I’d be terrified to direct this one. It runs 105 minutes straight through. It’s made up of an enormous number of rather short scenes. The majority of these scenes are played solely by the same two actors. The scenes are not in chronological order. They’re set in a small number of locations (which might appear to make things easier, but actually robs you of the opportunity for variety). And it being New York 2016, it’s all played in accent. Oh, and there’s sizable chunks of overlapping dialogue. It’s a director and performer’s nightmare.
Director Alex Kendall Robson and his cast are to be congratulated for making it work, creating an engaging evening of theatre.
Homos, or Everyone in America by Jordan Seavey presents the relationship between a “Writer” and an “Academic” over a handful of years. But by referencing events both from their childhood and before, and events contemporary to the writing of the play, their relationship evokes the gay male experience in America over the last fifty years.
Except for an absolutely show stealing scene in which Sonya Kerr creates both humour and pathos as a sale assistant at Lush, the play revolves entirely around the discussions between the two gay male lovers, and with their gay male single friend, Dan. Reuben Solomon as “The Writer” and Eddie O’Leary as “The Academic” are on stage for an extraordinary amount of time and they’re gloriously vibrant. With a performance that effectively suggests both the desire for inclusion and the awareness of exclusion, and as such is less vocally intense, Axel Berecry’s Dan gives the production a pleasing texture.
The lovers either flirt or bicker. You might think that a depressing image of romance. But is it actually possible to present the reality of romance on stage? Can romance, in itself, in its odd smallness, in its reduction of the wide world to one person, be the stuff of drama? We like to say Love is blind, but it’s actually just myopic. Romcoms employ humour because without the laughs, and the predictable beauty of the youthful characters, no one would be interested.
Perhaps we avoid a realistic portrayal of romance in theatre because, understandably, the audience thinks they already know enough about it. It is, after all, a rather garden variety human experience. When some Shakespearean character says nonsense like “The sun doth rule the heavens”, the rest of the cast don’t point flaming torches at the stage in the hope of suggesting something about the nature of sunshine. The audience knows what it is – and so the play gets on with its real business.
So what is actually happening when we purport to put romance on stage? What is the real business? Plays that represent gay romances tend to do so for two reasons.
Firstly, they remind us that they’re an everyday occurrence. And, yes, in a heteronormative society, that’s still desperately needed.
Secondly, they present the gay political experience. (Any decent play about heterosexual romance is also about politics. Name one well known play that’s actually about the romance itself, the personal experience of the lovers? To clarify, let me shift focus to another artform. All those nineteenth century novels ending with Dear Reader, I married him are bildungsromans, stories of young people growing up and either accepting their role in society or actively challenging it. They’re about politics.)
In this play, politics are particularly highlighted because that’s what the lovers bicker about. They fight about whether closet gays should be outed, about the gendering of language, about intersectionality and objectification, about the perpetuation of stereotypes, about homophobic violence, about the gay community. (What exactly is a community? There’s an entire play just in that. And like all good plays, it wouldn’t give an answer, only elucidate how complex is the issue.)
It’s a modern day cliché that the personal is the political, and the phrase’s popularity can be partly attributed to its nebulous nature, to the ambiguity of its terms. Many people use the phrase to express nothing more than their refusal to be alienated from sources of power: I will not be told that my actions are without influence. Other people use it to police the lives of those closest to them: You will behave this way because your actions have an impact you can’t see (though I can.)
Of course, the phrase the personal is the political could be simply read as what rhetorically it is: a paradox constructed from the juxtaposition of opposites. The personal is what we can do alone. The political is what we can do together. Viewed this way, every relationship belongs in the political sphere, and the much quoted phrase is, in effect, the denial of the very existence of the personal sphere.
This denial serves theatre well. As an artistic form, it’s never been particularly good at representing the personal sphere of life. That’s why it naturally privileges the presentation of individuals in their dealings with other individuals. It struggles to show us the inner world.
Perhaps that’s why Homos, or Everyone in America is fascinating. It’s very lack of ambition, its focus on a single romantic relationship, might be its strength. Theatre might glory in representing relationships, but what if romance is the most personal of relationships? Might we be getting somewhere new?
Or perhaps, as a cynic might say, romance is actually the least personal of relationships. It’s just blind biology that drives us together, rather indiscriminately, and the most positive thing we can say is that desire unconsciously creates one of the great glues that holds together …. community. Ah, that word again.
Homos, or Everyone in America is a beautiful acknowledgement of the experience of romance, and a teasing invitation to thought.
Paul Gilchrist
Homos, or Everyone in America by Jordan Seavey
At New Theatre until 9 March
Image by Chris Lundie
Theatre Red 
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