the reviewers dismissed Reality's efforts, calling them propaganda. Even critics who embraced the activism embedded in representing marginalized populations as the subject rather than object of the art attacked Tribes for not taking a more assimilationist approach to their message. By prescribing a kind of acceptable activist theatre and reading the performances through that lens, mainstream papers ignored Reality's community-based theatre ethic and the cultural work that Tribes was doing. Demanding that Reality Theatre's shows be easily readable and directly relevant to straight audiences worked to erase the presence and tastes of the members of the gay and lesbian community who continually supported the company's endeavors.

In this chapter, I aim to problematize the critical responses that Reality Theatre received to Tribes and shift the analysis to reflect the company's community-based activist work and their responsiveness to their gay and lesbian audience. The primary criticisms from Michael

Grossberg, theatre critic for the mainstream newspaper: The Columbus Dispatch, and from smaller independent arts publications: The Other Paper and Nite & Day, were that Tribes excluded straight audience members by being too insular, that it was not “universal” enough, and that was merely agitprop message theatre. These critiques align closely with those made of most

61 community-based theatre, especially that which represents marginalized populations, according to Tim Miller and David Román. Taking Miller and Román's analysis into consideration and combining Jill Dolan and Lara Shalson's critical approaches to lesbian-feminist theatre, I aim to model critical allyship. Rather than reading through the lens of mainstream and heteronormative theatrical tradition, my analysis will privilege a gay and lesbian perspective and performance techniques to more faithfully reflect the community building and queer-responsive activist aims of Tribes.

Critiques from the Press: Excluding Straight People

A common critique of Tribes—which appeared in most of Grossberg’s articles covering each rendition and both Richard Ades and Steve Weiss’ of Another Tribe—was that it was too insular, with a focus on gay and lesbian audiences, and critics often expressed concern that

Reality Theatre ran the risk of excluding straight members of the audience who attended the shows or even driving away the potential for building a straight audience base altogether. Before

Reality Theatre had proven its success at attracting audiences from Columbus’ gay and lesbian community, critics expressed doubt that a show about gay subculture would attract a crowd at all. In his article announcing the first staging of Tribes, Columbus Dispatch theatre critic,

Michael Grossberg claimed, “Reality Theatre aims to continue to test its audience’s limits. Case in point: Tribes, a two-act drama about conflicts within the homosexual subculture.”146

Grossberg’s warning that the company was pushing the boundaries of what Columbus audiences would be willing to tolerate followed his description of poorly attended performances from their first two seasons. His phrasing implied that he assumed the target audience to be entirely heterosexual and apparently mostly unaccepting of homosexuality or gay culture. Even within

146 Grossberg, Michael. “Reality Theatre Taking a Chance.” Columbus Dispatch, 10 May 1987.

62 that first article that heteronormative view of Reality’s Tribes’ future audience was contradicted by Frank Barnhart’s prediction: “We expect that Tribes will have a large appeal to the city’s gay and lesbian population, but our regular audience appears to be a very open-minded group of people. They should be interested in Tribes as well.”147 However, Barnhart’s reading of his own audience went uncommented upon, maintaining the assumption of a small pool of gay and lesbian audience members and doubt that straight audiences would attend a show about the gay and lesbian community.

After Tribes proved to be Reality Theatre’s most popular show of its second season, playing to sold out houses in its first run, staging a revival two years later, and updating the script to create their just as popular Another Tribe, critics continued to accuse the company of alienating the heterosexual mainstream public. Steve Weiss’ review of Another Tribe addressed a concern that Reality Theatre was playing too much to their gay and lesbian audiences in their overall work: “The main trouble I have with Another Tribe—and this may prove true of Reality’s recently announced season of gay-oriented plays for 1991-92—is its tendency toward insularity.”148 His statement warned that the company’s engagement with gay theatre would create a small audience community which was likely to exclude heterosexuals. Michael

Grossberg’s review of Another Tribe, on the other hand, expressed his misery in watching the show and emphasized that the population who would enjoy it was small. His article began,

“First, Reality Theatre should fix its air conditioning. Second, this Short North troupe

should fix its latest home-grown script. Only then, perhaps, will a general audience find

Another Tribe to be a ‘hot’ show in the best sense. The subject matter is certainly timely;

147 Grossberg, Michael. “Reality Theatre Taking a Chance.” Columbus Dispatch, 10 May 1987. 148 Weiss, Steve. “Backstage.” Nite & Day, 12 June 1991.

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this scattershot portrait of gay and lesbian life offers its narrow target audience a morale-

boosting preface to June’s Gay Pride Month”149

While this review offered an acknowledgement that the show was written for gay men and lesbians, Grossberg’s advice for fixing the show (apart from installing ceiling fans) was that the agitprop content needed to be directed at a straight audience rather than one already accepting of gay people. Barbara Baracks wrote that feminist theatre, like the WOW Festival, risked insularity by explicitly limiting who could be part of their audience. In defense of her tough criticism she expressed concern that the comfort of community had the potential to stifle work through its limited audience and the enclosure of all-women audience could impede the messages communicated in performance to reach broader audiences.150 Miller and Román reported that critics have often dismissed the by us-for us mentality of community-based theatre, saying that queer artists performing for queer audiences have a limited scope of address. Those critics,

Miller and Román write, ignore the regular erasure of marginalized communities and devalue the voices that community-based performance allows to be heard.151 Through their heteronormative proclamations of what audiences would accept and who theatre ought to speak to Weiss and

Grossberg seemed to caution against producing gay theatre in the first place as it would automatically drive away a general audience, further contributing to the erasure of the gay and lesbian community.

Some reviews were more lighthearted in their accusations of excluding straight members of the audience by performing scripts which are written from a gay perspective. For example,

149Grossberg’s review of Another Tribe contained six references to the heat inside theater and the weather the night he saw it. Grossberg, Michael. “‘Tribe’ Takes a Superficial Look at Diverse Gay Community.” Columbus Dispatch, 29 May 1991. 150 Baracks’ argument is summarized in Shalson, Lara. “Creating Community, Constructing Criticism: The Women’s One World Festival 1980-1981.” Theatre Topics, vol. 15, no. 2, 2005, p. 222. 151 Miller, Tim and David Román. “Preaching to the Converted.” Theatre Journal, vol. 47, no. 2, 1995, pp. 169-188.

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Richard Ades’ review of Another Tribe acknowledged that the show is intended for a gay and lesbian audience, and yet his critique maintained the perspective of straight audience members as he began,

“If you’re a ‘breeder,’ you may scratch your head once or twice during Reality Theatre’s

current revue, Another Tribe. This fast-paced look at gay and lesbian subcultures—a

sequel to 1989’s Tribes—doesn’t always stop to explain itself to visitors from the non-

subculture. For example, the game show spoof ‘Name That Breeder’ come and goes

before straights in the audience have a chance to figure out that ‘breeder’ refers to them.

‘When you’re from another tribe, no one seems to understand,’ the cast sings at the

show’s end. By then it’s become clear that the sexual preferences are separated by a gulf

that’s wider than a few slang words.”152

He emphasized the difference between gay and straight members of the audience, but his critique that “Name that Breeder” went too fast for heterosexuals to catch on that the term referred to them implied that regardless of the target audience he placed the responsibility of educating straight people about gay culture on Reality Theatre rather than the “visitors from the non- subculture.”

Frequent complaints about the insularity and in-jokes in Tribes continued even after the productions moved into well-known gay establishments in Columbus such as Out on Main153 and

Axis Night Club, and were being produced by a company exclusively focused on LGBT works,

Barnhart’s Act Out Productions.154 In response to Tribes 2000, Michael Grossberg wrote of the

152 Ades, Richard. “Reality Explores the Trials, Joys of Being Gay.” The Other Paper, 29 May 1991. 153 Tribes 2000 was performed upstairs at Columbus’ Short North’s Out on Main, a restaurant and well- known destination for the gay community. Newpoff, Laura. “Out on Main Up For Sale.” Columbus Business First, 11 Feb. 2002. 154 The rising cost of rent pushed Reality Theatre out of their black box and warehouse space, and they moved their productions to Axis, a gay nightclub in the same neighborhood. Since Barnhart was the

65 ongoing lesbian soap opera sketch, “Clintonville 43202,” “A few skits seem like over-extended in-jokes.” In earlier reviews he claimed the in-jokes of the gay community excluded straight audience members. Despite the largely gay and lesbian clientele of the venues, this review defined the specific straight audience to whom the show would be accessible because “enough songs and skits come across as good-humored commentary on urban life to entertain a sophisticated cabaret audience.”155

Critiques from the Press: Universality and Preaching to the Converted

In the spirit of inclusion for straight members of the audience, critics most often evaluated the Tribes performances based on how “universal” they found the stories that were depicted to be. Universal, in this sense seems to mean directly readable in a heterosexual context.

Those reviewers who assumed Reality Theatre was taking an activist stance used that same idea of the universal to judge the success of the performances based on whether or not they fit into a gay assimilationist approach. In his article, “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer

Dilemma,” Joshua Gamson specifies that gay assimilationist activism emphasized gay men’s and lesbians’ similarity to their heterosexual counterparts in the general population and promoted integration into mainstream culture.156 Viewing Reality Theatre through the dominant voices in the Gay Rights Movement and their approach to advocating for civil rights, critics judged Tribes according to how easily they, as audience members, were able to identify the ways in which the characters represented were “just like anybody else.” For example, Michael Grossberg’s review

artistic director of Act Out Productions, the two companies often shared space. Barnhart. Personal interview. 155 Grossberg, Michael. “Latest Update of ‘Tribes’ Manages to Keep it Fresh.” Columbus Dispatch, 15 June 2000. 156 Gamson, Joshua. “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma.” Social Problems, vol. 42, no. 3, 1995, pp. 390-407.

66 of the 1996 Comedy of Tribes draws multiple comparisons between scenes depicting gay people and common experiences for straight people.

“Most sketches are surprisingly accessible. Mike Dittmer's terse At the Gay Bar is a

perceptive reminder that on the dating scene, gays can be every bit as awkward, nervous

and image-conscious as heterosexuals. With Contemporary American Theatre Company

about to open Love! Valour! Compassion!, Reality's timing couldn't be better: Love!

Valour! Compulsion!, about an Alcoholics Anonymous-style support group for gay

actors who didn't get cast in Terrence McNally's gay-oriented Tony winner, will ring a

chord with anyone who has ever tried out and failed to land any role or job. A few in-

joke-filled skits, however, risk excluding some audience members. Tonight on the Town,

apparently a sarcastic guide to Columbus' bar scene, left me cold.”157

The part of the performance here that Grossberg objected to, or the parts which “risk[ed] excluding some members of the audience,” were the ones in which Reality Theatre was most actively utilizing community-based theatre techniques and directly acknowledging the gay and lesbian community and the dynamics in their shared spaces of the bars in Columbus. Since the critic defined universality—the key to including straight people in the performance—through characters’ emotional responses which could translate across contexts and evaluated the performances through that lens, pieces which drew their content from gay and lesbian identity, specific spaces, and community could not be considered successful.

Richard Ades echoed Grossberg’s call for emotional relatability to straight audiences, as evidenced by his contrast of universality and the trials of the gay experience. In his review of

Another Tribe, he wrote, “Despite the universality of such tender emotions, several scenes point

157 Grossberg, Michael. “Few Who See ‘Tribes’ Will Be Able to Contain Laughter.” Columbus Dispatch, 1 August 1996.

67 out that gay love carries its own set of problems. Shepherd and Cannon appear in one as a couple trying to decide whether or not to announce their relationship to Shepherd’s parents.”158 The couple’s fear of family rejection was common among members of the gay and lesbian community, but Ades set up that shared experience in opposition to universal feelings and struggles. He set up dilemmas informed by one’s marginalized identity and universal emotions as mutually exclusive. Grossberg reinforced the same division between gay identity and universality in his critique of the 1997 Christmas rendition of Tribes, writing, “The subtitle, I’ll

Be Homo for the Holidays, suggests a more in-your-face approach, and initial skits strain to fulfill that promise. Eventually, and with some blessed relief, the show settles down to explore a more human range of themes than the merely sexual.” His comment excluded sexuality from a

“human range of themes” which served to further distance gay identity—especially if it was explicitly labeled—from the possibility of positive response from a mainstream audience.

Grossberg connected Tribes to a radical queer activist ideology through his reading of the opening scenes as a strained “in-your-face” approach based on the descriptor, “homo,” in the show’s title. His disapproval of explicit sexuality as a strategy was revealed in his relief in the return to a “human range of emotions.”159

By evaluating Reality Theatre through the lens of gay assimilationist ideology, critics like

Grossberg, Ades, and Weiss have defined the company’s goals for them. In response to Another

Tribe, Steve Weiss wrote, “While the focus seems to be on mutual acceptance between gays and non-gays (semi-affectionately labeled ‘breeders’), the work is full of inside jokes and references.

Unfortunately, this may exclude the very people with whom the play attempts reconciliation.”160

158 Ades. “Reality Explores Trials and Joys.” 159 Grossberg, Michael. “‘Comedy’ Gets Giggles Instead of Big Laughs.” Columbus Dispatch, 5 December 1997. 160 Weiss. “Backstage.”

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He ascribed the objective of reconciliation with “non-gays,” again assuming that straight people were the audience to whom Reality was pleading for tolerance. Grossberg also prescribed the assimilationist goal of challenging straight audiences’ preconceived notions of gays and lesbians, ultimately assessing, “Most scenes are too short and superficial to transcend the easy stereotypes at hand.”161 The call to transcend stereotypes fit neatly within Grossberg’s framework of successful theatre which could be seen as universal. Aligning with the devalued status of community-based theatre and the common criticisms outlined by Miller and Román, Grossberg dismissed Reality’s efforts as “agit prop [sic].”162 His disapproval of purely community and activism-driven theatre came through in his first review of Tribes as he claimed, “One cannot applaud Reality Theatre for yet another failed experiment in heavy-handed ‘message’ theatre.”163

The major “flaw” that he identified, even by the standards of agitprop theatre, was that the company was “preaching to the already converted.”164

Critical Allyship with Tribes

Reading the Tribes series through a heteronormative lens as Ades, Weiss, and Grossberg have ignores the cultural work that Reality Theatre was doing with their primary intended audience. Furthermore, it devalues the perspectives of the gay men and lesbians with whom

Reality Theatre was attempting to build community through the performances. Assuming that

Tribes was intended as outreach to straight people in Columbus misses the entire purpose of the series.

In second edition of The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Jill Dolan suggests an approach to criticism where one is not an objective arbiter of theatre but an advocate for marginalized

161 Grossberg. “‘Tribe’ Takes a Superficial Look.” 162 Grossberg. “‘Tribe’ Takes a Superficial Look.” 163 Grossberg, Michael. ‘Tribes’ Explores Gay Life, but Isn’t a Gay Theatre Evening.” Columbus Dispatch, 15 May 1987. 164 Grossberg. “‘Tribe’ Takes a Superficial Look.”

69 peoples’ work and their perspectives in general.165 In situations like that of the Reality Theatre and the WOW Cafe, which Dolan addresses in her earlier scholarship, critics can serve as an ally to community-based performance by acting as an intermediary between the “gay ghetto” and the general public. Lara Shalson makes the distinction that “Critics do not institute a dialogue with community-based performance. Rather, their engagement must be seen to extend the conversation started in the theatre, taking up the invitation to dialogue that is inherent in community-based (if not all) performance.” In addition, Shalson posits that when looking at theatre created by, for, and about marginalized groups we should view criticism as “a site where cultural change is negotiated, and most importantly as a site that performers, spectators, and critics navigate together.”166

By reviewing Tribes from the perspective of the general public and through a heteronormative lens Weiss, Ades, and Grossberg set their criticism up in opposition to the performers and spectators of the series. In doing so they shut down the dialogue existing among

Reality Theatre, their gay and lesbian target audience, and people who could have potentially joined that conversation. In fact, in his response to Tribes Michael Grossberg explicitly discouraged his readers from attending the performance when he wrote, “most theatregoers should skip Another Tribe for another show.”167 I aim to challenge previous criticisms of Tribes and explore what opportunities for continued dialogue about cultural production and change exist when the series is approached from a perspective aligned with rather than in opposition to that of the performers and spectators.

Columbus critics’ accusation that Reality Theatre was excluding straight members of the audience through their gay and lesbian-focused material and being too insular were common

165 Dolan xxxvii 166 Shalson 223 167 Grossberg. “’Tribe’ Takes a Superficial Look.”

70 criticisms across the board directed at the community-based theatres that Dolan, Shalson, Miller, and Román describe. Reality’s aim was to have Tribes be by, for, and about the gay and lesbian community. Not only does the demand that their explicitly gay and lesbian theatre cater to straight people show a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of Reality's community- based performance, it reinforces a double standard between gay and straight mainstream performance. Most theaters producing works for mainstream audiences are allowed to perform them with no challenge to their heteronormative perspectives from the press. In response to

Richard Ades’ expressed concern that the company's all gay and lesbian 1991-1992 season would alienate potential heterosexual audience members, Dee Shepherd pointed out, “I don’t see

Players Theatre criticized for (appealing to) people who are over 30 and from a certain financial background.”168 In the face of similar criticisms from Michael Grossberg, Shepherd recalled that she told him, “I’m not doing Tribes for the straight community. They can come and enjoy it. I’m not doing Tribes for you, Michael. I’m doing it for the gay community. This is our way of thanking the gay community. So I don’t care if you like it or not.”169 What the critics at the time failed to ask was why Tribes was created specifically for the gay community even at the risk of leaving out potential ticket buyers. By establishing a gay and lesbian worldview in Tribes and refusing to stop to explain themselves to straight audience members, Reality Theatre intervened into the existing theatrical landscape in Columbus which almost exclusively sought the approval of straight audiences. Tribes represents an instance of cultural production in which gay and lesbian perspectives are privileged in ways that they are not among the general public and in popular entertainment. By providing that representation in response to the gay and lesbian community instead of in reaction against the straight majority Reality Theatre created a space for

168 Ades, Richard. “Summer Camp with Women.” The Other Paper, Aug. 1991. 169Shepherd. Personal interview.

71 community building among Columbus' gay and lesbian population which kept those audiences coming back year after year.

Columbus’ critics constant reiterations that Reality Theatre was excluding straight audiences read like a threat, as if a run of Tribes would be unsuccessful or wouldn’t sell tickets without catering to straight people. However, the box office records and consistent revivals and updates made to the show reveal that the company did not share their concerns. The opposite was true; Chris Jones wrote of the audience of the second production in 1989, “It was truly wonderful to see this usually sparsely-populated theater bursting at the seams, with the gay community out in force.”170 Tribes was Reality's first show to play to sold out houses and was so popular that they restaged it six times in fourteen years.171 The show by, for, and about the gay and lesbian community was unsurprisingly supported by that community both in terms of ticket sales and returning audiences.

Critiques that Tribes was rarely able to “rise to the universal” and that they excluded the people with whom they sought reconciliation assumes an assimilationist approach which would require a majority straight audience. However, the content, perspective, and performance structures of Tribes often directly opposed or fell outside of that framework. The scenes celebrated, interrogated, and parodied different aspects of gay and lesbian subculture from within. Many sketches actively fought against being read as universal by historicizing familiar popular entertainment forms, historical events, and pop icons and recontextualizing them to reflect gay and lesbian culture. The very purpose of that technique is to remove the subject from

170 Jones, Chris. “Backstage.” Nite & Day, June 1989. 171 Barnhart and Shepherd. Personal Interview.

72 the ways in which it is read by the dominant culture in order to gain the necessary critical distance to examine what is taken for granted in a new light.172

Again, in regards to the universal, Tribes actively worked against the call to create universal stories which fit neatly into the “gays are just like everybody else” narrative of assimilationist politics. Short snapshots reveal a diverse community and range of perspectives on gay and lesbian culture and strategies for surviving and making fun of a homophobic society.

Contrary to the critics’ claims that Reality Theatre was failing to achieve their activist aims by not pursuing the universal, their representations of gay and lesbian lives and voices as distinct could carry a greater threat to the status quo of theatre in Columbus. Jill Dolan writes that plays which can be read as “universal” or aligned with the experience of the generic straight white male spectator can be politically neutralized.173 On the other hand, theatre which develops a particularized perspective, like the gay and lesbian worldview established throughout the Tribes series, carries potential to subvert the cultural hegemony of the straight white male canon. In other words, by creating theatre which privileged gay and lesbian perspectives, Reality Theatre was enacting a form of subcultural resistance.

Finally, Grossberg's claim that Reality Theatre was “preaching to the already converted” with Tribes both misrepresents the purpose of the production in terms of activism and dismisses the value of the work for gay and lesbian audiences. As Tim Miller and David Román articulate, categorizing the entire gay and lesbian population as “the converted” paints it as a monolithic and permanently established community. It implies that the group is a static and stable mass of individuals who by virtue of their identities share the same perspectives. Conversely, as Miller and Román describe it—much like the process of coming out—in the gay and lesbian

172 See Chapter 2 173 Dolan The Feminist Spectator 34

73 community, “conversion” is dependent on shifting relationships among members of a group, is always in process, and is never entirely complete. Therefore, they write, “When the ‘preaching to the converted’ dismissive is directed toward queer performance, it trivializes spectators’ specific histories regarding queer identity and community. The dismissive disregards both the communal needs of the assembled crowd and the specific issues of the individual spectator.”174 Reality

Theatre may have been “preaching to the converted” with Tribes, in the sense that Grossberg says. A large part of what they were doing was writing and performing gay and lesbian content in a way that would allow members of the audience to see themselves represented and to validate their perspectives. However, the half dozen revisions of the show reveal the company’s responsiveness to a changing community and the needs of its members. The performances not only displayed a wide variety of experiences within the gay and lesbian subculture, but they were also very much in tune with contemporary politics and shifting social ties which affected the community as a whole.

Past popular criticisms of Reality Theatre's work, and that of many theatre companies working in the context of community-based performance, reveal how their performances may have been received by the general public. However, they tend to ignore how the shows were received by the audiences for whom they were intended. Thus, the reviews fail to capture the dialogue that took place between the text, the performers, the audience, and their collective community. Because the mainstream press typically evaluated Tribes according to the ways in which it could speak to the “universal,” or the straight majority, the cultural production happening in the theatre among members of the gay and lesbian community was at best clouded and at worst erased entirely. The dismissal of gay and lesbian perspectives in Grossberg, Weiss, and Ades’ responses to Tribes reflects a larger trend in the criticism of theatre created by, for,

174 Miller and Román 177

74 and about marginalized communities. Too often, community-based theatre is devalued because of its inability to fit within a hegemonic system. Criticism which dismisses this type of cultural production contributes to the further historical erasure of gay and lesbian communities. If critics of companies like Reality Theatre and pieces like the Tribes series can be allied with the creators of those works and extend the conversations starting in the theatre to the general public, not only can they continue those dialogues and challenge the dominant cultural landscape, they can aid the preservation of gay and lesbian histories.

75

Chapter 5: Conclusion

Through their multiple productions of Tribes between 1987 and 2001 Reality Theatre disrupted Columbus's theatrical landscape in order to provide a platform for dramatic representations by, for, and about the local gay and lesbian community. Their specific focus on depictions of and conversations with gays and lesbians departed from typical approaches to activism at the time. Instead of mediating discussion between gay people and the general public or directly protesting the homophobic society in which they lived, Tribes worked to cultivate community between members of the local gay and lesbian population. By taking popular entertainment formats and reinscribing them with gay and lesbian characters and settings; engaging with a variety of ideas, stereotypes, iconography, and politics within homosexual subculture; and referencing current events specific to Columbus, Ohio, Reality Theatre produced work which flipped the heteronormative conventions of mainstream theatre to reflect local gay and lesbian perspectives.

Beyond the content of the performances themselves, Tribes provided a space for gay and lesbian cultural production and community building among members of Columbus' gay and lesbian population. Not only did the company-created, community-based shows have honest and positive representations of gay and lesbian people, their physical theater space functioned as a site for community gathering. Reality's theater space became a place for members of Columbus' gay and lesbian community to convene where it was safe to be open about one's identity outside the gay bars to which they were often relegated. The company's comedic framing of current events, politics, and stereotypes which responded to the needs and tastes of the audience that supported them, created opportunities for communal expressions of joy, anger, and resistance.

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Because of the inherently public nature of theatre, this space was able to catch the attention of the mainstream press which would announce and review Reality Theatre's shows. In a time when the AIDS crisis dominated the popular press about the gay community, Tribes offered an alternative frame to the general public. The series was able to interrupt the dominant fear-driven narratives about gay people in a way that presented the community in a positive light and advertised a space for gay and lesbian cultural production.

While critics from the mainstream press often commended Reality Theatre for tackling what they deemed to be an unpopular or controversial subject, the first four renditions of Tribes received reviews which were entirely negative at worst and lukewarm at best. The reviewers evaluated the work according to how well it matched up with popular theatre conventions. They often dismissed Tribes for being too insular with their jokes and failing to rise to the universal.175

Their readings of the show assumed that it was aimed at a largely heterosexual audience with the goals of reconciliation with a homophobic public and education of said public about homosexual subculture.176 Critics’ insistence that Reality strive to meet their criteria of relatability to straight members of the audience framed the series as a failed attempt at gay assimilationist activism.

The dismissal of the company's productions as agitprop message theatre which was “preaching to the already converted”177 was common among critiques of community-based theatres.178

Reviews of Tribes which painted the series as message theatre which undermined itself by being difficult to read through a heteronormative lens and thus alienating to straight audience members failed to acknowledge the ways in which the shows were intentionally subverting that kind of interpretation. In ignoring the gay and lesbian audiences for whom the performance was

175 Ades. “Reality Explores Trials.” and Weiss. “Backstage.” 176 Grossberg. “Tribes is Gay Theatre but not a Gay Theatre Evening.” 177 Grossberg. “’Tribe Takes a Superficial Look.” 178 Miller and Román

77 intended, the mainstream press missed the work of community building and cultural production that the productions were attempting to accomplish. Unfortunately, the popular press in

Columbus often impeded the conversations and further community formation around Tribes rather than inviting the larger public into them.

Broader Implications

This case study of Reality Theatre and community-based gay and lesbian theater in

Columbus, particularly mainstream responses to Tribes, reveal several challenges to recovering the histories of companies who were doing similar work in the 1980s and 1990s. The ways in which the mainstream press in Columbus discredited Reality Theatre reflect the larger cultural trends which queer theatre has been subject to and which have obscured much of gay and lesbian theatre history. Critics' focus on how the work is readable to straight audiences, the evaluation of gay and lesbian performance through the lens of the heteronormative universal, and the greater value placed on work coming out of major cultural centers like New York have often ignored the function and purpose of queer theatre intended for gay and lesbian audiences.

Each of these ultimately reinforce what Judith Halberstam calls metronormativity, which encompasses the binary oppositions into which American culture divides conversations about

LGBTQ lives. Some of those binaries include urban/rural, East Coast and West Coast/Middle

America, forward-thinking/backward, queer-inclusive/heteronormative.179 Popular criticism of gay and lesbian theatre, I would argue, adds to these oppositional and supposedly mutually exclusive pairs: universal/insular, cultural producers/passive consumers, quality theatre/message theatre. In other words, they reinforce the idea that quality theatre that tells universal stories comes from cultural producers in coastal metropolises like New York and San Francisco. On the other hand, community-based theatre is insular message theatre; those who practice it are

179 Halberstam. In a Queer Time and Place. NYU Press, 2005.

78 excluded from being understood as cultural producers by nature of their existence outside of

New York or their daring to address issues from the perspectives of their specific communities based in shared identities or geographies. Reality Theatre's Tribes, focused on the gay and lesbian community in Columbus, cannot be read as universal within the metronormative framework, but Boys in the Band, The Normal Heart, Torch Song Trilogy, and Angels in

America with their gay white male New Yorker protagonists can.180

With the narrow geographical and demographic frame of who can be considered capable of representing universal experience, the vast majority of gay and lesbian artists are at a disadvantage. Community-based theatre which aims to create representations challenging the white male metronormative canon meets resistance from mainstream critics. Thus, communities that struggle to gain a public platform in the first place are further inhibited from either inviting the general public into the conversations started in the theatre or sustaining the communities created in the performance space. When community-based theatre receives negative reviews, none at all, or their work is dismissed, the assumption is that the cultural production had no impact. Therefore, evidence that performances took place or how the audience experienced them are left out of the public record. While gay and lesbian publications exist and may review theatre relevant to the community, mainstream newspapers are far more likely to publish often, to remain in business longer, to reach a wider audience, and to be archived. Critical responses which do not take into account the goals of community-based theatre or the intended audience contribute to the erasure of the cultural work that type of performance does.

Another challenge that gay and lesbian community-based theaters face when confronted with critics demanding they aim for universal stories is that the work is often intended to respond

180 A recent New York Times article outlined gay theatre history. While the author acknowledges that all of the playwrights who made his canon were white, he offers no analysis of the implications. Green, Jesse. “A Brief History of Gay Theatre, in Three Acts.” New York Times, 26 Feb. 2018.

79 to the current moment rather than to stand the test of time. Performances like Tribes that are rooted both in a specific historical moment and geographic community may resonate strongly with their intended audience. However, since shows like that are so grounded in place and engaged in a fleeting moment, they do not end up touring or having other companies around the country produce their work. They are unable to demonstrate commercial success in the way that a Broadway play picked up by regional theaters would, so they do not remain in the eye of the popular press and they are devalued when they are written about. The less writing that exists on gay and lesbian and community-based theatre, the more difficult it becomes to retrieve and construct their histories.

Finally, whether out of the need for financial survival or relative safety, theaters performing gay and lesbian works outside of cultural centers like New York and San Francisco did not always explicitly identify as such. Reality Theatre had a majority gay and lesbian audience and produced nearly every well-known gay and lesbian play that they could obtain the rights to in the 1990s. However, they never self-identified as a gay and lesbian theatre company, and gay theatre publications like the Purple Circuit listed them as allies. Since the degree of openness that would be safe for a company producing theatre by, for, and about the gay and lesbian community would have been largely dependent on their geography and the social climate surrounding them, I would imagine that many other theaters were also listed as "allies" or "gay- friendly" rather than explicitly gay and lesbian.

At the same time as this case study reveals multilayered challenges to constructing the histories of gay and lesbian community-based theatre beyond New York, it offers several possibilities for avenues of exploration. Finding the histories of the people and companies who have produced gay and lesbian theatre requires a shift in focus from a script-centric and

80 economic approach to one that considers communities, the dispersal of information, and space. It is important to explore how gay and lesbian communities communicate and where they come together.

State and city-wide gay and lesbian publications are likely to list cultural events, including performances, which are relevant to the community. The Purple Circuit, a nationally distributed listing of the openings of LGBTQ theatre productions across the United States and

Canada, offered quarterly newsletters for subscribers. Organized by Bill Kaiser out of Burbank,

California, The Purple Circuit began as a printed publication in 1991 and remains operational today with online archives dating back to 2003.181

Beyond the circulation of written work from press releases to performance reviews to show listings, another site of investigation into gay and lesbian theatre history is the actual physical spaces where queer communities gathered. A lot of gay and lesbian cultural production and performance happened--and continues to happen--in the informal spaces where artists could reach their intended audience. Local gay and lesbian performance, particularly in communities with few or no spaces designated for such theatrical production, can be found in gay bars. Reality

Theatre's treatment of Columbus' bars as a space to advertise their shows and generate audience182 and for the actual venues for the last two performances of Tribes reveals that bar culture was integral to their engagement between them and the gay and lesbian community in their city.

If allyship in criticism and historiography of theatre by, for, and about the gay and lesbian community across the United States is to be achieved, we need to look beyond the metronormative framework that excludes the majority of the country and attempts to view it

181 For more information on The Purple Circuit visit buddybuddy.com/pc-html. Kaiser, Bill. “On the Purple Circuit.” Purple Circuit, 2018. Accessed 28 March 2018. 182 Barnhart and Shepherd. Personal interview.

81 through a heteronormative lens. If we are going to find the theatre produced by the community, we first need to locate the gay and lesbian communities themselves.

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Appendix A: Reality Theatre Production History

1985-86 Season

This Is Not a Test by Reality Theatre, August 16-17, 1985 at Columbus YMCA The Shadow Box by Michael Cristofer, October 24-26, 1985 at Columbus YMCA Neon by Reality Theatre, January 23-Feb 1, 1986 at Park Street Theatre This is Not a Test by Reality Theatre, March 14-15, 1986 at Park Street Theatre The Revenant by Robert Weesner, May 15-24, 1986 at Park Street Theatre

1986-87 Season

**Reality Theatre moves to their own space at 736 N. Pearl Street

Our Target Is… by Reality Theatre, September 25-October 4, 1986 Morning, Noon, & Night by Israel Horovitz, Terrence McNally, and Leonard Melfi, November 13-22, 1986 Families: “Statues” by Don Blanchett, “Down Came the Rain” by Brian Burr Clark, “Missing You” by Gracie James as part of Columbus Playwrights Festival, January 15-24, 1987 Moral Minority by Reality Theatre, March 19-28, 1987 Tribes, Reality Theatre and Columbus’ gay and lesbian writers, May 14-23, 1987

1987-88 Season

The Serpent by Jean Claude van Itallie, September 3-12, 1987 Songs of the Astroneers by Reality Theatre, October 29-November 7, 1987 Ornaments by Reality Theatre, December 10-23, 1987 Impromtu and Line by Tad Mosel and Israel Horowitz, February 4-13, 1988 The Writer and The Elevator by Joe Ballou and Richard Markgraf, March 30-April 9, 1988 The Ruling Idea by Robert Weesner, May 26-June 4, 1988

1988-89 Season

Safe Sex by Harvey Fierstein, June 15-18, 1988 Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo, July 22-30, 1988 One Petite Woman by Angela Barch, August 19-27, 1988 Murder Mayhem by Ron Wilson, September 15-25, 1988 K2 by Patrick Meyers, October 20-30, 1988 Chamber Music, Death, and the Re-Erection of Dr. Franklin by Arthur Kopit, December 8-18, 1988 High Strung Voices for an Unstrung Quartet by Evan Bridenstine, Ohio Playwrights Contest Winner, February 9-19, 1989 Getting Out by Marsha Norman, April 6-16, 1989 God’s Spies and Crossing the Bar by Don Nigro, May 18-28, 1989 Tribes by Reality Theatre, June 22-July 1, 1989

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1989-90 Season

Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, September 21-October 1, 1989 Tongues-Savage/Love by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chakin, November 9-19, 1989 Playwright’s Festival, January 18-28, 1990 at Reality Theatre Unfinished Business: The AIDS Show by Theatre Rhinoceros, March 15-25, 1990 The Zoo Story and The American Dream by Edward Albee, April 19-29, 1990 Sacred to the Memory of a Fool by Reality Theatre, May 24-June 3, 1990

1990-91 Season

T-Shirts and The Well of Horniness by Robert Patrick and Holly Hughes, June 21-30, 1990 Vampire Lesbians of Sodom by Charles Busch, August 2-11, 1990 The Mystery of Irma Vep by Charles Ludlam, September 20-October 6, 1990 Mama Drama by Leslie Ayvazian, Donna Daley, Christine Farrell, Marianna Houston, Rita Nachtmann, Anne O'Sullivan and Ann Sachs; music by The Roches, November 1-17, 1990 A Dying Art and Corie by Oakley Hall III and Robert and Rochelle Weesner (Columbus Playwrights’ Festival Winners), January 10-26, 1991 The Tibetan Book of the Dead by John-Claude Van Itallie, March 7-23, 1991 Bloody Poetry by Howard Brenton, April 11-27, 1991 Another Tribe by Reality Theatre, May 16-June 1, 1991

1991-1992 Season

Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and The Well of Horniness by Charles Busch and Holly Hughes, June 13-22, 1991 Psycho Beach Party by Charles Busch, August 8-24, 1991 Bent by Martin Sherman, September 26-October 12, 1991 Spare Parts by Marjorie Garber, November 7-23, 1991 3rd Annual Playwrights Festival, January 9-25, 1992 Torch Song Trilogy by Harvey Fierstein, March 5-21, 1992 Metro General by Reality Theatre, April 9-25, 1992 Sex Rangers of Venus by Lane Roisley, May 14-30, 1992 Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley, June 19-28, 1992

1992-1993 Season

Drag Queens in Outer Space by Randall Lewis, August 6-15, 1992 Bluebeard by Charles Ludlam, October 29-November 14, 1992 Body and Soul by John Glines, January 7-23, 1993 Talking With by Jane Martin, February 4-14, 1993 4th Annual Playwright’s Festival, February 19-27, 1993 Just Say No! by Larry Kramer, March 4-20, 1993 The Hands of Its Enemy by Mark Medoff, April 8-24, 1993 Coming Soon by Debbie Klein, May 6-23, 1993

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The Best of Tribes by Reality Theatre, May 27-June 6, 1993 at Gay and Lesbian International Theatre Festival in Tucson, Arizona

1993-1994 Season

**Linda May takes over for Frank Barnhart as producing director.

Drag Queens on Trial by Sky Gilbert, June 17-26, 1993 Psycho Beach Party by Charles Busch, July 29-August 7, 1993 Red Scare on Sunset by Charles Busch, September 9-25, 1993 I Hate Hamlet by Paul Rudnick, October 28-November 13, 1993 The Sum of Us by David Stevens, January 6-22, 1994 Walking the Dead by Keith Curran, February 10-26, 1994 Six Women with Brain Death by Mark Houston, March 17-April 2, 1994 Dos Lesbos and The Well of Horniness by Terry Baum and Carolyn Meyers and Holly Hughes, April 14-30, 1994 The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel, May 12-28, 1994

1994-1995 Season

**Frank Barnhart launches Act Out Productions.

Street Theatre by Doric Wilson, June 2-18, 1994 Reverse Psychology by Charles Ludlum, July 28-August 20, 1994 Equus by Peter Shaffer, September 15-October 8, 1994 Movie Queens by Claudia Allen, October 27-November 19, 1994 The Lisbon Traviata by Terrence McNally, January 5-28, 1995 Lloyd’s Prayer by Kevin Kling, February 16-March 11, 1995 Childe Byron by Romulus Linney, March 30-April 22, 1995 The Destiny of Me by Larry Kramer, May 4-27, 1995

1995-1996 Season

Jeffrey by Paul Rudnick, July 27-August 20, 1995 Twilight of the Golds by Jonathan Tolin, September 14-30, 1995 Suddenly Last Summer and Something Unspoken by Tennessee Williams, October 30-November 18, 1995 Live With It by Elise Moore, January 5-27, 1996 Falsettos by William Finn, February 15-March 2, 1996 Patient A by Lee Blessing, March 28-April 13, 1996 The Elephant Man by Bernard Pomerance, May 2-25, 1996

1996-1997 Season

The Comedy of Tribes by Reality Theatre, August 1-10, 1996 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Edward Albee, September 19-October 12, 1996

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Party by David Dillon, December 5, 1996–January 11, 1997 Kiss of the Spiderwoman by Manuel Puig, February 13-March 8, 1997 Agnes of God by John Pielmeier, April 17-May 3, 1997 The Bacchae by Euripides, June 12-28, 1997

1997-1998 Season

Picasso at the Lapin Agile by Steve Martin, July 23-August 16, 1997 Hedda Gabler by Henrick Ibsen, September 17-October 11, 1997

**Alex Libby takes over for Dee Shepherd as artistic director.

Comedy of Tribes: I’ll Be Homo for the Holidays by Reality Theatre, December 3-28, 1997 Sylvia by A.R. Gurney February 11-March 7, 1998 Julie Johnson by Wendy Hammond April 15-May 9, 1998 Zombie Prom by Dana Rowe and John Dempsey, June 3-28, 1998

1998-1999 Season

The Last Hairdresser by Doug Holsclaw, August 6-29, 1998 Dracula by Steven Dietz, October 1-31, 1998 The House of Yes, Wendy MacLeod, January 7-30, 1999 Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare, March 4-27 Clue, The Musical by Peter DePietro and Tom Chiodo, April 20-May 13, 1999

**Mollie Levin takes over as artistic director after Alex Libby’s death in May 1999

Fit to be Tied, Nicky Silver, June 3-26, 1999

1999-2000 Season.

Whoop Dee Doo! by Howard Crabtree, August 5-14, 1999 A Question of Mercy by David Rabe, September 16-October 9, 1999 The Batting Cage by Joan Ackerman, October 28-November 13, 1999 P.S. Your Cat is Dead by James Kirkwood, December 28, 1999-January 15, 2000 Maxine Fisher: Escape from Reality by Roger Bailey, February 19-26, 2000 Private Eyes by Steven Dietz, March 2-25, 2000 As Bees in Honey Drown by Douglas Carter Beane, April 20-May 13, 2000 Tribes 2000 by Act Out Productions, June 14-23, 2000 at Out on Main The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told by Paul Rudnick, June 8-July 15, 2000

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2000-2001 Season

**Reality Theatre invites Red Herring Ensemble Theatre to share their Short North Playhouse at 736 N. Pearl St.

Closer by Patrick Marber, October 5-28, 2000 Sistahs by Maxine Bailey and Sharon M. Lewis, January 11-27, 2001 The Judas Kiss by David Hare, March 15-April 28, 2001 Tribes by Act Out Productions, May 31-June 2, 2001 at Axis Nightclub Hell/Bound by Christopher Cooper and Lee Kelly, June 18-20, 2001 Queen of Satin by Johnrick Hole, August 3-12, 2001 at the Riffe Center Studio Two Theatre

2001-2002 Season

The Holy Cross Quardilogy by Rob Nash, August 16-September 1, 2001 The Food Chain by Nicky Silver, October 25-November 17, 2001 Aunt Elizabeth’s Room and Shakespeare’s Sonnets by David Ringer and Samuel Park, April 4- 13, 2002 End of the World Party by Chuck Ranberg, June 19-28, 2002

**Reality Theatre moves out of Short North Theatre at 736 N. Pearl St.

2002-2003 Season

After Dark by Steve Kluger, November 20-30, 2002 at Axis Nightclub Naked Boys Singing by Robert Schrock, May 29-June 21, 2003 at Axis Nightclub

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Appendix B: Annotated Scenes of Tribes Productions 1987-2001

This document outlines the contents of six of Reality Theatre’s renditions of Tribes including the original Tribes (1987), Another Tribe (1991), Comedy of Tribes (1996), Comedy of Tribes: I’ll Be Homo for the Holidays (1997), Tribes 2000, and Tribes 2001. The 1989 version of Tribes has not been included because it was a revival of the original show and used the same script.

Each production break-down includes the cast of actors and an annotated list of the scenes included in the versions of the scripts held in the Frank Barnhart Papers at The Ohio State University’s Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute. The 1987, 1991, and 2000 productions include a breakdown of all of the scenes in the order in which they were performed, according to the shows’ programs. The 1996, 1997, and 2001 programs were not included in the collection. All but the 1997 production had either a typed or handwritten list of the run-order at the beginning of the collection of scenes. Although, how accurately these lists reflect what was actually performed is questionable because most have scenes crossed out, contain writing in the margins reflecting name changed to the scenes, and there are far more scenes listed than appear in the scripts. The scripts may also be incomplete because they were saved as a combination of typed scenes, handwritten monologues, and sheet music, and the scenes do not appear in the same order as is listed in the run order. The order of scenes in the cases of the 1996, 1997, and 2001 productions is based on their organization in of the compiled fragments of the scripts.

In order to most faithfully represent the often comedic, sarcastic, satiric, irreverent spirit of Tribes, my annotated breakdown of the scenes attempts to capture the tone, language, and style of the scripted dialogue and action.

Tribes 1987

Cast: Frank Barnhart, Dee Shepherd, Cathy Girves, Michael Dutcher, Natalie Lark and Larry Sherwood

Act One: Inside

*Rite of Exorcism: Ensemble poem calling forth demons in the name of fear, ignorance, scandal, envy, anger, and oppression. A demand for these demons to show their faces, then leave us.

Speaking: Ensemble poem dispelling stereotypes about gay people, asking “with all the injustices and cruelty in this world, isn’t it stupid to be outraged about people who love?”

Relief: Lead-in to the following scene. Relief is spelled T.H.E. B.A.R.S.

*At the Bar: Poem describing a smoky gay bar in black light where they wear tight jeans and everyone is thin and the music is too loud, so they go home and screw and forget to talk.

Womyn’s Room: A heartfelt moment between two women waiting in line for the bathroom at a lesbian bar.

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Internal Viewpoints: Ensemble call-out to the gays and lesbians who discriminate against one another.

Recycling/Reasons: Larry tells stories about his friends’ romantic entanglements, Frank questions why Larry has to tell the same tired stories about the same tired people. They challenge each other about why they behave and make livings the way they do.

The Stripper: Explanation of life as a stripper. It pays the bills and I get a good night’s sleep.

I’m Scared: Monologue about the fears he lives with on a daily basis as a gay man.

Have a Drink: Ensemble offers Mike a drink to ease the pain.

Dancing on the Edge: A song and dance number about feeling good and picking up a guy at the bar.

What They Really Mean Is: Two men have a typical bar conversation, two other actors interpret what they actually mean in each line.

*The Dominance/Submission Factor in Gay Relationships: Craig plays the dominant man, and Natalie addresses stereotypes that gay men all have fantasies of being sexually dominated.

*Has Your Fly Lost Its Zip?: Monologue by a man who wants to have sex with a man he sees across the room.

I Want More: Monologue by a man who has done the bars, the baths, and the bookstores and now wants a more committed relationship.

*Lying on a Twin Bed, Waiting for a Knock You Know Isn’t Coming: Monologue about a man’s internal conflict about being attracted to a friend and fear of losing that friendship.

I Think I’m in Love: Monologue by a woman who falls in love with another woman after believing it was unlikely anyone would ever want to spend the rest of her life with her.

*The Gray Man: Poem where a man asks his younger lover if he’ll still love him after he’s turned gray, I mean really gray, and balding, and probably fat.

John: Monologue by a man who misses his former lover, post-break up, he washes the dishes alone.

Home: Poem about the lives of strangers, searching for love, and loneliness.

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Act Two: Outside

Mom, Dad I’m…: Members of the ensemble recount a variety of experiences with coming out to parents.

Someone You Know: A poem about longing for understanding and normalcy in relationships with family members after coming out.

Letter: Apology letter from one sister to another after their parents outed the writer and ruined the sister’s engagement announcement.

**Leo’s Thoughts: Monologue where a gay man expresses frustration at the fact that straight people get a second chance at having a good family while gay men don’t, ultimately revealing his loneliness and insecurities in his own relationships.

*Fairy Blood: A poem about the mythical world of fairies and the ways in which words and meanings become twisted as one grows older.

*Growing Up: Three men talk wonder how they managed to survive their adolescence as closeted gay boys.

*Why I’m Afraid of Handcuffs: Monologue by a man who is trying to have romantic relationships but is still dealing with the trauma of being hand-cuffed, gay-bashed, and sexually assaulted in a bathroom.

Case #213: Monologue about a man’s experience with doctors in the Venereal Disease Clinic.

A Funny Thing Happened: Lori makes a new friend at work who, after introducing her to some friends, she learns is very homophobic. Things get awkward.

At the Movies: A horror movie trailer… It was a normal day for Sheila until she found out everyone around her was gay. Flaming Zombie Queens, coming to a society near you.

Blue 7: An introspective monologue by a woman reflecting on how she got to be where she is.

*Wolves on the Edge: A poem about all of the gay “lone wolves” in the workplace.

*Watch Me Burn, The Faggot Dance: A poem about being gay in a world that fears gay men and AIDS while and protects straight people at the cost of gay lives.

If You Care to Know/Come Together: A monologue by a woman who loves women and is frustrated that she’s made invisible because of it.

Another Tribe: A call for support and community through song, “You don’t have to lie if you’re from another tribe.”

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*written by Mike Dittmer **Written by David Wagner

Another Tribe 1991

Cast: Dee Shepherd, Linda Kennedy, Lori Cannon, Christine Brooks, Frank Barnhart, Randy Lewis, Michael Day and Michael Schacherbauer

Act One

Opening-Retrospective: An ensemble poem consisting of key lines from the first rendition of Tribes.

Declaration of Existence: A group declaration explaining that homosexuality is a natural part of existence, that gays are everywhere, and they’re not going away.

Jesus Knows: A poem about how Jesus knows and understands the struggle that is male sexuality.

Bar Talk: A group of friends is tired of the bar scene and not meeting anyone.

Paranoia vs. Eros in the Age of AIDS (Frank): Death is an attractive young man in a dark bar.

Dancing on the Edge: A song and dance number about feeling good and picking up a guy at the bar.

I Won’t Dance: A poem about the reasons a man may not want to dance at the bar, and that is his right.

When I’m Out: Monologue by a woman who actually enjoys the bars and the community she feels there as a lesbian.

This is my Brain: Monologue by a man who playfully fantasizes about his ex-lover’s brain exploding. It’s great therapy.

Cruise Olympics: Cruising at the bar is announced as if it were an Olympic event.

They Would Laugh: A poem about bliss and the sacred place that is the hollow of a woman’s shoulder.

Defining Myself: Monologue by a man who would rather drop the labels and blend in.

Activist 1: Lovers fight because Mike has just gotten a speaking engagement at the state house for a gay rights in the workplace rally while Randy needs to keep a low profile to protect his job. They argue about the need to fight for their rights and the feeling of futility when progress is slow.

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Gays in the Wild: Lesbians and homosexuals. What do they look like? How do they communicate? How do they behave when we’re not around? Join us as National Geographic explores gays in the wild.

The Kiss: A poem about the ecstasy of kissing someone you love.

Conjunction: A poem about touch, intimacy, and wanting a moment to last forever.

Lovers Jump, Cite Fear of AIDS: A poem about lovers who jump off of a building in New York City.

Goodbyes: A woman arrives at her ex-lover’s apartment to return her key and ring. She is sure that she has not left anything behind.

Aseptic Packaging vs. Modern Love: A poem to a lover about how the times have changed and so has the living arrangement.

Hiroshima Baby: A poem about a break up that is final and there is no hope of reconciliation.

Activist 2: Randy receives news that his lover, Mike, was jumped on the way to his car after speaking at a rally for gay rights.

Act Two

Excuses 1: A woman makes excuses for being late visiting her parents for the holidays because she has not told them that she is a lesbian or that the woman they think is her roommate is her partner.

Excuses 2: A man questions why he keeps lying to his mother about being gay.

Spill Your Guts: A talk show where the hostess interviews “Lesbians Who Changed their Minds.” She believes that her interviewees are talking about their sexualities when they are talking about other changes they’ve made in their lives from the cars they drive to the color of their bathroom walls.

GaySpeak 2000: Commercial for the GaySpeak 2000 which will help you fit in with your friends of the homosexual persuasion by translating their native tongue.

Name that Breeder: A game show hosted by the Network for Family Values, the contestants must guess the celebrity based on clues. One thing they have in common: all of these celebrities claim to be straight.

The Invasion of the Well-Meaning Straight People: Horror movie trailer, well-meaning straight people, they accept your lifestyle (very quickly!) They’re SUPPORTIVE! They will still make cringe-worthy comments toward you.

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Don’t Tease the Straight People: A monologue by a straight man who has some questions about how to interact with gay people and his friends who are gay and those people who his wife seems to be able to tell are gay but he can’t. He asks that you be patient with this breeder.

Friend: A poem about someone who needed a friend, but that friend wanted more.

Wolves on the Edge: A poem about all of the gay “lone wolves” in the workplace.

Remembering One Killed by AIDS: A poem about the moments a person remembers their friends and is hurt all over again by their loss.

Activist 3: Ann tries to convince Randy to speak out at a candle light vigil for those who lost their lives to homophobic violence. Randy feels guilty about the loss of his partner and jaded about the gay rights movement.

Anger: A monologue about ever-increasing rage at the injustices that gays face.

The Rally: Randy speaks out at a rally about the recent progress that has been made towards a cure for AIDS, adoption, and workplace equality but points out that we still need to deal with today’s realities.

Another Tribe: A call for support and community through song, “You don’t have to lie if you’re from another tribe.”

Comedy of Tribes 1996

Cast: Dee Shepherd, Dovie Pettitt, Michael Dutcher, Larry Fink, Nancy Heiden, Frank Barnhart, Gigi Schubert and Richard Boorman

Act One

Comedy of Tribes: Introductory song, shout out to various gay groups, and roll call of the cast

At the Bar: Poem describing a smoky gay bar in black light where they wear tight jeans and everyone is thin and the music is too loud, so they go home and screw and forget to talk

What They Say Is: Two men have a typical bar conversation, two other actors interpret what they actually mean in each line.

Flaming Zombie Queens: A horror movie trailer… It was a normal day for Sheila until she found out everyone around her was gay. Flaming Zombie Queens, coming to a society near you.

Name that Breeder: A game show hosted by the Network for Family Values, the contestants must guess the celebrity based on clues. One thing they have in common: all of these celebrities claim to be straight.

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Clintonville 43202: Lesbian soap opera: four women, varying definitions of what ‘explore as much as you need to means,’ lots of making out, one exploding Jeep. Partially based on true neighborhood stories.

GaySpeak 2000: Commercial for the GaySpeak 2000 which will help you fit in with your friends of the homosexual persuasion by translating their native tongue.

Gays in the Wild: Lesbians and homosexuals. What do they look like? How do they communicate? How do they behave when we’re not around? Join us as National Geographic explores gays in the wild.

Gay for Pay: Commercial for book teaching straight men how to play gay.

Cruise Olympics: Cruising at the bar is announced as if it were an Olympic event.

Act Two

Three Strikes and You’re Out: From the people who brought you Name That Breeder, a gameshow where men are asked questions and if their answer is deemed the “most gay” they are outed on national television

Politically Correct Kitchen: The Womyn’s Collective Cooperative Cooking Show attempts to make chicken fajitas, but due to different characters’ commitments to political and social issues, they end up only with a single home-garden-grown avocado.

Love, Valor, Compulsion: A support group for actors who have never been cast in Love, Valor, Compassion. They struggle to overcome specified auditioning compulsion.

Well-Meaning Straight People: Horror movie trailer, well-meaning straight people, they accept your lifestyle (very quickly!) They’re SUPPORTIVE! They will still make cringe-worthy comments toward you.

Pride March: A re-enactment of Columbus’ Pride March, local commentary, traffic issues, blazing heat and all!

My Lover’s Brain: Monologue by a man who playfully fantasizes about his ex-lover’s brain exploding. It’s great therapy.

Cocktail Party: A musical satire of Sondheim’s closeted characters written by Patrick Barnes. Fosca is hosting a cocktail party in her New York loft and trying to keep the peace between bickering couples by playing party games.

Drag on Ice: After being crowned “Miss Thing Extraordinaire of the Entire Universe-Franklin County, Desdemona Dementia has a post-show interview backstage. She answers all questions with popular song titles.

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Comedy of Tribes: I’ll Be Homo for the Holidays 1997

Cast: Frank Barnhart, Dee Shepherd, Michael Dutcher, Alex Libby, Christine Brooks, John Connor

Drag on Ice: After being crowned “Miss Thing Extraordinaire of the Entire Universe-Franklin County, Desdemona Dementia has a post-show interview backstage. She answers all questions with popular song titles.

A Day at the City Center Part I: Josh, Brad, and Sean are working for the holidays as perfume salesmen, spritzing customers as they walk by. The job is awful, the manager has been sent to mandatory sensitivity training, and the new salesclerk is way out of Brad’s league.

The Poof!: Commercial for RimCo’s newest product: the first scientifically-proven gay-dar scrambler on the market. It’s great for those awkward office outings!

Lesbian Chic: Ellen Degeneres is on Wednesday night, so Thursday is Adopt a Lesbian Day! While out at a restaurant celebrating their second anniversary, Debra and Angela are showered with gifts of food and wine from adoring heterosexual couples.

Ultimate Body Piercing: Gothic types in the coffee shop show off their increasingly intense body piercings from nipple rings to giant belly rings to ear and neck bolts.

City Center Part II: Josh, Brad, and Sean are on their lunch break while Joni Lee Carpenter arrives to play her new Christmas albums at the mall. Sean loves the song because it speaks to his relationship with his boyfriend. It’s like Joni knows all about him. Josh thinks the song sucks.

Psychic Stud Hotline: Introducing the Call a Hot Psychic Stud Hotline! We overhear the conversations of three men working for the hotline.

G.L.E.N. (Gay and Lesbian Etiquette for the Nineties): A Dear Abby-style talk show for gays and lesbians navigating family at the holidays. How does one introduce their… girlfriend? Lover? Partner? Significant other? Glen has the solution! Call him or her your POTSSWIL (Person of the Same Sex Whom I Love).

Just Your Average Queer: At last, something you can relate to! Frank Barnhart is a one-man tour de force of the homosexual experience in Just Your Average Queer. Critics say straight and queer audiences alike will be bored silly by this show.

City Center Part III: Josh, Sean, and Brad try cruising at the mall.

I’ll Be Homo for the Holidays Musical Revue: Includes songs like “The Christmas I Came Out,” “Solstice, the Gender Non-Specific Lesbian Identified Snowperson,” “Holidays with the One I Love,” “On my Wish List,” “Sisters, Rejoice!,” “Nick the Trick,” “Liza Kind of Christmas,”

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“Oh, Mary Where Did You Get that Halo (It Don’t Go with Your Eyes),” “Sister Claus,” and “The Snow is Black (Like the Hole in my Heart)”

Tribes 2000

Cast: Frank Barnhart, Dee Shepherd, Stewart Bender, Beth Kattelman, Linda Lee Kennedy. R. Scott Whitaker, Jim Speegle, and Dovie Pettit

Act One

New Wedding Song: A gay marriage song which admits to the mundane things for which we marry: the loot, the cash, the guests, the flash.

Best Movie #1: The Sissy Sense. He sees gay people.

Gay Moment in History #1: Meri Weather Fopsalot helps Betsy Ross come up with the design for the American flag. Her first rainbow draft would be “perfect for a specific cultural group, but she needs something to represent all Americans.”

Party Conversation: A couple joins the Human Rights Campaign as women in leather outfits and men in dresses take over their neighborhood. Where else can you spend an evening with gay people and still be surrounded by Republicans?

License Renewal: Wendy gets pulled over for expired flags. Luckily, these police offer roadside lesbian license renewal.

Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter: A gameshow of infinite innuendo where Dave the Butt Pirate and Sheila the Fag Hag compete to see who can get their mind out of the gutter first.

Politically Correct Lesbian Erotica: A woman attempts to write lesbian erotica. Unfortunately, her characters call her out at every stereotype and play into the patriarchy’s hands.

Coming Out: Gay dads, Alan and Bruce, confront their son after finding a pornographic magazine in his room. They grapple with the news that their son is… a heterosexual.

Best Movie #2: PolterGayest. They’re quee-eeer!

Gay Moment in History #2: Meri Weather Fopsalot is feeling ignored by his boyfriend, Benjamin Franklin. Ben wants to make it up to him. Meri ties his apartment key to Ben’s kite so it won’t get lost. Things get electric.

Clintonville 43202: Lisa has decided she and her partner, Stormy should be celibate, so that they can explore the spiritual part of their relationship. T.J. helps Stormy relieve her frustration as Lisa arrives home with her guru, Starfyre. How could she expect her to wait a whole two hours?

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Columbus M4M: Columbus M4M commercial: have stimulating conversations online with guys from your community! Swap pics! Meet men with exotic names like ButtBoy4U and ToeSucker!

The Bitch Slap: Commercial for The Bitch Slap from RimCo, great for all kinds of conversations from party banter to relationship woes to political debates. Don’t dish the crap if you can’t take the slap!

The Attitude Throw: Olympic event where each contestant has ten seconds to throw as much attitude as possible, judged in the areas of artistic interpretation and technical merit.

Gays in the Wild: Lesbians and homosexuals. What do they look like? How do they communicate? How do they behave when we’re not around? This episode explores the secret meeting of the Stonewall Union and the Gay Agenda: shopping, brunch, and destroying the institution of marriage. Join us as National Geographic explores gays in the wild.

You’re My Sister: A touching song about sisterhood and catfights.

Act Two

Tonight: In West Side Story fashion, Maria sings of her love with whom she plans to grow old, cook dinner, watch TV, and adopt cats as she prepares for their second date.

Best Movie #3: I Know Who You Did Lasts Summer… and it made me scream. Gay Moment in History #3: After another rough ride in their boat Meri Weather Fopsalot is tired of Paul Revere’s famous line “The British are coming!” He dreams of the day when the Dandies march to Washington, when Stonewall Jackson comes out and they riot, and when they throw huge parties in the street and drink mass quantities of ale.

Eyewitness to HerStory: A reporter interviews 90-year-old Sophia Kowalski about the remarkable women she met throughout her long life. We learn Sophia was involved on set with Barbara Stanwyck, on the golf course with Babe Didrickson, and on the political circuit with Eleanor Roosevelt… those bitches.

Warning Signs: Are you at risk for Heterosexual Dysfunction? An expert says the tell-tale symptoms in women are being unable to grow hair longer than an inch, lacking a womb, and particularly long ring fingers while in men symptoms include lack of muscle control in the wrists, speech dysfunctions such a lisp, and a distinct lavender coloration in the frontal cortex.

Womyn’s/Wimmin’s/Women’s Festival: Tiffany and Jo search for a place to sit at the Annual Womyn’s/Wimmin’s/Women’s Music Festival, but they find that they don’t fit into the sections reserved for differently-abled, chem-free, smoke-free; the vegans recovering from finding meat in their vegetarian Chinese takeout; or the bisexuals who only sleep with men but get the lesbian discount.

Best Movie #4: The nominees for best film are Sleeveless in Seattle, The Big Frill, 28 Gays, The Flaming of the Shrew, On a Queer Day You Can See Forever, Brunch at Tiffany’s, Florist

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Gump, Mommie Queerest, Shakespeare in Leather, As Good as the Hets, One Cruise over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Around the Mall with 80 Gays, Donnie and Clyde, Fairy Poppins, and I Know Who You Did Last Summer.

Memories: The cat puppet, Leather Pussy, sings a rendition of Andrew Llyod Webber’s “Memories” where the cat wants revenge against her lesbian owner and her new girlfriend. You should never, ever mess with the cat.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Toy Factory: Barbie and G.I. Joe’s toy factory has implemented a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, and both are frustrated with the lie they must now live being forced into heteronormative dress. Who’s to ask? Who’s to tell? Barbie hates to have to grow her hair out, beige and tan just aren’t Joe’s colors, and we’re missing out on a fabulous Drag-Queen Ken!

You Go Girl!: Commercial for a fast food restaurant for gay men on the go and lesbians in a busy world, serving drag queen cuisine with ham and attitude.

Oedipus Regina: A restaging of the first gay play. In this tragedy, Oedipus Regina kills his mother for her fabulous shoes and slept with his father, and for his crimes of passion and fashion he is driven to gouge out his eyes with the heel of Jocasta’s pump.

National Coming Out Day: Rosie O’Donnell, John McD, and Ricky Martin celebrate National Coming Out Day as unconvincing straight celebrities.

Queering the Musical: A musical medley of all of Stephen Sondheim’s closeted characters from My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and Oklahoma. Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, Anita and Maria, and Jud and Curly all get their happy endings.

Tribes 2001

Cast: Frank Barnhart, Dee Shepherd, Beth Kattelman, Stewart Bender, Linda Lee Kennedy, R. Scott Whitaker and Gaye Spetka

Act One:

Bang: An NSYNC-inspired gay pride anthem for a gay sex-positive boy band and girl band

Women of Neverland: Twenty years after Peter Pan brought the Darling children to Neverland, Wendy and Tigerlily catch up at the bar.

Flaming Zombie Queens-Classic Tribes: A horror movie trailer… It was a normal day for Sheila until she found out everyone around her was gay. Flaming Zombie Queens, coming to a society near you.

Gay for Pay: Commercial for book teaching straight men how to play gay.

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Clintonville 43202: Stormy and Lisa host the gals’ weekly encounter group to watch the final episode of Xena, Warrior Princess. As the series ends relationships are on the rocks.

Gay Men Walking: gay men walk through the mall, strut 2, 3, 4, strut, 2, 3, 4.

Relationship Survivor: Jezebel Jumpem, Suzee the Banshee, and Belinda Ballcrusher compete on the gameshow, Who Wants to be my Love Interest. The final question: We’re stranded at the Michigan Women’s Music Festival; how would you take care of me?

GaySpeak 2000-Classic Tribes: Commercial for the GaySpeak 2000 which will help you fit in with your friends of the homosexual persuasion by translating their native tongue.

Gay Network News: Moonbeam Schwartz reports that congress is against gay marriage and 3 states have overturned human rights laws while Gregory Swisher relays the exciting news that for the first time the Gay Pride Holiday will have a Beer Truck.

Psychic Sexual Hotline: Introducing the Call a Hot Psychic Stud Hotline! We overhear the conversations of three men working for the hotline.

F**k Variations: A spoof on Sundance Film festival; the gay romantic comedy genre; and playwright, David Mamet. In a short snippet of dialogue two men use the word “fuck” in all it’s possible meanings.

Meri Weather Fopsalot and Frances Scott Key: Meri Weather Fopsalot, Colonial Dandy’s “explosive weekend” with Francis Scott Key is not going as he hoped. Fopsalot inspires Key to write the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

Deprogramming Timmy: An after school special, Timmy has been rescued from a gay- reformation cult, but he can be saved with the help of Judy Garland and Gloria Gaynor.

It’s Better to be Gay: Sung to the tune of “Cabaret,” the Liza Puppet encourages the audience: ‘don’t be afraid you dykes and fags, come on and wave those rainbow flags’ because it’s better to be gay.

Act Two

Big Sister: A reality TV show spoof of Big Brother where four gay men are forced to live together for three months with cameras recording their every move for America. Big Sister… This fall on CBS. Reality TV that not only bites…it blows!

Uncle Fey’s Neighborhood: A spoof of Mr. Roger’s neighborhood: Uncle Fey invites Butchie- Loo to help him teach the kids about fruit. Miss Lipstick, the UPS driver arrives with the fruit and helps the pair deliver it to Mr. Wiggles, the penis puppet, who has a terrible head cold and sneezes constantly. Uncle Fey offers to warm Mr. Wiggles up and give him some fruit to help with the cold.

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Memories: The cat puppet, Leather Pussy, sings a rendition of Andrew Llyod Webber’s “Memories” where the cat wants revenge against her lesbian owner and her new girlfriend. You should never, ever mess with the cat.

The Poof-Classic Tribes: Commercial for the first scientifically proven gay-dar scrambler, The POOF! By RimCo.

Walk Like a Lesbian: The sister alternative to ‘Gay Men Walking’: Rock like Melissa, hit like Martina, and fist on the hips like Xena.

Damn Twinkies: The Human Rights Campaign and the Log Cabin Republicans softball teams face off.

Politically Correct Kitchen: The Womyn’s Collective Cooperative Cooking Show attempts to make chicken fajitas, but due to different characters’ commitments to political and social issues, they end up only with a single home-garden-grown avocado.

Name that Breeder-Classic Tribes: A game show hosted by the Network for Family Values, the contestants must guess the celebrity based on clues. One thing they have in common: all of these celebrities claim to be straight.

The Bitch Slap: Commercial for The Bitch Slap from RimCo, great for all kinds of conversations from party banter to relationship woes to political debates. Don’t dish the crap if you can’t take the slap!

Gay Network News #2: Gregory Swisher is still concerned about the news of the Beer Truck at Pride. Moonbeam Schwartz interviews Dr. Pat Mywangor from the United Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Transgender/Pre-op/Trisexual Institute of North America about their research on what different groups would do if they had the opposite sex’s genitalia for a day.

Meri Weather Fopsalot and Molly Pitcher: Now that the Revolutionary War is over, Molly Pitcher goes back to her waitressing job. She helps Meri Weather with his relationship woes after all the founding fathers have broken his heart. Meri Weather suggests that an ale cart would make Molly’s job much easier. With his luck, they’ll change the name to Beer Truck.

Homo Jamboree: A song in celebration of Columbus’ growth from a cow town to America’s 14th largest city, ‘all the queerest people are as happy as can be, dancin’ and a singin’ at the homo jamboree.’

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Appendix C: Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd Interview Transcript

January 31, 2018

4:35 pm - 6:45 pm

Frank’s house

Interviewer: Shannon Savard

Interviewees: Frank Barnhart and Dee Shepherd

HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED WITH REALITY?

SS: Alright, so my first question is how did you first get involved with Reality Theatre? How did it come to be?

DS: Well, he called me up and said, hey you wanna start a theatre company [laughs]

FB: Yeah, that is pretty much it, I mean, Dee and I went to undergrad school together so… and we’ve known each other since 19...80. Umm, I had to do the math in my head. And we both graduated at about the same time. Dee graduated in the fall of ‘82 and I graduated in the spring of ‘83… I think I ended up, I ended up in Columbus first. I graduated, I spent the summer of ‘83 working at a theater and moved here because my parents were here at the time. I moved here in the fall and then, I think you [Dee] came up shortly after that cause I think you were staying with your…

DS: I was. I was living at home, and then I moved up here about nine months after.

FB: So we were both in town and I had… I had lived at my parents apartment and eventually, you know, found a job in town, and it was a job that seemed like it was gonna be long term, so I could finally save money and move to get my own place, and that was kind of into like 1985. And that was kind of my… once I knew I had my own place and I was making money or whatever, then that was like, you know, I wanted to do theatre. And there wasn’t, except for community theatre, there wasn’t a whole lot of theatre happening in Columbus at that time. And then it was pretty much, like I said, I called Dee and I said Hey! Wanna start a theater? And she was like, sure! So yeah, that’s… It was 1985… I had to… these are actually in the TRI cause I gave them copies. . So I know you have all that information. I had to look today because I wanted to see the date cause I can never remember. Was it ‘85? Or ‘86? And I’ve got a copy here. I had to make these when I was going up for tenure, so that’s why I’ve got this stuff bound like this. But yeah, there’s the first article that announced that we were going to hold try-outs. And yeah, May the 16th, 1985, “theatre company to hold tryouts. That was, so that was when we got started.

DS: Who wrote that article?

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FB: That was actually in…

DS: What’s her name?

FB: No, this was… There used to be a newspaper called, oh this was, it doesn’t say… This was The Weekender. This was before Michael Grossberg came.

DS: Right, it was.

FB: It was probably either Frank Cabrena or Nancy Gilson. A lot of these early articles, I was just thumbing through that, were written by one of the two of them, so it was before Michael actually came in. But anyway so that was ‘85…

DS: That’s right. Frank Cabrena, he did theatre and Michael came in and Frank moved to movies.

FB: Right, film, he moved to film, yeah. So, it was one of those things where Dee and I had had - -which was real valuable to us-- we had had a lot of experience in undergrad school doing lab shows. Where, you know, you have no money, and you know, you put it together, you direct it. So that experience was real good for us because we didn’t have any money.

SS: The good old zero-budget model.

FB: Exactly. And so the initial--and things evolved and changed, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, over the years--but initially, the idea was that everything we were going to do, we were going to do company-created shows… because there were no royalties to pay on what we were creating ourselves. I lived out in Bexley at the time, and I found--it was with their Parks and Rec- -it was called, they had Jeffrey Mansion. And they gave us the attic of their building to rehearse in. So we had free rehearsal space.

DS: Not nearly as big as you might think an attic in a mansion would be.

FB: No, it was probably not a whole lot bigger than this living room. Maybe the dining room combined.

SS: Oh, wow, that is small.

FB: But that’s where we rehearsed and we… the first couple shows we performed at the YMCA downtown, which we did have to pay for rent, but it was nominal. Yeah so, we were trying to do theatre with no money and there were seven of us. The initial company, we had the two of us and then we cast five other people with the idea that--which is the way that we worked for quite some time--the idea that we were a company and everything would be cast from this company. It started as small and then got a little bit bigger with that concept. Yeah, so there were just seven of us to begin with. That was how it got started. It was five other people who were willing to be like, okay yeah, we’ll give this a shot. [laughs]

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SS: Was it just people who responded to that ad in the paper, or were you calling up friends, or…?

DS: Some of them we knew.

FB: Yeah, two of the people--well, they all auditioned--two of the people who auditioned were people that I knew. One was, I mean I guess we can say names, I don’t… But one was Michael Dutcher who ended up being a company member of ours for years. Cause I had done a children’s theatre piece with him in Columbus, and I knew him and asked him to audition.

DS: That was with [inaudible]?

FB: Yes, and there was Carla Banks was her name, and actually, the job that I worked at with her. And she had done theatre and she was a current… she was a runner-up for Miss Ohio or something like that and she had done some theatre.

DS: I never knew that, HUH! I never knew that.

FB: Yeah so the two of them I knew. One of them Dee knew, Craig.

DS: Craig, yeah. I had met him in an acting class.

FB: And I think it was through that that he auditioned. And then umm Gracie James and Ginny Rousie (sp?) were people who just saw the ad in the paper and called. And there were some other people, obviously, who auditioned. One of them we didn’t use and then came into the second show. That was Cathy.

DS: Right.

FB: I don’t remember who any of the others were, we didn’t cast them.

DS: The only one I remember is Nick *** [laughs]

FB: Yeah, there was Nick. That was somebody who had a connection to Ohio University.

DS: That is why he was there.

FB: So yeah, that was how we broke it down at that point. There was five of us, or the seven of us.

THE FIRST PERFORMANCE SPACE AND FIRST TWO YEARS

DS: And then we--it was Columbus Junior Theatre at the time--they acquired that space over on Park Street. And they were converting it. It was a warehouse. You know, and we were used to doing theatre wherever you can. They were looking for somebody to come in, you know, to kind of help them with the rent. And they… basically it was like, “eventually this will be a

108 performance space.” I mean it was like exposed beams and stuff like that. And that was where we met Larry Sherwood. And we did a couple shows there.

FB: I mean, nobody would ever be able to get away with having...inviting the public into a space today… based on what that space was at that time. But, yeah, Dee’s right. I mean, our very first year we did five shows and the first two shows were at the YMCA and the last three were at what is now called the Columbus Children’s Theater. And it was not the space they’re in now but the… on the corner of the same street, on the corner of Park Street. And it was, it had been some sort of a warehouse or something, but it had exposed wiring and two-by-fours where the walls had been torn down.

DS: Like “We’re gonna have drywall here! But not yet.”

FB: And so you know, they built wooden platforms--They were going to eventually turn it into a theater, which they did ultimately do several years later--and you know, inexpensive lighting. We did shows there.

DS: What was her name? What was the name of the artistic director, it’s been driving me crazy.

FB: It was Helen Fashbaw (sp?)

DS: Helen Fashbaw, GOD, thank you.

FB: who ran the Children’s Theatre at that time, but that was our first year. And we felt that it was… it’s not like we were making tons of money, we weren’t but after that first year we felt that we were kind of doing well enough that our second season we moved into our space which was our home the entire rest of the time that we were there. That was the one in Pearl Alley. That kind of happened through… the Short North at that time was really just starting, and they were renovating spaces and were like begging artists to come in and do things because they wanted to get it going. So rents were very inexpensive and we had done an event that took place in Goodale Park, and I happened to meet Sandy Wood who was the developer at that time. I told them who I was and how we were looking to do theatre, and he was like, well I’ve got a warehouse just off of High. And we talked about what we could afford and they actually went in and sort of cut up the warehouse and gave us the space that we needed. And for years it was $500 a month, which actually in the late ‘80s, you know, was not cheap--by today’s standards it’s like nothing--but he gave us for $500 a month and that’s what our rent was for several years there before it started to increase with, as the neighborhood grew. But we were there until, I don’t know, Dee, I was thinking about this today, Dee left in the fall of ‘97 and I left in the spring of ‘98. And it was still operating when we left, so I think it stayed in that space until about 2000.

DS: Yeah, and then they started, well, they started having this thing going with Red Herring.

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FB: And Axis, I mean, they combined, but I still think that after 2000 or so, they couldn’t afford the space anymore. They moved over to Axis, and I didn’t really follow them much after that. It was either 2002 or 2003 that the company finally went out of business.

SS:Oh, I did not know that. I had records up to 1995

FB: Yeah, oh, well, there’s-r. Kattelman, Beth would have some too. I actually donated a bunch of stuff last year. And I think that, Beth, they set up the archive, it’s actually under my name because it’s also stuff I [inaudible]. It’s got a lot of Reality Theatre stuff in it. And it should have stuff that goes at least, I think, up until ‘98. You know, then I wouldn’t have anything beyond that. They didn’t do much, even though they were kind of around in name until 2002 or 2003, they really weren’t doing much at that point. So, I think they just, they just didn’t have a lot of money.

SS: That makes sense that things would kind of drop off.

FB: Yeah, they would like announce shows then they would never happen and stuff, so there may not be a lot that’s in the recs. There might be some stuff that the Dispatch archives, but yeah they were definitely gone by 2003.

DS: Yeah, I don’t know anybody that went to the Axis shows.

FB: So that’s how we got started.

ROLES IN THE COMPANY

SS: Alright! Cool, cool. So I guess my next question is--I have so many...but I want to make sure that I get to the ones that I wrote down--How would you describe your role in the company?

DS: I took the trash out.

FB: You took the trash out? [laughs]

DS: Cleaned the bathrooms

FB: I mean, we eventually--I’m not sure what we did initially.

DS: Well, we were co-artistic directors at first.

FB: Early on we landed on, Dee was the artistic director and I was producing director, and these were the titles that both of us had until both of us actually left the organization. And I think, I think we operated--well, obviously we shared all kinds of stuff--we pretty much operated within those titles, you know. Dee chose seasons and that sort of stuff and hired directors and things and I wrote grants and stuff. So, I mean, we did kinda fit into those two managerial roles, even though it wasn’t like we both didn’t talk about everything.

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DS: And we both directed, and we both acted. I mean as time went on we basically went away from the company thing, I know that I myself, I just concentrated more on directing, you know, because I didn’t feel right about taking a role from an actor. You know, if there’s somebody who can do it. Unless it was a GAY show. If it was a GAY show, i had to be in it. Because, you know, it was really hard to find straight women who would be like “okay”. But in terms of like a non-gay show, but it was, god like 13 years before I was in something like that.

FB: Yeah but we both, we both directed down there a lot over the years. We acted a lot over the years. But we also did--I mean, what Dee said definitely rings true-the trash, the bathrooms, and…I painted the lobby floor more times that I can count, you know, and always trying to… We never had a lot of money--money did get better over time--but always trying to improve the space whenever possible. You know, I mean, we used to be just a bunch of folding chairs, for a long time, and then we were able to raise the money to actually get nicer chairs to sit in, being able to build seating risers. You know what I mean? You know, finally getting some black curtains, just over the years doing something to make it more of a black box performance space and not just a warehouse.

DS: Yeah, and it’s not--I mean, it’s very easy now to go online and find used curtains. Not so easy in the 1980s and ‘90s. Prior to the internet solution, you had to call somebody down at Shell Scenic and see [...]

FB: But, I was thinking about a lot of this stuff because I knew this was coming up--and I think that Dee would agree with me in that I am absolutely certain that in most of the years of Reality Theatre, maybe not all of them, but most of them, I was in that building more than I was in my own home.

DS: Absolutely.

FB: And there were--and I know that Dee did as well--I would have a regular job where I would work like the midnight to eight shift and I remember getting off at eight o’clock in the morning and driving down there and sleeping on a couch in the space because I had to do stuff in the afternoon. And because we would be…

DS: I was working downtown. I would get downtown a half hour early and, you know at that time you were able to actually park downtown, and I’d park at Reality, go in, check the messages, then I’d go to work. And then I’d get off work, go back to the theatre, check the messages again and get ready for rehearsal and what-have-you and just never go home.

FB: Because even if we weren’t directing or acting, we were still always there because you had to unlock the space, you had to answer the phones, you had to run the box office. And, you know, we were doing full seasons. I mean, at the height of what we were doing, I think we were doing about seven shows a year.

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DS: We did nine.

FB: Yeah, well yeah, there was one year we did nine and so we were just there all the time every night of the week, maybe with the exception of Sundays. You know, we were just always there, so yeah it was a lot of time we spent down there just doing all of the other things that had to be done. I mean that just became--my husband, Dan, we’ve been together 30 years so he… we’ve been together almost as long as Reality…actually, I met him through Reality Theatre, but I mean, I got tired of hearing him say, “Do you have to go to the theatre tonight?” you know or “when are you gonna get home?” I mean, there were times when--because we would also have company meetings and things like that--and then all of a sudden you get talking and it’s 10:00. And he’s like, okay well I made dinner and you weren’t here, you know. It’s sort of, I mean it was just, it took a lot of time. I don’t miss the time. I don’t miss having to spend that much time trying to make theatre happen. [laughs]

DS: But at least we liked each other.

FB: Yeah, and we were younger so it was easier. [laughs]

DS: We liked each other, we had more energy.

SS: Is that space still there?

DS: [laughs]

FB: The shell of the building is still there.

DS: Mona Lisa’s still there.

FB: They turned it into condos.

SS: Oh, okay.

FB: But the actual Mona Lisa mural that was on the end of it--it’s still there. But yeah, it was a Kwanza-hut building. They gutted the entire building and basically just kept the two ends of it and then built those condos in there between.

DS: Yeah, because when we were down there, the front of the building was Women Against Rape and the back end of the building was us.

FB: Yeah, and I think WAR was there almost the entire time we were there. So yeah it was just… Any time we ever did a show, we got to the point where we knew this and so we would let them know that any time we did a show where there would be a character, a female character, who screamed, all of a sudden somebody would be pounding on our door and it was the Women Against Rape and they were wanting to make sure everything was okay. So we got to the point

112 where we had to let them know, “for the next three weeks at 8:15 pm there will be a female screaming.” [laughs]

DS: Yeah, they were great gals.

FB: Oh, yeah they were wonderful, and next door and stuff… but, yeah, I’d almost forgotten about that.

DS: Yeah, HAHA!

FB: But, yeah, the building technically is still there, but it’s not a warehouse anymore. It’s… been turned into condos.

DS: Hopefully they fixed the wiring.

SS: Did you ever end up working at all with the Women Against Rape? Would they come to see the shows or was it just kind of like a “we’re in our separate spaces”?

DS: We went and got their material and stuff like that. We had this, you know, a lot of community stuff. And I remember we got their material, but they weren’t theatre people.

SS: Fair.

FB: I don’t remember, and I don’t ever think we did, I don’t remember anything that we did that was like in conjunction with them or--because there were over the years some different groups: Doctors’ Hospital, different places where we did projects that somehow were in conjunction with someone, but I don’t remember that ever happening with that particular organization. We just co- existed in the same…

DS: We’d just display their material.

FB: In fact, when they moved out--this was when I was still there but left shortly afterwards--but when they moved out, Reality Theatre actually took over some of their space.

DS: This was after our time.

FB: That’s right, I was gone too. I just ended up doing a show and using the space, but it was an Act Out Productions show. But that was part… and then Reality Theatre just--this was also after our time-- they ended up taking over even more of their space which is part of why their rents got so enormous that they couldn’t afford--because I know at one point they were paying over $4000 a month in rent.

DS: [whistles]

SS: Wow.

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DS: I forgot about that.

FB: That organization could never sustain that rent. You know, you just can’t do enough 99-seat theatre, you know, and pay $4000 a month.

SS: Alright, every night, show every night.

FB: Yeah [laughs]

DS: ‘Cause they didn’t expand their seating any, did they?

FB: Uhn-uh… but anyway, so…

WHO ELSE WAS DOING THIS?

SS: So part of kind of my purpose of this project is to document theatre that was happening--I guess I’m focusing on the Midwest, as opposed to gay and lesbian theatre happening in New York or San Francisco, L.A., which is all the theatre history about this is written. Were you aware of any other companies doing similar work to you guys?

DS: In the Midwest? I mean we knew there was some stuff happening in Chicago, but I mean, you know, again, it’s not like you have access to the internet. We knew Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco.

FB: We used to get--and I don’t think it exists anymore, it grew into something else--but there was something that was called the Purple Circuit, which Bill Kaiser was the person who ran it. He was out of California, and we were on the Purple Circuit. And so we would get their mailings and their newsletters and it would list our shows. So we could see a lot of different theatre companies, and some of the ones like Theatre Rhinoceros or Baileywick or Richmond Triangle Players and some of the ones that… but it was still, it was still like further removed. I don’t recall ever being aware of, like when I think of what’s the Midwest, I don’t remember there being, you know anything that was like close. There was… well and see, this is part of it as well, we never… We never self-identified as a gay and lesbian theatre company. That’s pretty much, I mean, I think we even kind of thought that ourselves, but unlike Evolution Theatre here and what they do, they identify as LGBTQ, we never did. It was just a big part of our work. And so even on the Purple Circuit, I think they always listed us as being “gay friendly,” or something like that, or allies. We never were listed as that. Because I know also, Cleveland had… I don’t think it was Caramou (sp?) House...there was, I forget which company it was… I don’t know if it’s still there. They did a lot of gay and lesbian theatre as well, but it’s the same thing. They weren’t identified as that.

DS: And the main reason why was not because, you know, “oh god, we were afraid of it.” But we didn’t want to do just gay and lesbian plays, basically. I mean that’s what it all boiled down

114 to. Dedication to providing gay and lesbian theatre, that was in our… part of our mission statement.

HOW THEY DEFINED THEMSELVES

FB: Yeah, it was part of our mission, but we always… When we initially started we self- identified as an experimental theatre, and we kept that for a while. But then when we started moving into other things--I remember when people would always ask what we referred to ourselves as--it was an off-off-broadway style theatre. You know, we were doing contemporary theatre. Of course, we didn’t call ourselves that. There was already a theater in town that was calling themselves that, but but we were doing contemporary plays that were… that you would tend to see more on off-off-Broadway than you would on Broadway or on off-Broadway.

DS: And we also wouldn’t do anything that had been performed in town within the last four years. We were very specific about that.

FB: And then we had--and there were different--within that, there were different phases that we went through and changed because there for a while we did a lot of camp. And we really kind of- -I mean, once again, it was just one of those genres that we were dealing with. We did a lot of different plays that fit into that category. We also, we eventually moved into what we were calling the contemporary classics, which is where Agnes of God and Equus and Elephant Man and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf… where all those fit in as well. So, you know, there were lots of different types of theatre that we were doing. But, we were also the premiere theatre in Columbus that had a primary focus on LGBTQ theatre… course, we didn’t use that term, all those letters weren’t used in those days. It was like you basically said gay and lesbian and that was it.

DS: See we were… you know in those first couple seasons, we were actually creating shows. We did a show called Neon which was basically poetry, monologues, and some music all about street life. And at least one of those characters was gay. I think it was you. Wasn’t your character gay?

FB: He, well, he was a street hustler, a prostitute, but yeah so he would, I think he would.

THE FIRST GAY PLAY

DS: That kinda came into it, and then we were at Mel’s one night, I think--which was a bar, which is where…

FB: Melman’s

DS: Melman’s, Which was where the Greek Orthodox Church is now. It was a hole-in-the-wall bar, and I think you said, “We should do a show about gay people” and I went “oKAY”. And that was--it was a created show--called Tribes.

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FB: And that was the last show of our second season.

DS: And that was, that was, again, it was poetry and monologues, sketches, some drama, some comedy. Comedy was very, very popular, and then we started doing just the comedy in Tribes.

FB: So Tribes was, that was the show that was at the end of our second season. And it sold out. We couldn’t sell tickets fast enough. I mean, it was just… And that was the first show that we’d had like that. That was when we realized that, Oh, there’s actually an audience, there’s actually a market for this… Something that I--and I don’t know if Dee remembers this or not. She probably will when I talk about it, and I don’t know if it was around the time of Tribes. I’m not exactly sure what the date was. But just in the nature of how and what we were doing and the times--Dee and I… there used to be a gay bar downtown called Garage and the front part of it was a piano bar--Dee and I were both there one evening having a drink. This was the day that Roy Cohn had died, who you know, he had died from AIDS and was very anti-gay in all of his politics but was gay…

DS: No, he was a closeted homosexual. I refuse to call that man gay. He doesn’t deserve the term.

FB: But so one of the local news stations was wanting to interview people about this who were going in or out of The Garage. Well, this was still in the ‘80s and nobody wanted to be on camera because they would be self-identified as gay on camera. And I don’t remember who he was, I think he was… He knew who both of us was… Somebody who worked with the TV station, like as a camera person or something knew Dee and myself and came in and said, we can’t get anyone to talk to us for this news story about Roy Cohn dying. Would the two of you be willing to do it? Keep in mind that we were already doing gay and lesbian theatre, and neither one of us would do it because we thought, well, because of our theatre company… so we didn’t do it either because we were thinking about, well, the company and we don’t want to be self- identified... And I’ve always looked back on that and been like, you know? It’s weird to think that that was our reaction to it, but not when you consider the time. You know?

DS: We’re not wanting the place to get fire bombed.

FB: Yeah, I mean because we had… we never really had protests. Every once in a while there’d be like a weird phone call or something. But still there were… after a certain point… There were actors in town who eventually we did work with on shows who were like, oh I could just never do a show at Reality Theatre because people are going to think I’m gay if I work there.

DS: Even if you’re doing a show that isn’t, you know, gay-specific or anything like that. It was like “oh, no, no, somebody might think I’m queer” (imitates nervous laugh)

FB: And I can remember--and this was 1990, so we were just starting to move into the ‘90s with things--and we did a double bill. We got to the point where we always did Pride Month. We

116 always did a Gay Pride Month play of some sort. And so we did a double bill in ‘90 of The Well of Horniness and T-Shirts. And we had a window box at that point out of the theater that advertised shows, and we just had a big poster that was made and it said “GAY PLAYS”.

DS: [laughs]

FB: And I can remember one of the actresses in the show, Linda Kennedy, who at that time was married to a man, and her husband drops her off and as she said, he goes, “Wow, they just really put it right out there for everyone to see, don’t they?” You know, the fact that you just walk down the street and it said GAY PLAYS, you know?

DS: And that wasn’t the first show she’d ever done there

FB: No, but it was the first one that she did, that I guess she was in that just really, you know… But instead of advertising the titles we just said this is GAY [laughs] So I guess that’s just kind of how the times sort of changed. I mean, like I said we never did--I mean there was never once that we had people protesting any of our stuff… But there was still just that, for some people, that stigma.

THE OFF-DUTY COP

DS: Well we got a couple. There were a couple of times where we’d get weird phone calls and…

FB: Well, yeah we did have that.

DS: And some strange things, you know, so we just nipped it in the bud and got an off duty cop to come.

FB: Yeah, we did

DS: Cause it actually wasn’t really that expensive

FB: And it was actually for that particular show that there were a couple of weird phone calls so we hired an off duty police officer to be in the audience.

DS: Which isn’t the only reason he was there, he actually wanted to watch the show. [laughs]

FB: He said, can I watch the show? We were like, sure. This was, if you don’t mind [inaudible] my first nude scene in a show at Reality Theatre. He literally sits right where I had to… so I’m like taking off my clothes and basically my butt is in this police officer’s face!

DS: Yeah, ‘cause we had an empty seat in the first row, and he was like basically “if you’ve got any empty chairs…” you know, nice fella. So yeah, we were like, we got that one right there if you wanna go in and have a seat. So he comes in and sits down and you just feel this wave over the audience. The people in the audience are going “...oh my god...is this? This is just like Cincinnati,” you know?

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FB: Well, see, and that’s the thing was that it was 1990. That was the year of the whole NEA 4, the National Endowment of the Arts. And in fact, we were--there was a pre-recorded message that Kathleen Turner had done that the NEA had sent to theatre companies all over the country asking them to play before the show started. It was all about the art police and all these sorts of things, and so before the show, all the lights would dim to half, we would play this very ominous thing and then the show would start. It was just a way to make the audience aware, and so the audience thought that the police officer was there…

DS: To raid us! [laughs]

FB: Because of all the NEA stuff… and then, you know, I couldn’t tell because I was out in the show acting, but I guess, obviously, the moment that I took off my clothes, all 90 people in the theatre, actually, they were watching me, they were watching the police officer to see what his reaction was. Because I was, I was that close to him. [laughs]

SOME THINGS ABOUT COLUMBUS

DS: See, Columbus never really had the same kind of difficulties that Cincinnati had about that sort of thing. There were some really… I mean, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park is the premiere sort of theatre in Cincinnati and it’s an equity company, been around for years, and--I don’t remember what show we were doing--but at the time, that sheriff down there, basically, came in and wanted to shut down a production, a professional production, of Equus. Not because of the female nudity, because of the boy’s nudity.

FB: And then the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati--which I believe is still down there, they came along around the same time we did and CATCO and things--they would do, you know, some contemporary plays too and they did a production of Poor Super Man a few years ago, many years ago, and it’s got gay characters in it, and it’s got male nudity and the police down there tried to raid it and shut it down. Nothing like that ever happened here. For as conservative as what Columbus was, and the stories I’ve heard, by the time we got here and moving into the ‘80s and things, it started to, you know, become much more liberal in terms of the people’s attitudes toward… everything. And I mean it’s the case with Gay Pride, I mean, one of the largest Gay Prides in the country happens in Columbus, Ohio, so…

DS: I think a lot of that has to do with… that there are so many universities and colleges in Columbus, Ohio, and at that time the average age of people in Columbus was 27.

SS: Wow.

DS: In the ‘80s that was the average age. And when I moved up here--I can’t remember exactly when it started-- but there was a really strong Women’s Studies degree and department at OSU, and I think that just kind of like spilled over.

REALITY AS A SPACE FOR THE GAYS

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FB: One of the things that happened with Reality Theatre--and I didn’t really… I don’t think I knew this at the time because when you’re in the middle of it you don’t really recognize it, and it’s really been through comments that I’ve heard even after Dee and I left and then looking back on things--part of I think the success of the theatre when we started doing more LGBTQ work was that there still at that time in Columbus, even into the ‘90s, there wasn’t a whole lot in the city for gay and lesbian people to do outside of going to the bars. And so they would come to Reality Theatre to see plays. And in some ways it was sort of a safe environment for them because if their friends asked them the next day “what did you do last night,” they could say I went to the theater, as opposed to I went to a gay bar, I went to a bar. But you would, you would see couples come and you’d be performing plays and there would be same sex couples out there holding hands or have their arms around each other because it was a place that they could do that. I didn’t really have any sort of sense of the impact of that--and this was just a few years ago--Dee and I were at… because I did the Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival for about six years and I had a booth down at gay pride and Dee was down there helping me and we were handing out flyers. There was an article--so this would’ve been in maybe 2006--it was an article in the Dispatch that Michael Grossberg had written that was sort of about gay theatre history in Columbus and he had mentioned Reality Theatre. The amount of people at Pride who came up to us and who had seen the article and was talking about how much they missed Reality Theatre and what it meant to them when that was there. And I mean, I’ve had people that I met many years afterwards who said, you know, I came out because of--and someone and I don’t remember who they were--but there was somebody who was like, “I was seventeen years old and I was driving, I would drive to Columbus to see shows at Reality Theatre. And we had--I don’t wanna name names of anybody in our audience--but we had an older gentleman. Dee knows who I’m talking about--who always came by himself, and he lived in Marion, Ohio, and he would catch the bus from Marion and take a Greyhound bus to Columbus to see our plays. Always came by himself, was always, you know? And there were just people, people like that, it was always a place for them to go and to be comfortable and to be surrounded by… and there weren’t any other opportunities at that time other than going to the bars. You know? And this, you know, this all pre-dates, you know, Will and Grace and Ellen and all these other, you know? So… or even films. I mean, you know, you didn’t really have… or if you did have a film that dealt with those themes, it was an independent film that was shown in one of the art houses, but it wasn’t shown, you know? But there were very few places to go, and so we… we filled that need, you know, at that time.

CHANGES IN ACCEPTANCE IN THE PUBLIC EYE

DS: And I mean, we would go out to the bars to promote the shows too, you know. Set up a table, the Eagle was always really good about that. That was a bar that was on Third Street which is now some kind of office furniture joint.

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FB: yeah, but marketing was very… was very easy at that time because you, as I said, you knew where your audience was. And so hanging up some posters at the bar actually generated audience for us.

DS: We’d set up a table and hand out flyers. There were a lot more free publications that people would pick up and actually read, you know where you could list your shows and thing like that, and there were, you know, gay newspapers.

FB: And you know the one thing is, I never felt that Dee and I leaving Reality Theatre. I never felt we had anything to do with Reality Theatre ultimately going out of business. I think Reality Theatre even if Dee and I would’ve stayed it would’ve still gone out of business because needs changed and times changed, and all of a sudden the stuff that we were doing became more mainstream. You know, you didn’t have to go just to Reality Theatre to see a gay-themed play. You could see it at just about any theatre in town. You could go to Academy Award-nominated movies dealing with it, so it’s the same reason why, you know, we used to have gay and lesbian bookstores in town. It’s like they’re gone too.

DS: I will say this: I think, you know, we could’ve evolved. I think fundraising and like grants sort of things would’ve been easier because I know that there are people now who are basically doing just gay theatre who have a lot more grant opportunities than we ever did… because, you know, it’s not so “EEK! We can’t give you money for a gay play! Oh my God!” you know? That whole diversity thing, which was not available to us…

FB: I guess my point is that I don’t

DS: But I totally get what you’re saying.

THE BUILT-IN AUDIENCE

FB: It was more about… we had this built-in audience that followed us, and just like us, the audience got older. They moved on. We had audience at that time--what are we talking about? It must be twenty plus years, thirty years ago.

DS: Yeah, I don’t know if we could’ve. I don’t know if we could’ve continued to keep up with the kids because I mean, even though we did have a pretty big wide expansive age, you’ve gotta admit, especially in terms of the gay community.

FB: There are the people--I mean, we had audiences then, that some of them were the age that we are now, you know? So I think about, much like with Evolution Theatre in town--which is a company that I love by the way--they’re having, they have a difficult time, even though they’re self-identified as LGBTQ, actually building an audience base. They can’t, they can’t trust that there’s going to be a guaranteed audience for each show because there’s so many choices now. And younger people, younger people don’t operate the same way that younger people did. The whole idea of subscribing to a series and making plans that far out in advance. Young people--I

120 know because I teach them every day--they just don’t operate that way, and social media’s, you know, what am I doing tonight? And on their phones.

DS: Remember Michael? We had a consultant way back. Michael London, remember him? And I remember him being in our living room and saying it’s kind of like, you know, “offer season subscriptions, but the type of theatre you guys are doing, it’s gonna be single ticket sales.” He’s like, “offer subscriptions and all that, but don’t depend on ‘em because what you’re gonna have is single ticket buyers.”

FB: True, it was single ticket, but at the same time it was single ticket buyers that we could count on. We could almost--I mean, obviously some shows sold better than others, but we could almost always count on there being at least a base that was going to be there. Especially, not so much our first four or five years, but once we got into the ‘90s we pretty much always had a consistent base. And, you know, some shows are just all of a sudden “where are all of these people coming from?” [laughs] and then you do another show and it’s like, “where did all of those people go?” Yet the base was still there.

DS: Yeah, I mean, like in ‘97, ‘98, I noticed that suddenly during Gay Pride Month there’s a lot more stuff to do that it almost made more sense to me… it was I don’t know if we should do our big gay show… I mean the BIG GAY show [FB laughs] in June rather than maybe in July and promote that show in June.

FB: Which that’s what we did because I remember when we did Jeffrey, we didn’t do Jeffrey in June. We promoted it in June and then, once again, played to like sell-out houses.

DS: To let people know this was happening because at that time it was like “this is happening! This is happening!” Because you had to be… There was like no Gay pride Month. It was like, there’s a march. “Here’s a march and let’s go to the bar.” and that was it. But then it came to be, you know, much much more, and it was kind of like, let’s promote during this month.

SOME OF THE PIECES THEY DID AND HOW THEY CHOSE THEM

FB: But we did… in the time that Dee and I were there, and really if you’re talking gay and lesbian theatre, it was really a period of about ten years at most… during those ten years, Reality Theatre did, I think, just about every well-known...

DS: Decent.

FB: gay and lesbian theatre piece that there was. Not only were we doing the recent ones that had just come out, like Jeffrey and Party and some of those but we also did Torch Song Trilogy. We also did Falsettos. We did Boys in the Band. You know, we did Kiss of the Spiderwoman, the non-musical version. I mean, we just...if it was out there, you know, we were doing it...The only one that we didn’t… the only one at the time that was… It was Love! Valor! Compassion! Because CATCO got it before we did.

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DS: Because they were equity and they could grab it.

FB: And they were wanting to cash in on the gay and lesbian thing [laughs].

DS: Yeah, because somebody came to see Jeffrey, and people were like busting out of the rafters. And he was going “Uh-huh, okay”

FB: But we did and…

DS: Once a decade CATCO will do a gay show.

FB: Yeah, and I mean we did a lot of Charles Busch’s pieces, we did Charles Ludlam’s pieces, and we really did… We did Paula Vogel’s stuff. There’s just so many, and I mean, if it was there…

DS: And I mean, you know, we would research. We did this one show called Coming Soon which was written by--it was sort of a gangster farce written by British playwright whose name escapes me. That was fun, you know, tracking her down. You know, it’s like midnight and I’m calling England to get performance rights for that show ‘cause there’s no internet! There’s no email!

FB: We found a lot of--and well, Dee did. She’s the one who--a lot of them… because lesbian plays, plays dealing with lesbian themes were just harder to come by. But I mean, Coming Soon and Movie Queens, and I don’t remember the one.

DS: Spare Parts.

FB: Spare Parts. And then there was the one that…

DS: That was actually published in like Sam French, which was really unusual.

FB: And then there was the one that I think Kathy Girvis and Lori was in where they were a lesbian couple but the one wanted to get pregnant.

DS: That was Spare Parts.

FB: Oh, that was Spare Parts. What was the one with the…?

DS: Walking the Dead.

FB: Oh, that’s right, Walking the Dead, with the…

DS: Which dealt with transgender…

FB: And being murdered, and yeah. I mean there was like… It was like we were really--and like I said that was Dee artistically but just really finding these pieces and bringing them in that…

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DS: We tried to…

FB: These are pieces that nobody would have, you know, would’ve seen.

DS: I mean, you know, when you try to…”Okay, this is going to be a big show and that’s gonna be a big show and this is gonna be a big show, so we’re gonna put this little show right in here, kinda cushion that ‘cause it’s a good show, but it’s not Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. We did Street Theatre by Doric Wilson.

FB: And you know, that was like, it was also kinda how things changed as well because initially all we had to do was say “gay plays” and people would show up. Well, as things became more prominent, it’s like, well yeah, there were the big name plays that people had heard of and came to those. But because it was a gay or lesbian-themed play didn’t guarantee an audience, so we had to make sure that we sandwiched some of these ones that were not household names, you know, to be able to try and find audiences for them. I think on the whole we did that pretty well.

DS: I think so. I mean, and plus, we wouldn’t do a show just because it was gay. It would have to be good. You know, I mean I’ve seen some things and I’m like, I would’ve never have picked that show because it’s stupid. [laughs] It’s just bad. And you know, I felt a special… I felt a lot of responsibility too, especially for shows that were lesbian themed. Not that you wanted it to be “uplifting!” you know, and of course we wanted drama, conflict, like doing all of that, but I don’t want anybody just killing themselves on stage. You know what I’m saying? I mean, so that was the great thing about Well of Horniness.

FB: Which I think we actually staged like three different times.

DS: Oh yeah!

FB: It was just way too popular.

DS: Funny show. It’s still funny. It’s still funny. It could still stand up today.

A BIT ABOUT TRIBES

FB: And we did that. We did--not many, there were a couple revivals that we did where they were popular and we decided to do them again. And then Tribes, which Dee mentioned, we constantly kept coming back to that and updating it.

DS: And doing new sketches. Because then it became comedy of Tribes.

FB: Initially, probably the first two or three that we did, it was a combination of comedy and dramatic pieces as well, and then it just turned into all sort of like sketch comedy, which is what the audiences liked. And, you know, we would poke fun at… I mean, we made fun of ourselves, it wasn’t just--I mean, yes, we made fun of straight people too--but it’s like we also made fun of all these things within our own culture.

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DS: We used to go to the bars a lot, so that’s where a lot of our ideas would come from.

FB: And you know, audiences, those almost always sold out. And we’d just announce it. We got to the point where we would do one every couple of years, and, yeah, I mean, people would come to them. They really enjoyed those.

DS: I mean, we just noticed that people really liked the funny stuff, and the first one of those that we did that was Comedy of Tribes, we wrote new sketches and then we took the funniest sketches from the past couple ones that we’d done and we glommed it together. It was always like, first act was 45 minutes, 45-50 minutes and the second act was 45-50 minutes because when we first did Tribes we did it in the summertime and we had no air conditioning. [laughs]

FB: Well, I do know that…

SS: Michael Grossberg was very unhappy about that. He complained about it the entire article. I was like, I’m trying to figure out what this show was about, man!

FB: And I do know that in the archival stuff that I donated last year, that’s under my name… I don’t know how they file things at the TRI, but there was a binder this thick [shows with hands] that has every sketch ever written for Tribes all of the years, and that includes once Dee and i left Reality Theatre, I was still doing Act Out Productions and we did two different Tribes when I was there. There was a Tribes with Act Out Productions, and that included those sketches too. We used to, which is kind of true, but it got to the point where we used to bill it as “the longest- running gay play in America” because the first one we did was in 1986 and in 2001 we were still doing it. So every couple of years we would, you know, come back with some new stuff and… and it was sort of like doing Saturday Night Live, you know, but all gay. All gay and lesbian stuff.

DS: Some of that stuff was really funny. I look back on it and I’m like, that was pretty damn clever, if I do say so myself.

FB: So yeah, we were always, you know, adding those into our schedules and things as well, as far as our seasons of shows.

SS: Can I ask kind of what the process was of putting Tribes together in the first place?

FB: You mean the very first one, or just in general?

SS: In general, I guess.

FB: Well, I mean, once we knew who our cast was… and over the years anyway the cast kind of became consistent. I mean there were several people who did many of them. I think Dee and I were in every single one of them.

DS: Yeah, you know, because you had to find. It wasn’t easy to find women.

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FB: We would, we would just talk about what’s some of the stuff that’s going on? You know, what’s in the news right now? What’s happening locally? Things like that. And you know different ones of us would write and would put the sketches together and we would workshop them.

DS: Sometimes, especially with sketches--and this was basically the same kind of formula we would use for those early created shows--okay, this is the theme and what do we want to have happen? And it was easier with Tribes and Neon because it was like episodic. It was like sketches and stuff. It was like Neon was “street life,” and then it was like, “okay, who is your character? Dadadada.”

DS: With Tribes, it was like, “okay, it’s gotta be gay. It’s gotta be gay, so…” and like I said, the first one dramatic and comedic. And then there’s music…It’s like okay, this needs to happen first: this is the story that we’re trying to tell. I know when it was like a scripted show, and we did two or three of those, Frank was like, “okay, so this is the synopsis, and then unknown stuff…”

FB: Yeah, I would always say “and then we have unknown stuff here” [laughs].

DS: But with like the sketches and stuff a lot of the times we would improv.

FB: I forgot about unknown stuff.

DS: Improv and then a lot of times… I would go write it.

FB: Yeah, and then the thing of it was almost always, which is why a lot of the stuff that we did was funny for the time—it wouldn’t necessarily be funny today. So much of it was tied to what was going on. There was one that we—I guess this would’ve been 1998—it’s when the Olympics was happening in Atlanta, so we had a whole sketch that was the “Cruise Olympics.” And it was the Olympics of how to cruise and pick people up at the bar. And even to the extent that even, that was when Carrie Straub, you know, sprained her ankle when she was doing the dismount and still stuck the landing, and so my character, after I had done a successful cruising, stuck the landing and sprained my ankle. Everybody was all… it was all tied to that.

DS: That was funny.

FB: I was talking about when CATCO did Love! Valor! Compassion!

DS: I was just thinking about that sketch the other day.

FB: And we… every gay actor in town, myself included, wanted to be in that show and a lot of us, we actually auditioned and we were called back and they didn’t cast any of us. In fact, it was almost an entirely heterosexual cast. And so we had a sketch that was a support group for gay men who had never been cast in Love! Valor! Compassion! And the thing was, was that it was

125 enough in the community that the audience found it funny because they knew exactly what it was that we were spoofing.

DS: And that was, god I can’t even remember. I wrote a serenity prayer for it. Yeah, I was the moderator for that.

FB: And we had like, we would a lot of these little like… I remember I wrote these, but we would do a lot of like commercials, almost like the… and I was like the announcer with the “how many times has this happened to you” sort of thing. And for that one it was, I was an announcer and my name was Guy Manly: I’m not a homosexual but I play one on TV, and it was all about this new book I’d written called Playing Gay for Pay. And it was all still tied to what was going on—that you’re casting straight people in these gay roles.

DS: GaySpeak 2000.

FB: Yeah, GaySpeak 2000, which you know…

DS: Which would translate gay talk.

FB: Yeah, it would translate, so when you’re talking to a gay…

DS: “It’s so exciting!!”

FB: It also came with a “snap-tionary” with the meaning of the snap back and the around the world snap [snapping, laughs]

DS: “Spritzer!”

FB: Then we had one sketch that we did for two or three years, but this goes back to, you know, this was before a time where movie stars were coming out of the closet. And there was all this talk about, you know, well John Travolta’s gay and Tom Cruise is gay. I mean they’re just not coming out. And we had a game show that was called “Name that Breeder.”

DS: [laughs] I forgot that.

FB: Even Martina hadn’t come out yet at that point. And so it was like this redneck contestant and this over-the-top gay man. So the game was called “Name that Breeder,” and every single person that the answer to was already in the public, like Martina, was thought of that they were gay. So the gay man keeps guessing what he thinks are the right answers.

DS: The gay man keeps saying straight people.

FB: He keeps saying straight people because the show is called “Name that Breeder.” And the redneck keeps naming these people, and he’s like winning the game, but these are all like gay people.

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DS: Until he finally clues in.

FB: Until he finally clues in and he asks who sponsors this show and it has something to do with “family values” and then the gay guy’s like “oh, I get it” and then they have like a lightning round and he’s just like hitting this buzzer and he’s getting all these people. Because it’s like, oh, they really are gay. These people just think that they’re straight.

DS: Yeah, I can’t remember that one tag because the gay fella says something and host goes “well, isn’t that great, even if I don’t know what it means!” [laughs] I can’t remember how it went.

FB: And we did… Our very first Tribes that we did… and we’re just talking about how things were created. Somebody made, somebody in the cast made some comment about telling somebody they were gay and somebody being shocked or something like that, and we did this sketch that was called “Flaming Zombie Queens.” And it was a horror movie. I was the announcer for that too, but it was that you had the character of Sheila, and the announcer says, “It started out as a normal day for Sheila until…” and the thing of it is that through the course of her day, everyone that she meets is gay. Her hairdresser, you know. And when they say they’re gay she screams, and the announcer would come in and say things like, you know, “Flaming zombie queens, they’re behind the door, they’re under the bed, they’re out of the closet,’ that sort of thing, you know? [laughs] But so it was like this horror movie but it was gay.

DS: It was backed up with “Night on Bald Mountain” music.

FB: And then a few years later, a different version that was called “The Attack of the Well- Meaning Straight People.” And so these were the people who they were liberal, they wanted to say all the right things, but like they would meet the lesbian couple and be like “oh, we’re so glad to meet you. Now which one’s the man?” [laughs]

DS: And then the lesbians would go AHHH!

FB: So in that case, in the first one it was the straight person was doing the screaming, and in the second one it was the gays and lesbians who were doing all the screaming. [laughs]

DS: We did this one sketch, which I think would still hold up today, you’d have to change some of the political stuff. “The Politically Correct Kitchen.” I think that would totally work.

FB: And then a lot of it was local as well, which wouldn’t be funny to anyone outside of Columbus. I don’t know if it’s still true, but this neighborhood that were in right now had the largest population of lesbians per capita than any other location in the United States

DS: Yeah, Clintonville’s zip code.

FB: So we ended up, it was a soap opera, Clintonville 43202. And it was a lesbian soap opera, and it was just… because you would hear these about… because I remember the first one we did

127 was because, you know, somebody--and these were real things in the community--somebody got upset and went out and set their partner’s SUV on fire. So we did this soap opera called Clintonville 43202 and it was just all of these lesbians and the things that they were… and the audience loved it. And once again, I was the announcer for that, and there was always some catch phrase at the end

DS: What was that?... I wrote ‘em. I should know. FOUR-three-two-oh-two!

FB: Yeah, I remember there was the one at Christmastime where--and this was so not politically correct--there was the one at Christmastime where the announcement was “Clintonville 43202, where they put up the tree and go down on the bush.” [laughs] Well, and then I remember the one where they kept blowing up each other’s SUVs.

DS: That’s right.

FB: It was “Clintonville 43202, where the women get laid and their trucks get blown.”

DS: Because, it’s like, I mean there’s this one character.

FB: [laughing] I can’t believe I remember this stuff after twenty plus years.

DS: Because there were these, I can’t remember their name. I remember my character’s name. I should remember it better. I wrote the damn thing, but it was Stormy. Stormy and Stormy was a softball dyke, so she’s like cheating on her girlfriend with the woman across the street, so the first time you see Stormy is like in a… she’s making out with this chick, you know? And she’s got a baseball shirt on, and it’s like “oh, we can’t do this anymore” and I’m like “I know!” and I’ve got a baseball mitt on [smack] “I know!”

FB: I had, in two of our different ones I had a recurring character--these were the ones that were like Tribes 2000, 2001--that was Merrywether Foppsalot.

DS: [laughs] I forgot about that.

FB: He was Merrywether Fopsalot, Colonial Dandy. And so [laughs] he was--so it was one of those things where it was kind of like, all these like events that we think of in terms of Colonial American history, somehow Merrywether Foppsalot had something to do with it. It was like he’s… in one of the sketches he’s like wanting to make out with Ben Franklin and gives him the key to his apartment and Ben Franklin ties it to his kite and discovers electricity. And the one with Paul Revere and something with his horse. And with Betsy Ross it was like her trying to create the first… and he helped her create the flag and it was almost going to look like the rainbow flag. And as I said, we always tie things to locally. That year at Pride was the first year-- and I think the only year--it was the first year that they approved for the rainbow flag to fly over the statehouse. And during the Gay Pride March somebody climbed the flagpole and tore it down and burnt it. It became like a really big deal and they were discussing if they were ever going to

128 allow flags of different events and things to fly, and so this was the same time. So in this sketch, you know, you’ve got the Betsy Ross character brings out her first design to show me and it’s a rainbow flag. And I remember my character--I don’t remember exactly what I said, I’m paraphrasing--he would say, “no, no,no. I don’t think that’s right. Yes, I mean, I can see a time when they will fly it on statehouse lawns all across America! But for now…” And of course the audience laughed at that because of course we were in the middle of that. But like I said, we would also--I say it like ourselves, our community--we would call ourselves out with things too. I mean, we had a sketch in there about the Human Rights Campaign and the HRC and how elitist they were.

DS: Yeah, that was Dr. Larry Fink who taught at OSU and he kinda did a Michael Musto “what’s happening GAY in Columbus, Ohio?”

FB: It was like, but with the HRC sketch it was like it was these two straight people, a male and female who were talking about how repulsed they were by some of the gay people who were moving into their community, and all that so that’s why they joined the HRC because if they have to be around gay people, at least they can be around ones that look like them. And it was one of those things that when the sketch was over, the audience laughed and at the same time went oooooh. Because it was one of those things that everyone talked about. They would say, oh, the HRC, it’s the social event of the year. You know, it’s not what it should be about.

DS: Larry called it, when he was doing his little monologue it was “the HRC see and be seen dinner.”

FB: So, you know, we would, we poked fun of the Stonewall march the one year because they…

DS: It was really HOT. [laughs]

FB: It was really, really hot and they kept wanting us to march--we were in the march--they kept wanting us to stay on one side of the yellow line. Not down the middle of the street.

DS: Because we all had to move, and we never did find out why.

FB: And as, you know, they always had the “Dykes on Bikes” that was like starting us out and the group would start marching and then all of a sudden, one of the Dykes on Bikes would come up and say, “PLEASE” like yelling at us, “PLEASE STAY ON THIS SIDE OF THE YELLOW LINE.” and screaming this like in anger, and it kept getting worse and worse.

DS: And then they were like “MOVE OVER!” And we were like “O-KAY?”

FB: We did a sketch and we were all marching in the Gay Pride and we’re into the sketch and doing things, and then one of the characters comes out and is wearing the same colors, and comes out as… and goes, “PLEASE STAY ON THIS SIDE OF THE YELLOW LINE” and when she had to say it the audience goes, just because everyone knew.

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DS: Basically because we’re walking in place, and I’ve got my little wind-up dog with me and [gets up to demonstrate]. Michael Dutcher’s got a fake snake. And you know, she’d come out and yell at us and we’d like mooooove.

FB: The director or Stonewall at that time, he was in the audience, and he told me that his friend that he was with leaned over and said “why is this funny?” And then the director, Phil, said to him, he goes, “Obviously, you didn’t go to the march.” [laughs]. And he goes, yeah, we had some traffic problems and we probably didn’t handle them as best as we should. But the fact that his friend didn’t get the joke, it was like, then you weren’t at the march because if you were at the march you’d get the joke.

DS: See what’s hysterical is that the person who would come out and scream at us to “MOVE!” was Dovey who was the shortest person in the show, and you know, there’s some six-footers I remember… ‘cause, and this actually did happen, people have whistles and stuff. Well, they didn’t like that, so they took people’s whistles away from them. So here’s little Dovey with Rick who’s like 6’2’’ and Dovey’s like shorter than me. She’s like maybe 5’1’’, 5’2’’, like “Gimme that whistle!” [laughs] which I never could figure that out.

FB: We, our last couple of ones, we had some sketches where we made fun of gay republicans, and we actually had gay republicans in the audience who felt that we were, you know, being unfair to them ‘cause we had one sketch that was called “The Bitch Slap.” And it was, once again, it was another commercial product and it was like this plastic hand that you can put over your hand so that you can… so you could bitch slap people whenever. And Dee played the person who was the slapper and it was like different little things. Somebody would come out and say, “I just eat and eat and eat and I can’t gain a pound.” You know, Dee would smack them, that sort of thing. Then we had these three people who came out and said, “Hi! We’re gay republicans,” and Dee just went smack, smack, smack. [laughs].

DS: The Bitch Slap! A product that, you know, is definitely needed right now. Don’t you think?

FB: Yeah, we had the You Go Girl, which was the first fast food restaurant for gays and lesbians. [laughs] But anyway, so it just really was tied to what was going on. And, you know, part of it-- because we’ve even talked about it and I know Beth has said, you know, I’d like to do another Tribes--sometimes it’s like things have changed so much that...there’s part of me that would be hard-pressed to figure out what’s...what to find within the LGBT community that would be… because so many of the things that we made fun of, you know, dealt with things like people who weren’t coming out of the closet, not having gay marriage, sort of things like that. I mean we did a whole--which is funny because they all did eventually come out--we did one sketch once that was the Rosie O’Donnell Show when she was still on TV, and it was Rosie O’Donnell, Ricky Martin, and then John McDee, her band person, and they were all celebrating. It was their Gay Pride episode, but they were all celebrating it because they were all straight. And that was part of the humor was that everybody, I mean, we all knew that these people were gay or lesbian, but yet

130 they’re not coming out of the closet. And so it was the irony of the fact that they’re celebrating Gay Pride as “straight people.” Well, all three of those people, you know, are out. That’s what I said, so I don’t know. It would be hard for me to figure out what’s actually funny now.

DS; Well I would have, we would have to… I’d have to do like six months going back to the bars again [laughs].

FB: Because so much of it was tied… we had it--this was back when the internet was just starting--and people would like go online to message boards, and we did sketches that were about stuff like that. Now it’s like… you know, there might be some fun social media things that we could do, but so much has changed now and so many things are, in one way or another, accepted now that I’m not sure where the humor part in some of it is. It’s too easy to, you know, make fun of the president or whatever. [laughs]

SS: Everybody’s doing that!

DS: We had access to a guy named Patrick Barnes, who graduated from Ohio State. Was he in undergrad too?

FB: He was an undergrad and then a grad student.

DS: From Ohio State. He’s in New York now; he’s a very good musician, and he wrote music for us. I mean he did, he wrote… was it the Gay West Side Story? And he also did--because Stephen Sondheim has never written a gay musical--so we had him write the definitive gay Stephen Sondheim musical, which was basically, you know, characters from Company and Passion… and basically all the boys end up with the boys and the girls end up with girls.

FB: He did three different shows that we did because that was the first one that he did where he wrote the definitive Sondheim gay musical. And then Tribes 2000, the one we did down in “Out on Main”, he--I just gave him some ideas and just some different things--so he wrote I think it was like two or three original songs that he did and one was called “Queering the Musical” and it was like how to take--there was like West Side Story or Oklahoma--it was how to take these musicals and make them more gay. He also did…

DS: Anita and Maria wind up together.

SS: Nice.

FB: He did the movie, or the play, Sideshow, which actually will be down here in Columbus real soon, about the identical Siamese twins who were in the circus. It was really popular on Broadway at that time. So he wrote a song for us that was a spoof of the song the two sing, but it was about two identical drag queens. [laughs] And then the last one he did, and one he did one that was--’cause this was when NSYNC and all the boy bands were really popular and he did

131 like a boy band song for us that I remember we did. This was when we were at Axis that we did that one. It was called “Bang Bang” or something like that.

DS: Oh, yeah! Yeah.

FB: That was the one when… at the time reality TV was still new at that time ‘cause we had one sketch that was called “Big Sister” instead of “Big Brother.” It was a bunch of gay men who were like sharing… all they did was keep calling each other whores and sluts. [laughs] So it was like… and then Beth, you know her Puppetqueers in some ways grew out of Tribes because she debuted her cat puppet at one of the Tribes and it was so successful that then the penis puppet showed up… [laughs]

DS: That was when we were at Axis. I think she wrote that skit. It was called “Uncle Fay’s Neighborhood” and one of the characters was Mr. Wiggles.

FB: which was a penis.

DS: Which was a penis...who had a cold. It was like “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” It was Uncle Fay, and you know, I was Butchy Lou.

FB: yeah, Mr. Wiggles had a cold and every time he would sneeze, he would shoot out the [laughs]

DS: And that’s how Puppetqueers was born. [laughs]

FB: So yeah, Puppetqueers was a spin off. Yeah, Reality Theatre had more than one spin off because Act Out Productions was a spin off of Reality Theatre too, so we had a couple of spin off groups from what I would say had their origins in Reality Theatre.

DS: Yeah, because when Frank put together the Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival, Beth said I wanna do puppets, but not a puppet show. Basically what Puppetqueers… Puppetqueers is basically popular music and show tunes with dirty gay lyrics because it’s cute when puppets cuss. And we’ve been doing that now for…

FB: Yeah, you’ve been doing that for a while.

DS: For 12, 13, 14 years.

FB: Well, the very first Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival was 2002, so that means you’ve been doing it for 15 years.

DS: Yeah.

FB: What else? [laughs] We were talking about Tribes a lot!

DS: It was fun.

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CHALLENGES FOR REALITY IN COLUMBUS

SS: So what do you think--you touched on this a little bit-- what do you think were maybe some of the challenges that you ran into doing gay and lesbian theatre in Columbus, as opposed to some place with like a larger gay and lesbian community like New York or California?

DS: Well, I think the time that we started… it was just difficult to, you know, reach out to that community and say hey it’s okay to come here. The early arts councils were never really fond of us. They just couldn’t quite figure us out because… “now wait a minute, you’re not Players Theatre.” I mean, you know basically, the Greater Columbus Arts Council at that time funded Players, the Ballet, the Opera, and the Symphony, and us applying for grants and very soon there were other groups. They were kinda “Huh? I don’t get it.” It just, in terms of a population, yeah there were a lot of gay people here, but certainly not the amount of gay people there were in San Francisco.

FB: Well, yeah, I guess for me I never really saw, if we’re talking specifically about LGBTQ theatre and not just Reality Theatre in general, I never really saw an audience challenge for it because we still had a relatively large population for it and they would come to the plays. For me there weren’t… and not even a challenge when it comes to the straight community because we weren’t really doing it for them anyway. But I think that there was a, which I did mention, there was a bit of a challenge from actors because there were a lot of actors who just were like I just can’t work there. So, you know, and you’re always wanting to cast the best people that you can find, and when there’s people, even when… and sometimes it would be people who were gay or lesbian. They just didn’t want that association because of the time period, so there was that challenge. The Arts Councils maybe a little bit. I mean, we did ultimately get funded from them over the years. But there was also a challenge from like the mainstream press. I mean, the Dispatch was pretty conservative, and I mean it was like the mid to late ‘90s before the Dispatch really started saying anything really positive about what we were doing, which you probably noticed from reading some of the…

SS: I did! I have read so much Michael Grossberg.

DS: See here’s the thing, when he came in--because we were getting positive stuff from like Frank Cabrena and like there was somebody else--it was kinda positive and then Michael Grossberg almost it seemed like he was going out of his way to be very, very negative.

FB: Oh there were some of his reviews that he wrote of us that were just horrible, horrendous, awful stuff, and I never really… that’s one of those things that I don’t really, even today, I don’t really understand why because, I mean, the acting talent… I mean, Columbus has still a relatively small acting pool. It’s like we had some of the same people that was working… it just… yeah, he just had horrible things to say about us. But that did start to change, but it really wasn’t until the mid to late ‘90s. I do remember--I don’t think it was him--but one of their papers because they always used to do their “ten best” list at the end of the year. There was the one year

133 that three of the ten shows were Reality Theatre plays that made the list. But, yeah, it took us a while to get to that point.

DS: It’s kinda like, we’re not going anywhere, so you might as well lighten up.

FB: It always felt like to me that Reality Theatre and CATCO started really at exactly the same time, and yes, we both made different choices. And Jeff [inaudible] who started CATCO, he was already kind of know in the community because he had gone to grad school at Ohio State, so he knew people. But it seemed very early on and kind of with Michael’s coming into the Dispatch that a decision was made that “we’re going to promote these people and not these people.” And... because we were the first ones to get our own space. We got our space a year before CATCO got theirs and things like that...but then it was like all of a sudden all of the attention was going here, and to this day I don’t really know why that decision was made that they were going to view this company as “Oh, it’s just the best” and this as… you know. You’ve read some of the stuff. I don’t know why that choice was made, but it seemed to be a very obvious choice.

DS: I mean, they got much more funding than we did, and you know it was easy to… They just had a lot of money and support coming their way.

FB: But I remember it would reach the point that… I can still remember I had gone to a workshop, and people were talking about their--it was a different theater, a different place--and people were introducing themselves and there was a person that was sitting behind me and she was with CATCO. Very nice person Sherry [inaudible], very nice person. But somebody asked her, you know, who are you with? And she said, oh I’m with CATCO, and she says, “Oh, CATCo, best theatre in town.” And Sherry was like, she had never been to a CATCO play in her life, but that’s what she’s read. Best theatre. That was how ingrained it sort of became was that if you wanna see the best, it’s gotta be here. It was just so marketed that way. I remember getting into not arguments but discussions, heated discussions with Michael Grossberg when he would talk about… he would write these articles and he’d say, “well, the most successful theatre in town is CATCO.” And I would ask him, I would say how are you defining success? Because if you’re defining it on solely who’s got the most money, okay.

DS: And if you’re going by that, the most successful theatre in town is Players Theatre, but they went belly up.

FB: But he was constantly in all of his end of the year reviews or whatever, no matter what he said about other people in terms of if it was positive or whatever, he would still say, “and Columbus’ most successful theatre, CATCO…” It was like that was just always thrown in there, and it was like why are you calling them that? You know, just because they have more money, that doesn’t necessarily. You know, you just said… When we did Mystery of Irma Vep, it was like us and CATCO. They weren’t a union house at that time. We both did the show at almost the same time. They opened their production of Irma Vep like two weeks after ours closed.

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DS: But we had announced that we were going to do it, so… I said screw it, we’re keeping it.

FB: In Michael Grossberg’s end of the year review our production made his ten best list and not theirs, but still they were the most successful theatre in town. It just never made any sense to me because it was all being defined on money and not based on what the companies were doing.

DS: And like I said, prior to that Players Theatre was the most successful theatre company in town until they like blew up. They were down at like Vern Riffe and went belly up. And then it was like, Oh! Well now CATCO’s the most successful theater in town.

SS: [click] Just making sure it’s still going.

FB: Oh wait a minute, I forgot to hit play! [laughs]

SS: Just say everything you just said the last ninety minutes. Go!

FB: Yeah, theatre in Columbus has just always been evolving, and I think it always will. We’re just not the type of city that’s ever going to have that regional theatre that exists for a hundred plus years like Cleveland or some of these other places. It’s just not gonna happen here. And over the years we have seen so many theaters come and go. I mean, even with Reality Theatre, it had kind of like almost a fifteen year run, I mean, you know, which is not bad. But things come and go, and I fully believe this, CATCO wouldn’t be around today if they hadn’t initially been taken over by CAPA. CAPA saved them, and that’s because, it’s nothing against CATCO, it’s just the changing nature of audiences and things that it’s very hard for theatres to sustain themselves. The only theaters that are still operational in Columbus that were back when Reality Theatre started are like the children’s theatre, but it’s been here since the ‘60s and some of the community theatres like Gallery Players and things, but they have kind of reached the level of institutions. If you haven’t reached that level, it’s like, your time will eventually… I always say your time will eventually… everything has an expiration date, you know? And a lot of times it’s tied to, once again, I never felt the demise of Reality Theatre had anything to do with anything really directly involved with Dee and I leaving, but the one thing that is true is that usually theatres, or arts organizations, if their founders do leave, that does have an impact because, you know… someone said to me, it was Michael London years ago, it was kind of like this is your baby and no one cares more for your baby than you do. I mean that’s just the reality of it. So when the parents finally decide to like let the child go off on its own, there’s not somebody else who’s going to be an adoptive parent who’s going to care for it as much as what you did. They’re not the people who are going to go at 8:00 in the morning and sleep on a sofa and then get up and answer the phones and then go to work and come home from work and stay there till 10:00 at night. They’re not gonna do it because it’s not their, it’s not where their passion is. That’s why I think a lot of the organizations that are not institutionalized yet, a lot of them don’t survive once the founders have moved on.

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DS: Yeah, and the way that Columbus is, it doesn’t have that old money thing going on like Cincinnati had, for instance, you know, with the Playhouse in the Park, and Cleveland had. I mean, you don’t have that old money kind of thing. It has that sort of thing going with Players, but then Players, in my opinion, got suckered into moving to the Vern Riffe Center and then they just got. They just got like, you know, got so bloated and nobody knew where the money went.

FB: That was the result of a--which I was involved with--but a GCAC consultancy that they had done basically asking why do we not have the community support in terms of money that you see in Cleveland or Cincinnati. And what it came back to was that Columbus is a corporate city, a transient city, people move here on their way up, and then they move out someplace else, and when you ask people who donate to charities, who donate to the arts, donate to the libraries, the hospitals, when you ask them why they do those sorts of things, a lot of times the answer that you get is “well I want it to be here for my kids. I want it to be here for my grandchildren. Well, if you don’t view this as the place that you’re ultimately going to have your children and grandchildren, then you don’t invest into the community the way that you would. That’s why Columbus has never had that base of donor support, that donor base, which is a term you hear now. It’s just never had the donor base that these other cities have because people don’t view it as the place that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives, even though so many people do. I moved here in 1983. I never thought that. When I moved here I thought I was passing through. I’m still here, and it’s been 35 years. You know, so people do make this their home, but they don’t necessarily come here thinking this is going to be their long term home, so they don’t contribute.

DS: And plus I think even though, you know, like Franklinton and Worthington and all these other places… Columbus is an entity that was created to be the capital of Ohio as opposed to… Cincinnati happened because it’s on the river. So it was kind of like “this is the capital!” so it doesn’t have that whole history, even though people were living around it all over the place, you know, like I said Franklinton, you know, Worthington. And you know, very soon after Northwest Territory in 1803, you know, Columbus was created as the capital, but it didn’t just spontaneously happen. You know what I mean? It’s sort of like, “It’s the center of the state and that’s where I’m gonna put it!” [laughs] So I think that kinda adds to the whole transience of the thing.

FB: But I, yeah, I guess maybe the short answer to your question about… is that I never felt that the challenge that we had with Reality Theatre was that we were doing LGBTQ theatre. That never felt like the challenge to me. The challenge was more about where’s the money coming from? What’s the press saying? You know, can we get the best talent? The subject matter of the plays for me never felt like what was getting in the way. I mean, because we obviously wanted to do theatre and we wanted to be able to do theatre and support ourselves, and we were doing all different kinds of theatre. It wasn’t just that. I think even then I was enough of a business-minded person that if I, if we, would’ve thought that this is what’s keeping… we would’ve, you know, would’ve probably altered and adjusted, but we did, we actually made money. Those were our, it

136 got to the point where those were our money-makers. So that never, I don’t know. That never seemed to be a challenge. You know, we never had protests. We never had…

DS: And we had a good amount of straight people usually come see those shows too. I will say that.

HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED

FB: I don’t know. I don’t know what sort of challenges other communities faced doing that type of, doing that particular genre, but that… It’s weird. I think Evolution Theatre now has more of a challenge with subject matter than we did twenty years ago.

SS: That is interesting.

FB: But part of that is even tied to the LGBT community, they don’t want to be pigeonholed into… the thing I hear is like “Don’t think I like gay theatre just because I’m gay.” You know, it’s like I’m gay and I can like a musical as well. I also like The Sound of Music, you know.

DS: No shit! Of course! You’re gay! [laughs]

FB: So it’s almost that for us…

DS: We all know that.

FB: For us it was a place for the community to go, but now because there are so many choices I think the community is like oh, I’ll go there if it’s something that I’m interested in, but also I’m three dimensional, I’m well-rounded, I like these other things as well. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I agree with that. But, you know, I’ll be the first person to say that I don’t think I should have to support this just because of that. You know? And we didn’t think that either at the time. It’s just that we did benefit from that because it was new and it was different. But, so yeah, I think it’s a bigger challenge today than what it was twenty years ago. It was certainly, I think in some people’s eyes, more controversial, but controversy sells.

SS: It does.

FB: You know? That’s what they used to say. It’s like you can’t write a gay play unless it’s got nudity in it because nudity sells. I don’t think anyone gives a crap about nudity now. You can see it anywhere you want.

DS: I think that people… I get the feeling that for reasons that escape me that people are more like “AHH” about taking off their kit, as the Brits say, and I’m not sure why that is. I mean, we never looked for and now we have to find a show where they’re nude. I mean, that used to irritate me too in terms of like, well now they’re just having him take off his clothes because, you know. This play originated in New York and now everybody expects you to take your clothes off. It’s taking too long.

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FB: I think things have just, I mean you know, in the ‘60s people were taking off their clothes, it was the sexual revolution, and people are taking off their clothes because it’s the first time it’s up on stage. Then all of a sudden with gay theatre, gay and lesbian theatre, we ultimately had a voice on stage, and so we could explore our sexuality on stage, and so then taking off your clothes in that. But it’s like we’ve moved beyond, we’ve moved through all of that now. So now if there’s a new gay play, whatever that might be and it’s got a bunch of nudity in it, people are kind of like well, why? It doesn’t, you know, it’s almost like you don’t need to… In some ways the stories have changed. Now it’s like it’s not as surface. That’s not the right word, but I think about some of the stuff in the last season that Evolution did. I mean, I think about the show that you directed, Traveling. So then I was in Perfect Arrangement, kind of like, these are dealing with much bigger issues. The fact that these characters are gay, that’s the backdrop it’s being set against. These are much larger issues. We’ve moved beyond, oh we get to see two people make out. We’ve seen that, but what’s really going on. I think the plays, they’ve moved into much bigger stories now.

DS: I mean we had, you know when we were doing Reality Theatre, I mean comedy was important, but we also did Bent. You know, we did Bent. And then we did Party. [laughs] You know just like…

FB: But I think, you know, even with like film, Moonlight last year that won the Best Picture, you know, and I saw that. Other than one very short scene that you don’t even see anything, but it’s when the two boys are like teenagers, it’s like that’s… there’s no nudity in that movie. There’s not even seeing two men kiss in that movie, but it’s about all this other societal stuff that’s going on, and it’s such a powerful film that I think that’s the direction that things have moved in. We’ve moved through the sexual revolution. Yes we’ve been able to show ourselves on stage, and say oh, look, gay people actually kiss. And now we’re getting into the meat of some real stories and issues that’s going on.

DS: You’ve gotta go through the Holocaust or the AIDS crisis.

FB: So they have to be really, really good shows with really, really good stories, otherwise people won’t come, you know? I mean, Party was a lot of fun, but people would come because you’re going to see seven relatively attractive men get completely naked on stage. It was basically the theatrical version of going to the Chip and Dales or something like that, you know.

DS: That or strip truth or dare. It was a funny show, but it’s totally… Party, that’s the name of it and that’s what it was.

FB: I can’t imagine it actually selling today. I just can’t, It’s such, I mean. I just don’t think it would sell today. We had to extend the run for seven weeks when we did it at Reality Theatre and made more money than at any show I think we’d ever made.

DS: Because I mean people had heard about this show because--where did that originate?

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FB: Well it started in Chicago.

DS: Chicago.

FB: I think at the Baileywick in Chicago then it went to off-Broadway. And then every gay and lesbian theatre in the country was trying to get the rights to do Party because it was just a guaranteed sell.

DS: It was kinda like Jeffrey.

FB: But it was bigger than Jeffrey though.

DS: Oh yeah. And Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which we did, what? Three times?

FB: Yeah, that had a title that sold. We were even, we did… the first time we did Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, and it was in the newspaper, we sold out our opening night performance of that. We had never sold out on opening night before. This was in 1990, and the fact that it was opening night--because, you know, you’d open on a Thursday--and we were sold out. And we had to… it was a short show. It was only like an hour long.

DS: It was a summer show, wasn’t it?

FB: It was a summer show. No air conditioning. We were at a performance because it was an hour show, we would do it on a Saturday at 8:00 and then we would do it again at 10:00. And on our closing night weekend, on the Saturday morning, we added a Saturday night show at 10:00 and sold it out. It was like… but one of the local radio stations brought us in--they had a talk show--and brought us in to interview us because we had this “controversial show” that we were doing called Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which we thought was hilarious because we were like “yeah, the only thing controversial about this is the title.” [laughs] And it was the weirdest interview because I think that they thought that it was… and it was like, no, this is just a very silly show with a very weird title.

DS: “So it’s these two vampires fighting through the ages.”

FB: But, yeah, it made a lot of money.

DS: I do remember--and I did tell Michael Grossberg this, although I don’t think he ever printed it--but it was about Tribes. About the second or third time, I’m like “thinking about straight audiences blah blah blah”... And I’m like, you know what? Straight people come to Tribes, but I’m not doing Tribes for them, you know, I’m just not. I said, “I can’t say that about any other show, gay or straight,” and I said that we do have straight people that because I know them. I know they’re straight, and they come to our shows, and they like them and appreciate them. I said “I’m not doing Tribes for the straight community. They can come and enjoy it. I’m not doing Tribes for you, Michael. I’m doing it for the gay community. This is our way of thanking the gay community. So I don’t care if you like it or not.”

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FB: We had Jean Anne Weaver who was this lovely little old lady who wore a hat and gloves and came to the theatre and she was a reviewer for Suburban News. She pretty much loved everything that we did, but there was no agenda there. She was “I’m coming to watch the play, oh what an interesting endeavor.”

DS: “Oh, this is kind of avant garde.” And Frank Cabrena never had a problem with what we were doing.

FB: None of the other… yeah, there were sometimes things we did that they didn’t like, but they never… none of the other critics in town were ever vicious toward us.

DS: Yeah, and there were a lot of people who were like, “what’s going on?”

FB: So anyway, what else?

REALITY’S RESPONSE TO AIDS

SS: Alright… we’ve talked about that […] So during your ‘89-’90 season and a bunch of shows afterwards Reality was doing a lot of work spreading awareness about AIDS, and I kind of wanted to hear more about what your outreach looked like because I’ve read reviews of like Safe Sex and Unfinished Business and stuff like that and other little tidbits about you guys working with Riverside Hospital and doing fundraising-type stuff. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that outreach looked like, how you ended up doing that?

FB: Well, we did… I’m trying to remember… I know with Safe Sex… and the group doesn’t exist anymore, but Harvey Fierstein--it was a relatively new play--he gave us the rights royalty free for that show because we were wanting to do it as a 100 percent benefit, which we did. Reality Theatre did not keep a dime of the box office for that. We all donated our time, who were in it. The group was called Avalon, and it was more of like a hospice sort of thing for HIV and AIDS, and… that was really our first...not a collaboration, but really like, you know, really dealing with that in terms of, you know, as a fundraiser. It wasn’t too long after that, that, you know, we lost our first company member to AIDS. That was Larry Sherwood… I mean, I know that we did, that’s the thing--I know that we did a lot of things indirectly over the years. I mean, even with like the AIDS Task Force, you know, and whether it’s promotions or, you know. For years we had, I think, bowls of condoms in the lobby, and you know.

DS: Yeah, we had… what do you call those things?...basically it was sort of like a caddy that had, you know, every pamphlet for, you know, services I think in the entire city.

FB: And I know that like when we did Party… because we had three equity people, which is the union for the actors… we had three equity people involved with it… we collected with Equity Fights AIDS. We collected a couple thousand dollars during the run of that that we donated… I… that’s the thing is that I don’t remember any sort of partnerships… they could be slipping my mind...The nature of the plays, you know… In fact, when I was in grad school at Ohio State, my

140 thesis and my thesis show--because we had to create our own thesis shows--was called Walking Shadows and it was about the artists’ response to AIDS. I mean, you really, when you got into the early ‘90s you started to see, you know, gay theatre, whatever that is, also started to… that started to become part of it, you know? And so by nature so many of the plays that we did, you know, that ended up becoming, you know, part of what was going on… Unfinished Business… I’m trying to remember which… What show was that?

SS: The AIDS Show.

FB: Oh! The AIDS Show! That’s right, it was The AIDS Show… That came about… I had gone to San Francisco, and--my husband and I--we had gone to San Francisco and… well, no, actually before that, this was in eighty…’89? I think it was...well actually, was it? Yeah, ‘89. I had to look at that poster up there. The Wexner Center, which hadn’t even been built yet, but they had already put together a staff and things. The Wexner Center had what they called “The Artists’ Response to AIDS” and they brought the names panel, the Names Quilt in town and there were a few things going on...and they wanted to have a theatrical production, so they produced, and I was in it, they produced a show called Life of the Party. And Life of the Party was about these four friends, and it was pretty much a comedy, but one of them ends up being diagnosed with HIV and dies at the end of the show...And it grew… The playwright, who was from San Francisco, Doug Houshall [sp?] from Theatre Rhinoceros, he came into town to see it, and I learned from that that those were characters that actually appeared in a sketch show which was Unfinished Business. So when I was out in San Francisco...the people that we’re friends of Dan’s that we were staying with actually had a videotape that Theatre Rhinoceros sold of their production of The AIDS Show and Unfinished Business. So I contacted them and got the rights to be able to do it in Columbus. And I’m quite certain… we would’ve never done anything like that without being able to partner up and raise money as well… I just don’t remember… I know that the AIDS Task Force in its infancy, you know, did a lot, worked with a lot of things with fundraisers. As they got bigger and bigger, they started narrowing their base of who they were working with, so… and then there were like smaller AIDS organizations and things that we would work with to try and try to raise money for. But that was kinda how that show came about. And I mean so many of the plays after that, including Jeffrey, that just started to become a theme. It was actually operating in them because that was what was going on at that time.

DS: Yeah… Somebody beat us to The Normal Heart.

FB: CATCO did The Normal Heart.

DS: Yeah, I wasn’t gonna mention any names. And another company beat us to As Is.

FB: Right.

DS: But they actually did it at Reality Theatre, so a lot of people thought… and we were like, no, they were just renting our space. It was the Theatre Project. They announced it, so we were like,

141 well, not gonna do that! [laughs] We’re not gonna be doing that show! Because, you know, somebody else had already…

FB: And there was so many, I mean, we did The Baltimore Waltz, which was Paula Vogel’s piece which, you know, deals with that… and even though the theatres, you know, Beth had a theatre company called…

DS: New Venture.

FB: New Venture Theatre. And… I was in a show that she directed then that was called Lonely Planet, a really wonderful play that dealt with that. Although the word AIDS or HIV is never mentioned once in the play, you just know that that’s what they’re talking about, and it was just permeating what was gay and lesbian theatre at that time. And so… you know, by nature it just became a part of what we were doing as well. But I… and so… yes, I know that we did things and we raised money for… but we never actually partnered with anyone. I don’t remember that.

DS: Not in that way, I mean…

FB: Just like, I mean, the Doctor’s Hospital that I mentioned was actually what we did, and it was about… it was theatre for the deaf.

DS: Yes.

FB: They had… and it was us, CATCO and…

DS: Players.

FB: Players Theatre. And there was a large grant and they funded--each one of us did a production, and it was called “Hands in Motion.” And so all three of the productions were either signed for the deaf or it was shadowed for the deaf, but so it was for that particular community, Doctors’ Hospital, so…

DS: The one that we did was a Mark Medoff play called Hands of Its Enemy.

FB: Right, Hands of Its Enemy.

DS: Which actually has deaf characters in it.

FB: So that’s what that particular production with Doctors’ Hospital was about… Yeah, I can’t… You know, I mean… It was… we over the course of the time that we were there, we ended up losing five of our company members over the years to AIDS. We did… with Larry-- ’cause actually I have some pictures around because… the whole company, we came to mine and Dan’s apartment and we actually made his quilt, and then Dee and myself and Dan and one of the other company members at the time, we actually drove to Washington D.C. and, you know, presented it at the quilt there. But yeah… It was Larry, then Larry Fink, who was from Ohio

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State… Craig… T.J. Harler and Alex Libby who was the last one… but yeah, we lost all of them… because of that…

DS: Yeah… it’s… it’s difficult to… get people your age to understand that… that whole thing. You know? ‘Cause… I stopped counting… Because I worked in restaurants too and things like that. I stopped counting at like 60… So you can just imagine how much more impact there was like in New York, Fort Lauderdale, Key West, San Francisco, and L.A. But I stopped counting the number of fellas that I knew that died, so I mean there’s kind of like… AHHH. And… even though lesbians, some lesbians did get affected by HIV, it was nothing like what was happening in the gay community… So yeah, it was basically these gay women trying to like, you know, help their gay friends.

FB: Well that’s what it was and, I mean… and I should remember his name and I can’t but the gentleman who actually started the Names Project quilt. It was Clint...something. But anyway, I mean, that’s what he’s quoted to say, you know, the gay men were dying and the lesbians were the ones who were taking care of them. That was, you know, it was…

DS: That was like Larry… Larry had a big circle of friends, you know. He also worked with us at Reality Theatre and graduated from OSU. He was a graduate student. But amongst us there was this group of hard core lesbian nurses [laughs] you know, that he was friends with from something. And boy they stuck with him right to the end.

FB: But I think it was, you know, I mean… well, I don’t think. I know. It was a very different time, and it sort of goes back to all this and what we were doing in the theatre at that time… because of what was going on in the community and the world and all that it had… it had a greater impact I think within the community...Which thankfully, I say, I think it’s more difficult for like an Evolution Theatre to find an audience now, but there’s many good things about why that’s difficult. So, you know, that’s not entirely a negative. But I think for our time period and in the ‘90s and what was going on, I mean, it was lending a voice--I don’t mean to make it sound more grand than what it was, but it was just that--to people who didn’t have one. And they were coming and they were experiencing it, and, I mean, you would do… I can remember moments that just sort of stand out to me where we would be doing some of these shows and there would be something particularly dramatic with a character who might have AIDS would die, and you would hear the occasional person sobbing in the audience because it was just hitting so close. You know, it’s like that’s how… and, I mean, it was a tiny theatre. It was one of those ones where if you’re in the front row you could do this [reaches his hand out] and touch the actors. You were so close to what was going on physically but then emotionally too, and people’s nerves were just very raw at that time because it was all new and, you know?

DS: What year did Larry die?

FB: Larry died in… Larry...Larry probably died in ‘98 maybe? Because…

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DS: No, no, no… it had to have been sooner than that. ‘98?

FB: Well when were the… ‘96 were the Olympics that we were making fun of in Tribes in Atlanta, and he was still alive then, and when we did Falsettos… No, ‘97 because Larry auditioned for Party… So Larry died in ‘98 because when he auditioned for Party he and I talked because he was already very emaciated, and it was one of those things that was kinda like, this is a show where people take off all their clothes… and I was like, Larry, do you really, really want to do that? You know, and that was ‘97. So I think he passed away in ‘98.

DS: Beth and I got together in ‘97. You sure you didn’t?

FB: Oh, I’m one year off. Tribes was in ‘96 but it played over into January of ‘97, so he passed away in ‘97. Yeah, you and Beth got together in ‘97 because that’s when i was in New York doing my one person show… I really do… All the moments in my life are tied to “What play was I doing at that time?” because I can remember the years the plays were in. But yeah, I was doing my show in New York in ‘97, so…

DS: Yeah, see, when he died… Lori Cannon and I just started to date...I remember just working on the quilt at your apartment.

FB: That was for Larry Sherwood.

DS: Yeah.

FB: I thought you were talking about Larry Fink.

DS: No, no, Larry Sherwood.

FB: Oh, okay, we’re talking about two different people here.

SS: Different Larrys

FB: So yeah, there were two Larrys. Larry Sherwood died in 1989.

DS: Yeah, okay so we were still in our twenties, and some of the other people who were dealing with that were younger than us...so… and that was happening all over the place, you know? You don’t expect to have your peers dropping like flies around you when you’re like 25, something like that.

FB: Yeah, I mean, Larry Sherwood and I, we were the same age. So I mean at that time I was 28, he was 28 and just… and then it was…

DS: And he had started getting sick.

FB: I have these conversations with my students now because like I said, it’s a different time and it’s a different world, and my students always read the play Andre’s Mother, which was written

144 in ‘90… And it’s always like… they don’t understand why this is a big deal, you know, because it was almost 30 years ago… But the thing I remember with Larry Sherwood was that… it happened so fast. It’s like--because it was in September--he died on September the 14th. I had gone--and he was going to be doing a show for us, Cloud 9, with Reality Theatre--and he said he wasn’t feeling well. I didn’t think much of it. I had gone on a vacation with my parents. I get a call from one of our company members, Natalie, saying Larry’s in the hospital. I come back… He never got out of the hospital. I mean, he went from rehearsing and being in a show, never knowing he was sick or anything to literally being gone in a couple weeks. Never got out of the hospital. He just went straight…

DS: Yeah, I knew he was HIV-positive, but what was happening to him… Cathy Girvis and I would go to see Larry, and he’s like, you know, the nursing staff… they were very, very kind, very good… “Umm, this is going to be happening a lot, so you guys just need to, you know, blahblahblah…” And Larry was from Columbus, so he had his family coming in and all of that. But we would go see him and it was like the nurse was going, “This is what happens, he’s going to get out in a few days. So, you know, watch your energy because it’s gonna be the long haul.” And I remember one day Cathy and I went to see him… and it was like he was talking to somebody in there… and we kind of like listened to what he’s saying, so we look in there. There was Larry. He was like, “Oh hi!” and he knew us and everything like that, but he… in his mind-- he was hallucinating--he thought that he was at this banquet. He went to Otterbein. To honor Dean Bansant. So he would talk to us then go, “Oh, wait a minute, I have to make an announcement.” And we walked out and I said this isn’t right. This isn’t right. And he never got out. And they never did find out what killed him. They didn’t know… ‘cause he had something weird.

FB: I remember… I do remember him saying, “I am Chris Brooks” and him saying… he goes, “I can feel this in my feet.” And he says it’s just working its way… he said he could just feel over the course that whatever it was was just getting higher and higher into him… I guess the whole point of this is that, I mean, by today’s… we were all young, I mean, it’s like 26 and Chris was her like her early 20s… it’s like young people, you’re not used to people your age around you getting sick and dying, and so it was just a very…

DS: And not knowing what was going on and people saying terrible things, you know, about people who had it. You know, just really mean, mean things.

FB: Yeah, that’s why, you know, my students when we talk about it and I said that… I mean, parents would list in the paper that their children died of cancer, or things like that because they didn’t want the word AIDS in the paper, you know. And you had mortuaries and funeral homes who would refuse to actually, you know, accept the bodies of the people. It was just a very different time.

SS: Wow…

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DS: And gay people should all be rounded up and, you know, quarantined.

FB: So, you know, so the plays and things just had, you know… and it did, especially… even though Columbus was a large city, still when you’re talking about, you know, the gay and lesbian community, it’s small by comparison to the entire population, and so when we would do these plays at Reality Theatre the people who came to them… you know, you reached a point where it’s like probably everyone who’s in this audience has been touched by this disease in one way or another, you know. And so it just hit very close to home for people.

DS: Not that we ever did the shows, but I recently directed a show for Evolution Theatre and my stage manager and my set designer, young women, they’re not gay, but of course, you know, they’re into theatre and stuff like that and getting degrees and one has just recently gotten a degree in theatre. And I don’t know how it came up, but Angels in America came up, and they’re like, “You know what, we study that in school and I just don’t get it…” Like, well, it’s Fantasia, I said. Maybe the show is dated or something. I said Tony Kushner basically had his finger on the zeitgeist of what was going on at that time… So… I’m sorry you “didn’t get it.” [laughs] Guess you had to be there.

FB: But I, you know, the one story I tell my students when I’m giving them kind of the history lesson of all this--’cause I graduated from Ohio University in ‘83 and the last production I did down there was a production of Cyrano, and all the seniors were cast in it. And I remember I saw--I remember this so clearly--somebody had brought a Life Magazine to rehearsal one night and it had pictures, it was on the cover, of somebody with AIDS, and they had like the lesions and things on them. And this was at the time when they still, basically, they were like this is a disease you get if you’re gay. And I can remember myself and the other guys who were gay sitting around looking at these pictures, getting ready to graduate college, and thought...we’re all gonna die… It’s like it goes, we’re gay and so we’re going to get this new disease because we’re gay. And literally that feeling of I’m getting ready to graduate college and I’m going to die. That was what it felt like at that time, you know, because people didn’t know. I mean, it was called GRIDS when it first came out, you know, because they thought “oh, this is just a gay disease.” So there was just a lot of…

DS: It was like Gay Related Immuno Deficiency or something.

FB: Something like that, but yeah, I mean, so… and it really did. It… That carried into the ‘90s. It took a while for people to learn about things. I did… you know, and our government and things didn’t help. I mean, I did a paper for on my Masters at Kent State in Public Relations, but finally when they provided funding to the CDC to actually create these videos, these informational videos about AIDS… The only like culture or high-risk group that they didn’t do a video on were for gay people. They did them for Haitians. They did them for hemophiliacs. You know, they did them for drug… they would not invest the money to do one for gay people. So

146 even when the government put some money into it, they didn’t want to touch that. You know? So… yeah.

DS: ‘Cause what gay guys do is icky. It icks us out.

FB: So, yeah, so that’s…

DS: Yeah, it’s kinda like I guess you had to be there. Read The Band Played On, you know, I don’t know what to tell people.

FB: Well, you can’t, I mean, if you did live through it all you can do is tell people what it was like, but there’s so much you can’t… I mean, I don’t know what it was like, you know, to live through Pearl Harbor. It’s just like there’s a whole of young people growing up who have no idea what it was like when 9/11 happened, you know. I mean, all you can do is talk about it, but they can’t feel it if they weren’t there. They didn’t know it. And in fact, I understand that, but that, you know...again just goes back to what was the impact in terms of what we were doing and who the audience was at that time… What else?

SS: I actually need to run to a rehearsal, but thank you so much.

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