In 1970, eight months after gay pride and gay rage were ignited at the Stonewall Inn, Broadway briefly hosted Ron Clark and Sam Bobrick’s Norman, Is That You?, in which a young man and NYC boyfriend hide their romance when Norman’s straight-arrow family comes to visit. After critical revulsion and a quick exit, a funny thing happened. It became an “audience show,” a summer stock and community theater perennial (still is, for all I know) and a 1976 movie with Redd Foxx and Pearl Bailey as the bewildered parents. The play’s enduring popularity and healing theme—the dad becomes the lover’s BFF, fully supportive of his son’s life choice—may very well have played a role in the changing social attitudes of subsequent years.
There are similarities between Norman and The Closet, Douglas Carter Beane’s world premiere at Williamstown Theatre Festival. Each has a flimsy farce premise hinging on gay deceivers, with plotting some will consider coarse and plenty of non-PC japery. The new work could thus run into disfavor should it risk the Main Stem, despite a talented cast headed by Matthew Broderick and Jessica Hecht, and Mark Brokaw’s clever direction.
Even if so, it could easily go on to be every bit as much a crowd-pleaser and attitude-influencer down the road as its ancestor. For where Clark and Bobrick wrote an anti-bigotry tract in 1970, Beane’s work—inspired by a 2001 Francis Veber film of the same name—takes place in a more or less post-bigotry world in which Job One becomes working out the politics and language of diversity. Once we’ve agreed to accept each other on principle, what next?
Passive, plodding Martin O’Malley—one of those nebbishy roles on which Broderick has held a 30-year patent—is in job trouble at Good Shepherd Catholic Supply, and not just for boners like accidentally sending a “Christ Is the Answer” banner to Temple Beth-El. More direly, nobody likes him: not the owner’s son Roland (Will Cobbs); office gossip Brenda (Ann Harada); his unseen ex-wife; nor contemptuous, alienated son Jack (Ben Ahlers). No, wait: Timid accountant Patricia (Hecht) carries a huge crush, but like Shakespeare’s Viola she never told her love, but let concealment feed on her pasty cheek.
Enter Ronnie Wilde (Brooks Ashmanskas) in peach pants, paisley shirt, and mini-neckerchief, described as prowling the warehouse “like Liberace in search of a candelabra.” Got the picture? This lonely retiree, determined to rent the upper or lower half of Martin’s Addams Family-sized manse, knows exactly how to save his putative housemate from the ax. Faster than you can say “Martin, is that you?,” office scuttlebutt and the Internet spread the news about Scranton’s secret lovebirds, initials M and R.
In Veber’s film, the pallid Pignon is in on the deception from the first. Without doing anything different he’s suddenly perceived as a star, advancing Veber’s gentle insight that even the dullest of us can be fascinating if others choose to so perceive us. But in classic farce tradition, Beane keeps Martin in the dark until the act one curtain, gaining comic mileage through accidental double entendres. (The new housemates flipped a coin as to who’d be on top and who on the bottom, he informs a transfixed co-worker. “I think he’ll fit in just fine.”)
Ensuing complications are every bit as preposterous as the foregoing setup. The set does its part, as designer Allen Moyer and lighting designer Japhy Weideman transform the warehouse of candles, chalices and religious statuettes from Arthur Miller drab to Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In garish.
Yet the play gains in delight as it goes along, not least because of its star, a lovable middle-aged Charlie Brown. Broderick’s deadpan offers a perfect foil to two hours of overwrought behavior, his unfailing cheer poking indomitably through deepest dismay. For her part, Hecht knows how to upshift Patty from twittery fear to breathless sensuality; when Martin decides to reveal the truth to her and their mutual juices start flowing, it’s the evening’s comic highlight.
Ashmanskas boldly wraps himself in outrageousness like a comforter, and in a sly homage to Veber’s La Cage Aux Folles, in which a drag star is urged to impersonate John Wayne, he teaches Broderick how to “walk gay” by tiptoeing across bubble wrap. Meanwhile, Ahlers’ aggrieved-adolescent attack on his father is remarkably strong, which it has to be since Jack’s later pride in Martin’s coming out is what persuades him to accept the charade. Ahlers is winning and persuasive, too, in the lad’s volte face (I wanna be an actor, dad!).
Other roles’ transformations need some rejiggering. Since we never get to see the side of Brenda described as “a meddler, a stir-pot,” her supposed reinvention as a show-tune “fageleh hageleh” (her words, not mine) seems merely a means for Harada to recap her peppery Avenue Q belting. Meanwhile, Roland is an amalgam of two film roles—the boss terrified of public backlash, and the macho coworker strangely drawn to the gay colleague’s aura—that haven’t quite meshed yet, though Cobbs gives it a valiant try.
Roland’s Blackness—explicitly used to impel banter and advance plot—sits uneasily with his casual homophobia. Brenda’s Japanese ancestry is brought in with similar awkwardness. But the play just barrels along heedlessly, hoping no one will listen too closely until all rights itself by the end. Beane’s satirical repartee cuts broadly across ideological lines, skewering trigger words here and Fox News there, but never cutting very deep. Even the obvious target of a Vatican Bishop, who in the way of farce antagonists arrives a day early to encounter a hotbed of sodomy, proves to be affable and empathetic. Raymond Bokhour’s sparkling performance is particularly welcome because you can’t ever guess what he’ll say next. Whether fretting over what to make of the current, mercurial Pope, or musing on his eggs-and-bacon-between-pancakes sandwich as a metaphor for America, the portly cleric is always a treat but never an outright bigot.
Which in the end speaks to the play’s most salient point. Eventually, and predictably, The Closet gets around to celebrating everyone’s uniqueness—you know, urging all within earshot to be honest, be yourself, Let Your Freak Flag Fly. But Beane also recognizes that many of the old categories of separation and opposition are fading away, the sexual ones in particular. In a future spectrum one might call pan-normative, when casually-accepted celebrity bisexuality starts filtering down to the rest of us (and the play suggests it already has), those who might’ve been targeted as likely haters may turn out to be allies, or even brothers and sisters under the skin.
It’s far from an unpleasant vision, though something ineffable may be lost in the transition. In the second act, Ronnie lights long enough to reminisce about the old radical days, when gay liberationists rejected disinclusion from the straight world with the defiant cheer, “We’re just like them!” And what’s been discovered, 50, 60 years on? Ashmanskas’ eyes and shoulders droop as he sighs, “We’re just like them.”
The Closet opened June 30 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and runs through July 14. Tickets and information: wtfestival.org
