“Pieces” By Chris Phillips Directed by Brian Zimmer Reviewed by David Roberts, Chief Critic Theatre Reviews Limited
[A Gay POV Review. This review is anchored in the belief that the gay community and the straight community speak two entirely different languages and participate in two radically different cultures. When gay men interact with straight men and women we “code-switch:” we adjust all of our rhetorical skills to a different set of vectors and we behave in ways that are expected of us, in ways we have traditionally learned from that heteronormative culture that is not our own. This is the belief of this critic who is a gay male making his way through the same world we are all navigating. It is not assumed this belief is shared by the writer of “Pieces.” This belief is not meant to offend anyone or hurt anyone in either community.]
Can gay men get along with straight men and women when gay men cannot even get along with one another? Can straight men and women get along with gay men when straight men and women cannot even get along with one another? Playwright Chris Phillips brings these bold and important questions to the table in his impeccably perceptive and fresh new play “Pieces,” currently playing at The Cherry Lane Theatre’s Main Stage as part of The New York International Fringe Festival.
On the surface, and on several deeper levels of the play, “Pieces” is about Shane Holloway (Chris Salvatore) a young, attractive gay man who gets himself into some very serious trouble. After being kicked out of his parents’ house as a teenager because they “discovered” he is gay, Shane does what he needs to do in order to survive. [Sidebar: this is the perfect example of the content of the disclaimer that precedes this review.] Shane attends gay AA Meetings so he can crash on the venue’s couch (he is living on the street). He then accepts Darren’s (one of the Meeting attendees) offer to stay at his place which he does for about a year. Darren teaches him to garden and all about flowers (hold that fact for later). After drifting away from Darren, Shane attempts suicide. He eventually meets Jonathan Gibson (Paolo Andino) at a club who ultimately introduces Shane to openly gay Hollywood power broker Stephen who houses, feeds, clothes, and monies Shane for years in exchange for the young man’s beauty and sexual power. At the play’s opening, the audience learns that Shane has been accused of brutally murdering Stephen, dismembering his body, and disposing it in six different locations in West Hollywood.
These conflicts drive the plot of “Pieces” as Shane’s Public Defender Rory Dennis (Jonathan Gibson), who is also openly gay, tries to discover why Shane would murder his benefactor. Rory battles the Assistant District Attorney Mary Hamilton (Nina Millin), a straight woman who claims to be gay-friendly, who simply wants him to convince Shane to accept the plea bargain that will put Shane behind bars for life. And, in his battle with journalist Nick Goff (Joe Briggs), Rory discovers his deep-seated hatred of himself, his gay client, and his gay community.
Rory’s prison interviews with Shane cleverly provide all of the exposition needed by the audience to understand the characters, their conflicts, and ultimately what “Pieces” is all about. Because we gay men are a fragmented (pieced) community, either by our own choice or by emulating the isolation and social mores of straight culture, we are susceptible to being desiccated, pieced up: our strength and our ability to connect to one another and empower one another and sustain one another in non-conventional ways is compromised by our fragmentation.
[But, the reader asks, didn’t this reviewer write that this play is about a psychotic gay young man in Los Angeles who murdered and dismembered his older “sponsor?” It is about that but the meaning of “Pieces” transcends Shane’s story. So, fasten your seat belts, dear readers.]
As Shane, Rory, Jonathan, Nick, and Mary interact in real time and in flashbacks, the audience discovers how awful they are to each other, how they actually hate each other. The gay men realize there is no diversity and no tolerance in the gay community. Gay men stereotype one another, and as Nick shares with Rory, “Which comes first the self-loathing chicken or the marginalized egg?” In the midst of this, Rory realizes just how much Shane has been “broken into pieces.” In the haunting scene between Rory, Shane, and Mary – after Mary humiliates Shane into rehearsing just how awful gay men are to each other – Shane shouts, “No straight person (Mary) has any idea what I do or what I think or how we act with each other when you are not around!” That is the rub. After this exchange, Shane asks Rory for a piece of paper and returns to his cell. The next morning, Rory discovers from Mary that Shane committed suicide and left a beautiful folded-paper lily as his suicide note.
[Review Continued in Second Blog Post]
Permalink | Posted by David Roberts on Wednesday, August 15, 2012
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