then: they are the stimulation of the cultivated.
This is why many of us get into playwriting in youth, laying down versions of our favorite shows, adapting novels and plays, even attempting originals. When I was scarcely old enough to stand I was herding my parents into my living room for cameo pageants, written, scored, and acted by our boy. This may be why I never liked little off-Broadway musicals, with their simplistic composition and undecorated staging style—mine were no smaller and no more terrible. Off Broadway was tyke theatre. It was the racy wisdom of grown-up Broadway that I prized—not the glamour, but the self-knowledge.
Yet, years later, as we graduates of this eccentric college congregated and met in the metropolis, I learned that some of them did not have any perspective on themselves at all. The theatre had instructed them, but never let them go to learn about other things. Socially, professionally, even sexually, they were unversed and unmotivated. They were overgrown precocious kids, using their love of theatre to protect them from all the other loves they could not collect. Disreputably dressed, showing up everywhere bearing bags containing the day’s haul of records, books, or memorabilia, sporting the breath of a dragon, and blaring idiotic trivia about record matrix numbers, they put something of a punk on the image of the buff. And, of course, they were always gay.
Why of course?
Yet I wonder what they would have had if they didn’t have the theatre. Musical comedy doesn’t ruin them: it saves them, gives them a topic and a confraternity, even if, at times, that brotherhood consists of a body of strangers enchanted in a darkened auditorium. Their first love became a lifetime obsession; but if it set them strictly apart, it did set them somewhere. How much worse to have nothing to believe in, to be, like many people I have met over the years, utterly devoid of interests. Work detains them. Companionship eludes them. Only the bodily appetites impel them: food, sleep, sex. Absurd as it is to see Gene Caputo the ironworker as an aficionado—once I mentioned Liza Minnelli and he said, “Who’s that? Some bimbo?”—if Gene had had the ability to be enlightened, redeemed, perhaps merely diverted by entertainers, he might not have been so lonely, a homosexual straight who couldn’t touch men and didn’t appreciate women, a truly single man.
This fraternity aspect of the musical comedy life is significant: types tend to cluster. When my father’s hurtling success, my brother’s implacable rivalry, and my own ornate precocity suggested something (respectively) fancy, remote, and advanced in the way of my education, my folks sent me off to Friends Academy in Locust Valley, Long Island. Friends no longer accepted boarding students, so I stayed, through some occult arrangement, with a family that turned out to be shockingly informal; had I been Ralph Bellamy, it would have been a screwball comedy. Their huge house stood a short walk from the Glen Cove railroad station, and I found to my delight that Mrs. Pratt saw nothing objectionable in my spending Saturday afternoons in the metropolis, lunching at the big Automat (now vanished) on Broadway at Forty-sixth Street, catching a matinee of just about anything, and generally nosing around. Here was when my coming of age really began, when theatre trips evolved into trips into city life, into the notion that a people as chosen as gays are must erect a ghetto not so much for segregation as for concentration: to learn what gay is.
True, this side of me was not useful at Friends Academy, where most of the students were sheltered WASP kids of Brookville and Old Westbury who, for one reason or another, didn’t go off to Choate or Deerfield. They were sheltered from notions of race and class and what might be called disopportunity; and from the notion of art as well. I felt like young Lord Greystoke, set down among not apes but talking macaroons. At the
This is why many of us get into playwriting in youth, laying down versions of our favorite shows, adapting novels and plays, even attempting originals. When I was scarcely old enough to stand I was herding my parents into my living room for cameo pageants, written, scored, and acted by our boy. This may be why I never liked little off-Broadway musicals, with their simplistic composition and undecorated staging style—mine were no smaller and no more terrible. Off Broadway was tyke theatre. It was the racy wisdom of grown-up Broadway that I prized—not the glamour, but the self-knowledge.
Yet, years later, as we graduates of this eccentric college congregated and met in the metropolis, I learned that some of them did not have any perspective on themselves at all. The theatre had instructed them, but never let them go to learn about other things. Socially, professionally, even sexually, they were unversed and unmotivated. They were overgrown precocious kids, using their love of theatre to protect them from all the other loves they could not collect. Disreputably dressed, showing up everywhere bearing bags containing the day’s haul of records, books, or memorabilia, sporting the breath of a dragon, and blaring idiotic trivia about record matrix numbers, they put something of a punk on the image of the buff. And, of course, they were always gay.
Why of course?
Yet I wonder what they would have had if they didn’t have the theatre. Musical comedy doesn’t ruin them: it saves them, gives them a topic and a confraternity, even if, at times, that brotherhood consists of a body of strangers enchanted in a darkened auditorium. Their first love became a lifetime obsession; but if it set them strictly apart, it did set them somewhere. How much worse to have nothing to believe in, to be, like many people I have met over the years, utterly devoid of interests. Work detains them. Companionship eludes them. Only the bodily appetites impel them: food, sleep, sex. Absurd as it is to see Gene Caputo the ironworker as an aficionado—once I mentioned Liza Minnelli and he said, “Who’s that? Some bimbo?”—if Gene had had the ability to be enlightened, redeemed, perhaps merely diverted by entertainers, he might not have been so lonely, a homosexual straight who couldn’t touch men and didn’t appreciate women, a truly single man.
This fraternity aspect of the musical comedy life is significant: types tend to cluster. When my father’s hurtling success, my brother’s implacable rivalry, and my own ornate precocity suggested something (respectively) fancy, remote, and advanced in the way of my education, my folks sent me off to Friends Academy in Locust Valley, Long Island. Friends no longer accepted boarding students, so I stayed, through some occult arrangement, with a family that turned out to be shockingly informal; had I been Ralph Bellamy, it would have been a screwball comedy. Their huge house stood a short walk from the Glen Cove railroad station, and I found to my delight that Mrs. Pratt saw nothing objectionable in my spending Saturday afternoons in the metropolis, lunching at the big Automat (now vanished) on Broadway at Forty-sixth Street, catching a matinee of just about anything, and generally nosing around. Here was when my coming of age really began, when theatre trips evolved into trips into city life, into the notion that a people as chosen as gays are must erect a ghetto not so much for segregation as for concentration: to learn what gay is.
True, this side of me was not useful at Friends Academy, where most of the students were sheltered WASP kids of Brookville and Old Westbury who, for one reason or another, didn’t go off to Choate or Deerfield. They were sheltered from notions of race and class and what might be called disopportunity; and from the notion of art as well. I felt like young Lord Greystoke, set down among not apes but talking macaroons. At the
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