&  Interviews

        As both the book and cinematic versions of Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet demonstrated several years back, homosexuality has been evident in the movies since their inception more than a century ago. It has only been recently, however, that Hollywood has dared make movies that honestly depict gay lives and loves, rather than reducing homosexual characters to stereotypes. Robert Patrick, who helped create the off-off-Broadway scene back in the 1960's, and penned what is widely regarded as the first "gay play" (The Haunted Host), has returned to the stage after an extensive hiatus with a tender and funny examination of how Hollywood’s depictions of homosexuals influence gay lives. Hollywood at Sunset is a refreshingly intellectual and thought-provoking study of not only two vivid characters, but of the entertainment industry.

        The play focuses on Penn and Aron, two aspiring screenwriters/directors and lovers of eight years, who are forced to remain closeted within Hollywood’s homophobic hierarchy. As they work to find success in their careers, they must also find a balance in their lives: Penn is afraid of the societal repercussions of coming out, while Aron wants to love and be loved openly. Over their years together, Hollywood produces several big-budget films that deal with gay issues either concretely or abstractly; two such films that feature prominently in Hollywood at Sunset are Philadelphia and Interview with the Vampire. These movies tried to cast a sympathetic light on gay lives, but the basic lesson in these movies goes back to The Children’s Hour: hide who you truly are, or die. Many of the conversations revolve around these two films and their destructive themes, and how gay people internalize the messages. These scenes are often fascinating, and quite enlightening for non-cineastes. (I doubt I’ll be able to watch either Philadelphia or Interview in the same way again, having heard Patrick’s analyses. And I used to love those films, too...)

        . . . Patrick’s script demands not only cultural and historical literacy from the audience, but lightening-fast reflexes to follow the many puns and quotes the lovers throw at each other. (It is truly entertaining to try and keep up with the many cultural and cinematic references that fly back and forth throughout the show.) Patrick's dialogue regularly becomes poetry, which is both a blessing and a curse. The very real emotional issues that Aron and Penn discuss are elevated by Patrick’s heightened language, but the movie analyses seem almost trivialized when treated the same.

        As the dueling lovers, Kevin Held and Graham Fulmer brilliantly capture the alternately campy and dry wit of their characters, as well as the pathos that is never far beneath the humor. Their chemistry is genuine and loving, and from the first moments of the play we know that these people have come to know each other’s quirks and foibles and favorite foods––like any couple of eight years. Barry Childs’ direction is nicely understated, especially in the second act when the characters, talking via telephone, make connections without making eye contact. Michael Muccio’s sparse yet functional set works very well in the tiny NativeAlien's Flatiron Playhouse.

        . . . Hollywood at Sunset is a significant and refreshing arrival off-Broadway. Intelligent plays about important social issues may flourish in the tiny theaters rarely visited by tourists, but it is rare to find one so consistently funny and charming. I do hope that Mr. Patrick will not make us wait many years again for his next play. (abridged, Jena Tesse Fox, March 14, 2004 - BroadwayWorld.com)

Witty repatee zings (and zaps)

I            'm not sure how you'll react to Hollywood at Sunset. I say this because people whose opinions I trust implicitly had completely opposite views of this show-they loved it or they hated it-and I was somewhere in between. A couple of things are certain: Playwright Robert Patrick (a legend of queer theater, pioneering the form back in the mid-'60s) has crafted dialogue that is exceedingly sophisticated and artful, and the cast of two are among the most talented and intelligent (and cute!) actors I've seen on a New York stage. Hollywood is a bittersweet comedy about closeted screenwriter/director Penn (Kevin Held) and his slightly younger director/producer boyfriend Aron (Graham Fulmer), who wants Penn to come out, at least to the extent of introducing Aron to his parents as his lover. My friends who didn't like it so much objected to how "exceedingly" clever Patrick's dialogue was: Patrick has framed the play naturalistically, and the almost poetic dialogue doesn't square with this being a real-world situation. True, Patrick's characters are writers, but they don't talk like writers. They talk like writers would talk if they had time to edit their own dialogue, and I have to agree that rings more than a little false. Paradoxically, the play is at its richly realistic best when the two are debating the gay-friendly (or not) merits of the movies Philadelphia and Interview with the Vampire. Otherwise, there's a bit too much of them repeating the same basic disagreement with a different set of bon mots. Director Barry Childs' work is intelligently detailed . . .Held is steadily making a case for himself as the smartest male ingenue on Manhattan's stages, and Fulmer's performance is the single most impressive New York debut I've ever seen. He's going to be some kind of star, and the gay theater scene is damn lucky to have him for now.. (abridged, Jonathan Warman, March 2004, HX Magazine)

        Penn Palmer (Kevin Held) is a smart, ambitious young screenwriter. He has an impressive knowledge of cinema, and wit to spare. He also has a handsome, loyal life partner: Aron Byron (Graham Fulmer).

        But Penn is conflicted about his sexuality. He is ashamed to be seen with Aron in public -- and he is ashamed of his shame. Playing the closet game seems a natural thing to do in a town where gay colleagues seem perfectly comfortable leading double lives. Penn, though, is not comfortable. He mocks the Hollywood establishment (whom he dubs "rhinoceri"). He hides behind flippant remarks and eternal movie allusions. ("You're being challenging -- like Susan Hayward in 'The Conqueror.' ") He knows, though, that unless he changes, the relationship with Aron will be kaput.

        Veteran playwright Robert Patrick seems to have written a 1950s character study. But, no, Hollywood at Sunset is set in the early 1990s, when films were at long last beginning to deal regularly with gay themes. In a sense, though, the play seems -- thankfully -- like a period piece. One would like to think that in 2004, gay Hollywooders feel more at ease with themselves than poor Penn does here.

        The play is a two-hander, set in three "scenes" (which might as well have been called acts, as they're interspersed with two intermissions). Mostly it's Penn and Aron sorting out their lives in their apartment. So it's by nature a talky play. And much of the talk is movie talk.

        Still, director Barry Childs and his two actors help us get to know and care about these characters. Fulmer believably depicts Aron's frustration with a lover who seems sincerity-deficient. And Held is convincing as a guy who deflects pain with quips -- but who finally begins inching himself out of his own cage of fear.(Mark Dundas Wood - March 25, 2004, Back Stage)

Interview:

Robert Patrick

Interviewed by Michael Dale March 4, 2004

No, I wanted to be a cartoonist. There was no theatre where I came from. theatre was something that Betty Grable & Judy Garland did in movies.

I was a dishwasher in a summer stock theatre in Kennebunkport, Maine in 1961 and I stopped off in New York to see a college friend. He wasn't home, so I wandered down to Greenwich Village and within 30 minutes of hitting Manhattan I followed a boy into Caffe Cino which turned out to be the first Off-Off-Broadway theatre. I stayed there until it closed in 1967.

To understand the 60's you have to understand the 50's. The 50's were not Happy Days and Grease. The 50's were much more like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Americans were automated. All thought was suppressed. No one was honest with anyone. It is possible that during the entire 1950's not one true word was spoken in the United States. You have to understand how suppressed we were to understand how we rose up in the 60's.

Joe Cino never intended to start a theatre or a theatre movement. He was a failed dancer who retired in his early 30's to run a coffee house on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. We wandered in, we refugees from 50's America. People like me wandered in and Joe showed us his floor and said "Do what you have to do." People had done folk singing and poetry readings, then a woman named Phoebe Mooney asked if she could do scenes she was doing in class at HB Studio and Joe said "sure". That's how modern theatre started. Theatre was the only art that had never moved into the 20th Century. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry and the novel had all entered into the 20th Century at the end of the 19th Century, but theatre requires money, skills, material and cooperation. Joe Cino allowed us to do theatre that we didn't charge for so we didn't have to please an audience. We weren't reviewed so we didn't have to please critics. We weren't noticed so we didn't have to obey laws. And he let loose the 60's. We had so much in us that we had no way to express and we invented theatre on that floor.

A genius named Doric Wilson was the star player at the Cino when I arrived. And we were all in love with him, by the way. He wrote what I regard as the first gay play, Now She Dances!, in which John the Baptist is a gay crusader. The first one ever depicted on stage and practically before there were any in real life.

People who just happened to find us. There were a lot of ex cons and future cons. There were what I call the Art Ladies who haunted the Village. Actors, actresses, and eventually writers. And a lot of gay people looking to get laid. It was a gay milieu before there was such a thing outside of bars. There were bars, the baths and The Cino. There were the odd straight playwrights like John Guare, Sam Shepard, Oliver Hailey and Leonard Melfi. But mostly it was white young gay men. Most of us had never seen any, or very little theatre -- because it was America. Some were very experienced; Lanford Wilson had actually gone to theatre school at Northwestern. So had Marshall Mason, the director. But most of us learned theatre on that stage.

If you saw the list of plays we did you'd know commercial success was the furthest thing from our minds. One playwright, Tom Eyen, who later wrote Dreamgirls, had actually been writing review skits for uptown nightclubs. But once Tom got hooked on the freedom of The Cino his career took a ten year delay. Never before in the history of the world had there been a theatre with no repression. At the Caffe Cino theatre entered the modern era because we took full responsibility and authority for our work. We were like The Impressionists in the 1890's or the Cubists in the 1910's. We fed off each other's ideas like vampires. We wrote for each other and it turned out there was an audience that, without knowing it, had been dying for personal, political, philosophical theatre. And a few years after The Cino began doing original plays there were over 300 Off-Off-Broadway theatres.

I was a doorman, a waiter, a sex slave, I acted, I did lights, I washed dishes and after three years there, one day I was helping move scenery in for Lanford Wilson's first play. The scenery for an Off-Off-Broadway play at this time was usually a bed. It's evocative and it's easy to move. Lanford had a fold-out sofa bed and I suddenly had an idea for a play about two men unfolding a sofa bed. And so I wrote The Haunted Host, which drama anthologist William M. Hoffman called "the first gay play".

And I understand you acted in the play yourself because you couldn't find an actor willing to play a gay man. In The Haunted Host you write of a parasitic relationship between straight men and gay men, as well as the same type of relationship between Joe Cino and his writers.

As Harvey Fierstein put it, for thousands of years gay people provided the culture, art, literature and music for the human race. That's what happens in The Haunted Host. All of us were feeding off of Joe Cino, so I made a plot out of it. I made the character straight to make the parasitic relationship more vivid. I'm happy to say it was one of Joe Cino's favorite plays and he saw every performance.

No, I don't think he did. People just flocked to it. It was done a dozen times in various Off-Off-Broadway theatres before it finally had an Off-Broadway production in 1969. It's been used to open more gay theatres than any play in history.

Look what I loosed on the world! And two years later I wrote the first known nude play, Camera Obscura. Before then there had been flashes of ass in a couple of plays and I believe that Sally Kirkland had already sat with her naked back to the audience for the whole play Sweet Eros, but in Camera Obscura we kept trying different costumes for the boy and the girl to fit the science fiction setting of the play and finally the designer, Andy Milligan, just said "You know, to take them out of any particular time and space, they ought to be naked." David Gallagher and Zita Litvinas played three performances nude and were quite happy except the stage at The Cino was so small they were literally touching the audience, so they asked if they could wear something. So Andy took transparent vinyl and made bikinis for them. But for three performances they were nude.

At first there was a show at seven on weekends. Then it got to be at seven and nine. Then we started doing shows on Thursday... and Wednesday... and Tuesday... Then it was two shows a night except for Friday and Saturday when it was three. As doorman I learned to pack a hundred extra people into that tiny place. Eventually people were coming from Europe and Asia to see us and many of them went back to form Caffe Cino type theatres in their cities. I went to Capetown, South Africa in 1975 to The Space Theatre. They had three floors, three theatres. They were doing a play by Paul Foster in one, a play by Sam Shepard in the other and a play by me in the third. The Fringe in London was started by Americans who had been to the Caffe Cino. It was the fountainhead of modern theatre.

Phebe's became to us what the French cafes were to the Cubists. I could walk into Phebe's any time I needed money and somebody would offer me a production, a publication or an article to write. It was like the Algonquin Round Table. My play Kennedy's Children took place in Phebe's.

We were the elite. Sam Shepard was already famous, having his plays done at The Genesis and La Mama, but he couldn't rest until he got a Cino production. Melfi did one play there, John Guare had two one-acts. They were already well-known but they wanted that Cino pedigree. In my novel, Temple Slave, which is a highly fictionalized and romanticized account of the Cino years, I tried to describe the feeling of it; "It was Oz, it was Hollywood in the silent days, it was Paris in the Impressionist era, it was Athens at its height, it was Baghdad, baby!"

By 1973 Off-Off-Broadway as I knew it was dead. It had been taken over by people auditioning for uptown productions. Very sad. I went into Phebe's one day with posters for a show. Friends of mine were sitting isolated from one another at the bar and in dark booths. They were not friendly. They were sulking and moping. I sat at the bar watching them and realized this was my next play, but I didn't know how to write it. Then I saw the bartender had the TV on with the sound off. He began to click from channel to channel and I realized that was the play. I would let the audience read the minds of people in the bar, clicking from mind to mind in a series of alternating monologues.

And the play, of course, was Kennedy's Children, which was first produced where?

At Playwright's Horizons in 1973. Nobody came, nobody reviewed it. But the man who played the silent role of the bartender wanted to be a producer. He flogged the play around the world for three years. No one would produce it. Finally he told me that a theatre in the back room of a bankrupt pub in a slum in London had agreed to do the play and to bring me over. I went over and I slept in the room where they stored coal and potatoes, and I helped out at the bar. It opened and the next day I signed contracts for its translation into sixty languages. I went all around the world to see it or direct it. I loved the money, I loved the travel. I hated being famous. I'm not made for it.

Julie Newmar.

Julie Newmar hurt me. In the lobby of the Golden Theatre Julie Newmar, who is bigger and stronger than I am, grabbed my arms and said "I want you to fire Shirley Knight and put me in that role." And she dragged me to 8th Avenue to a taxi she had waiting, obviously intending to take me home and use her charms to make me cast her. My boyfriend was pulling on my other arm. He won, but he and I fell down in the middle of 8th Avenue. Julie slammed the door and drove away. That crystallizes what success was like.

In Boston the play was a runaway hit. They begged us to run it there for a year because we were filling the huge Wilbur Theatre. I wanted to stay, but the producer had already booked the Golden on Broadway. The Boston PBS station fell in love with the play and had me on every program they could. During a break in one of the programs the primary theatre critic in Boston turned to me and said, "Of course, I assume you'll take the homo out before you go to Broadway." Not only that, the Boston PBS station's logo is on every mini-series that comes from England. I said, "Well, since you all love it so, who don't you film it and put it on PBS?" They said, "Bob, for what it would cost us to film Kennedy's Children we can bring over seven British mini-series."

As I recall, the play was tremendously popular among acting students. The monologues were so rich and vibrant that in the late 70's it seemed every actor in New York was auditioning with a piece from Kennedy's Children. It got so that you'd see casting notices requesting that actors prepare monologues not from Kennedy's Children.

I understand many acting teachers have signs on the walls of their studios: "No Kennedy's Children." Also, I'm told it’’s the most imitated play since Oedipus Rex. Everyone thinks it's easy to write a play of monologues. Baby, it ain't! Kennedy's Children is a musical. All my plays are musicals. Take a deep breath and do it like you're singing it. Let the rhythm and the imagery carry you along. It has a complex musical construction, and if you try and play it realistically you've got two very boring hours... As Shelley Winters and her Actors Studio friends learned when they did it in Chicago and ruined my American career.

They said hardly a word I wrote. They thought since it was monologues they could just improvise. Sometimes the show was an hour shorter than it had been in London, sometimes an hour longer. The tour was slated to run in ten cities, but when the reviews came out Shelley realized what she'd done and skipped the country, and I had no American career.

In 1975 I tied up with a high school theatre organization called International Thespians. For the next ten years I traveled to over a thousand high schools trying to promote high school theatre, which is most of the theatre in America. After ten years I realized I had not made a single advance in high school theatre in America. It's considered inessential. People are killing themselves trying to do it and they're just being let die. So I quit that and opened the first year-round gay theatre in Los Angeles, The 5th Estate. Equity was threatening to close all small theatres in LA at that time and they went down on us big. So I went back to New York and worked with a company called The 4th E until one day in 1990. At the age of 53, twenty-six years to the day after The Haunted Host opened at the Caffe Cino, I found myself trudging down Second Avenue between Houston and Fourth carrying on my back a discarded sofa I wanted as a set-piece for my new play at La Mama. A world-famous playwright was carrying yet another couch on his back for scenery and I said "No more." I said to myself "Lanford Wilson doesn't have to carry couches. Sam Shepherd doesn't have to carry couches. I'm not going to carry any more couches."

But then in 1994 I met two enchanting young men, Penn and Aron, who seemed to me to crystallize the situation of the world at that moment the way Joe Cino and his playwrights had in 1964, and I couldn't resist writing Hollywood at Sunset. There they were -- profoundly in love, profoundly ambitious and profoundly conflicted. Penn wanted to stay in the closet. Aron didn't. And in them I saw in small the conflict that's tearing this country apart right now. The actual idea of equality for queers. It's going to tear America apart the way the quarrel over icons tore Byzantium apart. You might also mention that it's the funniest play I've written. They are profoundly witty and articulate young men and have both endorsed it as a perfect portrait of them.

I don't go to theatre anymore. To me that would be like watching somebody else have sex. I live a very quiet life alone and I love it. But I think Lanford Wilson and Paul Foster were the two greatest playwrights of my generation, besides myself. Tony Kushner, obviously, is the heir of Off-Off-Broadway. He uses freedoms that we fought for and discovered magnificently. He's the Rafael of Off-Off-Broadway. Paul Foster was the Leonardo Da Vinci and Lanford Wilson the Michelangelo. People wonder why the gay revolution is so important. It's because straight males have become a problem. Men made cities out of the jungles. They are now making jungles out of the cities. They cannot stop it. Their creative ambition, aggression and bonding created civilization -- and they don't get enough credit for that. But their destructive ambition, aggression and bonding is now destroying the civilization they made. They can't stop it. Something must replace them.

Above all, I was doorman at The Caffe Cino, of which I am very proud. I let Lanford Wilson into the Cino for the first time.