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April 30, 1996

 

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Daniela visits the theatre

by Daniela Zanatta

Betrayal

Sometimes lying is easier than telling the truth,
but one lie leads to another just to cover up the
first lie. Each lie that is told affects the relationship
of the people involved. Emma betrays her husband
Robert and her lever Jerry. Jerry betrays his
friendship with Robert, and Robert betrays his wife.
This is the beginning of the tangled web of Betrayal.

The play starts off two years after the affair
between Jerry and Emma ended. The two meet up
to talk and Emma reveals that she and Robert are
getting a divorce. Their talk stirs up memories and
thoughts of where things went wrong or how things
could have been different.

The play continues but instead of moving
forward the next scene takes you back two years to
when Emma and Jerry end the affair. The play
continues to backtrack every few years to various
milestones in the relationship. Through this you
see how the deceptions and lies lead to the
destruction of three relationships and causes pain
and emptiness in everyone.

(twice!)

Camille Mitchell does a good job
portraying Emma as deceptive woman
to both husband and lover. Tom McBeath
is Jerry, the confused lover. Jerry found
out that Robert knew about the affair but
didn’t do anything about it. Bill Dow
played the bitter husband who knew of
his wife’s deceptions but did nothing to
discourage her and maintained his own
affairs.

Tom Keenlyside played the saxophone
during scene changes and various points
throughout the play. The music created
a sensual and relaxing mood and also triggered
memories and reflections of an intimate nature.

Betrayal was an astonishing play, with beautiful
music and a surreal, sophisticated set. It envelopes
you in the problems of the three characters and you
develop a sense of pity for them that they lose their
ability to identify their feelings.

The Celluloid Closet

opens May 3 at the Varsity

by Peter T. Chattaway

One of the breathtaking things about Vito
Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet was its sheer
wealth of knowledge. From mainstream features
to independent shorts, from across the seas to
mainland America, from the boob tube to the big
screen, Russo covered it all, and what he saw he
didn’t like. As of 1987, the date of his book’s last
edition, gays and lesbians were regularly ignored,
often insulted, and the rare sympathetic portrayals
always seemed to end in melodramatic death. His
was an activist’s book, and a fairly angry one; we
can only wonder what Russo, who died six years
ago of an AIDS-related illness, would have made
of the gay 1990s.

I suspect he probably would have had a different
take on the matter than Rob Epstein and Jeffrey
Friedman, whose documentary film feels,
compared to Russo’s book, like a nostalgic pat on
the back, ora longer version of one of those treacly
Oscar-night retrospective montages (Carter
Burwell’s candy-coated score is a chief culprit
here). Which is not to say that it’s bad; in fact,
despite its lapses, much of Russo’s original vision
remains.

Films in the silent era and afterwards relied on
the desexualized “sissy” stereotype as a
counterpoint to the heroes’ uber-masculinity, and
a 1932 film called Call Her Savage offered America
its first cinematic look inside a gay bar. A second
glimpse—and a much scarier one, at that—would
not appear until thirty years later, in Advise &
Consent. Between these points fell an era
dominated by the Hays Code, a rigid moral guide
created by a compliant film industry in response to
pressure from women’s and religious groups. As
Hollywood censor Joseph Breen explains in an
amusing clip, “decent Americans” didn’t want
nudity, obscenity, or “cockeyed philosophies of
life” (and you wondered why no one filmed Plato’s
Symposium).

Nonetheless, gay themes and characters lurk in
the films of the ’40s and ’50s. There’s the
gymnasium full of apparently gay men ignoring
Jane Russell’s request for love in Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes; the way Peter Lorre tenderly fondles his
walking stick in The Maltese Falcon; and, of
course, the homoerotic back-story Gore Vidal wrote
for Ben-Hur (just don’t tell Charlton Heston!). But
the Hays Code era was also a time when gays and
lesbians were portrayed as villains and monsters,
from Dracula’s Daughter to Suddenly Last
Summer. Even when the Code collapsed, the
association of homosexuality with death—either
because they were murderers themselves, or
because gay people have a habit of getting killed,
or because self-loathing queers always ended up

commiting suicide—lingered into the 1980s.

The film’s narrow focus on mainstream America
handicaps its coverage of more recent
developments. British films were beginning to
address queer issues sensitively in the 1960s;
television tackled gay themes in the 1970s; and
actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis (My Beautiful
Laundrette) and Steve Buscemi (Parting Glances)
cut their teeth playing gay characters in the
independent films of the 1980s. But despite the
groundbreaking workin these genres and the
attention Russo gives them in his book, this larger
context is all but ignored by Epstein & Friedman’s
documentary; conspicuously absent is William
Hurt’s Oscar in 1984 for Kiss of the Spider Woman,
which made him the first actor to win the
Academy’s golden boy for a gay role years before
Philadelphia puffed up Tom Hanks’ salary.

The interviews scattered throughout the film are
sometimes quite revealing. Shirley Maclaine admits
she badly handled her lesbian character in The
Children’s Hour, and in a brave confession, Harry
Hamlin says he still feels a latent homophobia
whenever he sees gay characters onscreen—despite
the fact that he sucked face with Michael Ontkean
in Making Love! The Color Purple, on the other
hand, is let off the hook far too easily for
compromising its own lesbian element: in a
statement that would have riled Russo, Whoopi
Goldberg says her scene with Margaret Avery was
about “intimacy”, not sex. Especially intriguing are
the moments of friction between conflicting
testimonies: Arthur Laurents complains that sissies
aren’t funny in the least, but Harvey Fierstein
disagrees in the name of “visibility at any cost”
(“and also ’cause I am a sissy!”). Similarly,
screenwriter Ron Nyswaner has to defend
Philadelphia against Jan Oxenberg’s assertion that
Philadelphia offers just another “gay hero who
dies.”

A closing montage blitzes through some of the
recent hits of gay cinema (Go Fish, My Own Private
Idaho, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, etc.), but
while these are noteworthy achievements, The
Celluloid Closet misses one of Russo’s central
theses: that Hollywood will make movies about
homosexuals, but Hollywood will never accept
homosexuality as an incidental part of life; at the
time of his book’s 1987 edition, Cher’s character
in Silkwood was the only “incidental” queer he
could cite in recent mainstream film.It’s all well
and good that gays have a cinema of their own now
— The Celluloid Closet could not have been made
without it — but Hollywood still has a long way to
go. Perhaps the note of self-congratulation is a tad
premature.

€

ie Press

Brigadoon

Brigadoon is a small village in Scotland that is
not found on any maps. Two American travelers,
Tommy Albright (Tom Arntzen) and Jeff Douglas
(Eric Trask), are wandering lost through the forest
when they see the lights of the village. They wander
down to find many people singing and dancing.
They discover that this is fair day and the wedding
day of Jean MacLaren.

Tommy is enchanted with Jean’s sister Fiona.
Fiona (Maggie Brockington) is gentle-humoured
and disarmingly frank. The two go off together to
get to know each other, Meanwhile Jeff is whisked
away by Meg, the village’s gypsy.

 

Just before Jean’s wedding, the miracle of
Brigadoon is explained to Tommy. The miracle-
working pastor wanted to preserve the
righteousness and clean-hearted beauty of the
village from the encroachment of evil. The only
way he could figure to do this was to by-pass time.
He made a plea to God to grant him this miracle.
Thus, each century in the outside world became
but a day to the folk of Brigadoon. If anyone left

 

the village, the miracle would be broken and
Brigadoon would be gone forever. A person could
join the villagers if they fell in love.

During the wedding festivities a broken-hearted
suitor of Jean attempts to leave the village. He ends
up dead, but the village is still safe. Tommy and
Fiona declare their love for each other, but Tommy,
experiencing a sudden case of fear, decides to leave
the village and head back to New York. Once in
New York, he finds himself haunted by the memory
of Fiona. He heads back to Scotland to search for
Brigadoon. Fiona and Tommy’s love and faith
prove to be strong enough to bring Tommy to
Brigadoon, where he will live out the rest of his
life. Jeff witnessed the miracle of Brigadoon, but
without love he has to remain in the outside world.

Brigadoon is an entertaining play that can
envelope you in its fantasy. Karin Konoval is the
gregarious Meg, who provides laughter throughout
the play and is the most entertaining character. With
much singing and dancing the play can weave its
magic to those who choose to believe.

 

 

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