Log Cabin, the new Jordan Harrison play that opened tonight at Playwrights Horizons, is, as is always the case with Jordan Harrison’s plays, a bit of a puzzle. In this case, though, the puzzle is not so much its structure or premise — although there’s one fun little metaphysical tweak there — but rather in its existence. The mystery is: Can a small, domestic play, primarily about two gay couples, also be a sweepingly large one? Can a seemingly slight dramady encompass the totality of modern gay life? Harrison seems to think it can, and he just might succeed.
That’s not really true, of course; this trim play is no gay fantasia on 21st century themes. But Harrison manages to work marriage, parenthood, trans rights, sexual curiosity, fidelity and infidelity, and the compromises necessary to make a modern relationship work into an intermissionless 90 minutes that considers all of those issues even if it doesn’t deeply grapple with them.
We begin in a handsome Brooklyn apartment, presumably a brownstone floor-through, with tall bookcases, an open kitchen, and a Room & Boardish sectional. (There’s a West Elm joke, too, but it’s about flatware.) A projection tells us we’re in 2012. We quickly meet two gay, interracial couples: Exuberant Ezra (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and calm Chris (Phillip James Brannon) and Jules (Dolly Wells), Ezra’s best friend, and Pam (Cindy Cheung), her quiet, competent wife. Ezra is excitedly, exasperatedly recounting the story of telling his father they’d be getting married — dad chose to acknowledge the news by reminiscing about the AIDS crises — and ends with Jules and Pam announcing they’re planning to have a baby. It’s pre-Obergefell, even pre-Windsor, but after New York’s legislative legalization of gay marriage. It’s an optimistic time. To the future, Ezra says, raising a glass. “It’s here,” Jules says, drily: “The gay takeover we’ve been plotting, all this time.”
A few scenes later, Pam and Jules have had their son and named him Hartley. (“Very WASP,” Ezra observes. “Very B+ average at Stuyvesant.”) On their way to his baby shower, the guys quickly note how much gay life has changed. “What would Keith Haring think?” Ezra says to Chris. “Or, like, David Wojnarowicz.” (Chris is younger, in a somewhat recurring joke: “I don’t know who that is.”) “All those radical ’80s art queers,” Ezra continues, “if they could see us lining up for gender-coded balloons at Party fucking City.”
And so Log Cabin continues on, confronting the new realities of urban gay life. Ezra’s childhood best friend, Helen, is now Henry (Ian Harvie, himself a trans man). Chris wants a child and Ezra doesn’t, until Ezra does. There are debates about politics and privilege, how Chris’s marginalization growing up gay and black — but wealthy and well-educated — ranks against Henry’s as a white trans person. Whether monogamy is even possible in a longterm relationship, and whether it’s worth blowing up that relationship if someone strays. “I want a real marriage,” Ezra says, after an incident involving Chris, “not some lo-cal version the gays cooked up so they could still fool around at the White Party.” “This is real marriage,” Pam replies. “This is what straight people have been doing for thousands of years.”
What starts as a fairly conventional look-how-conventional-we’ve-become play takes an intriguing turn with the baby’s arrival (in the play’s amusing twist, Hartley is described as slow to start speaking but is in fact portrayed by Harvie, who gives adult voice to the infant’s interior monologue), then threatens to be overwhelmed by all the Big Issues confronted in its middle (there’s a somewhat superfluous and tiresome Gen Xers-versus-Millennials bit involving Henry’s younger girlfriend, played by Talene Monahon), and finally ends with a satisfying, if perhaps overly neat, resolution and point: We all need to allow everyone to figure out how to be happy on their own terms.
Ferguson has the fun part, in neurotic Ezra, and he has fun with it; he’s amusing and engaging without being too sitcom-star focus-pulling. Wells plays nicely against him, equally neurotic but in an arch, English way. Cheung, as Pam, has a quiet, unshowy part, but she’s especially fine in her big moment, sternly presenting Ezra with wise insight into relationships. The other performers register less.
But it’s director Pam McKinnon whose work is most essential to this play’s success. As Allen Moyer’s handsome set rotates between the living room and Hartley’s bedroom, McKinnon moves us smartly through the action. While the mess of issues and situations hit upon in the play sometimes threaten to overwhelm, the staging and portrayals stay firmly in hand, propelling the play on.
And forward movement is what Log Cabin is about, both how things change and how times change. Each scene is titled with the passage of time: “A few short months later,” “A long year later.” In the penultimate scene, someone mentions turning on the TV, concerned that “it’s going to be over by 6:30.” Don’t worry, someone else says: “The Huffington Post has her at 97 percent.” All those short months and long years, you realize with a genuinely horrified start, have brought us to that night. Which has brought us to today. It’s a subtle reminder that while we always move forward, it’s not always progress.
Log Cabin opened June 25, 2018 at Playwrights Horizons and runs through July 15. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
