Another American Asking and Telling
Oct. 24th, 2004 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidLast night I saw Another American Asking and Telling, written and performed by Marc Wolf, put on by Boston Theatre Works. It's an intense show, as he portrays at least twenty different people he interviewed about gays in the military, mostly current and former military people (gay and straight, closeted and out), some others (parents, etc), using their words and their mannerisms as he talked.
The stage is mostly bare, just a table and chair and a white screen on a dark wall, a couple of hand props (a tiny cassette recorder, a glass of water), the changes between people coming through light changes and changes in his stance and voice. It was particularly impressive when he was showing a pair of older women, doing both parts almost at once.
I hadn't realized just how much no one liked "don't ask, don't tell". And some of the stories were heart-rending (the mother identifying her son's body by the tattoos she hadn't wanted him to get, the man assaulted by another soldier while being held in protective custody by MPs... by someone he later found out had AIDS, the woman who fought to get her job back. And so on.). Some weren't as heavy (a woman discovering she was not unique, and the power of her first kiss; a man who kept his unit together in Vietnam). Together, he weaves a whole, shimmering with different experiences, shining darkly.
It's an intense show, and well worth seeing if it comes by again (this was the last performance in this run).
The stage is mostly bare, just a table and chair and a white screen on a dark wall, a couple of hand props (a tiny cassette recorder, a glass of water), the changes between people coming through light changes and changes in his stance and voice. It was particularly impressive when he was showing a pair of older women, doing both parts almost at once.
I hadn't realized just how much no one liked "don't ask, don't tell". And some of the stories were heart-rending (the mother identifying her son's body by the tattoos she hadn't wanted him to get, the man assaulted by another soldier while being held in protective custody by MPs... by someone he later found out had AIDS, the woman who fought to get her job back. And so on.). Some weren't as heavy (a woman discovering she was not unique, and the power of her first kiss; a man who kept his unit together in Vietnam). Together, he weaves a whole, shimmering with different experiences, shining darkly.
It's an intense show, and well worth seeing if it comes by again (this was the last performance in this run).