This is a simple, generous-hearted story of the friendship between a gay man and a straight man. It’s funny and engaging.
For the most part, an overly reductive binary opposition between gay and straight is avoided. Instead, directed by Les Solomon and performed by Nathaniel Savy and Tom Kelly, we get rich portraits of two likeable men.
One of the most intriguing creative choices made in Jeffrey Jay Fowler & Chris Isaacs’ script is to reject the convention of presenting a series of dramatic scenes portraying moments in the characters’ relationship. Instead, the two characters directly address the audience, not each other, taking turns to tell us their own version of the unfolding events. This juxtaposition effectively creates humour, but it also makes very apparent to the audience the isolation of the two men, and their differences.
The question is: From where do these differences derive? Because one man is gay and the other straight? Or because, regardless of sexuality, the two men have different psychologies? Or because, at the most fundamental and ontological level, two souls just won’t see the world in the same way – because they have to see it from different places?
The answer is, of course, all three. But it’s the third that’s of particular interest (to me).
Drama struggles to present the inner life of individuals; it’s far more successful in presenting relationships, the life of groups. (If this seems an unusual thing to say, that’s because the Western mind has been so soaked in the dramatic form that this particular presentation of life – life from the outside – has come to seem entirely natural.)
Though working in an artistic form that privileges the interpersonal, dramatists over the millennia have experimented with ways to represent the personal inner experience. The Elizabethans, for example, embraced the poetic soliloquy. This play, with its beautifully veracious contemporary vernacular, is a fine modern descendant of that experiment.
And so, regardless of its humble focus on the garden-variety experiences of finding romance and friendship, what an experiment like Fag/Stag does is explore one of the greatest of miracles: how we make a connection with others, despite the isolation of our rich but singular inner lives.
Paul Gilchrist
Fag/Stag by Jeffrey Jay Fowler & Chris Isaacs
Presented by Little Stormy Productions in association with Lambert House Enterprises,
At the Substation, Qtopia, until 21 March
Image supplied.
Theatre Red 