Astrov in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”
corpses to mourn over (loudly). Not many schools have the
cojones to do the Greek classics anymore—to do them with
a gender-bending cast of middle school boys—I’d have to
guess that’s nearly unheard of. Here is a 2,500-year-old story
about the responsibilities of family love poised against the
demands of the State, the liberating individual in conflict
with the restraining collective. A fashionable and growing
distaste for the Western Canon notwithstanding, the play
persists; it was dazzlingly revived by a Japanese troupe just
last month at the Park Avenue Armory. Even in those days
of peach fuzz and voice cracks I could feel the gravity of
its timelessness. The echoes of something universal. And
it would follow me like a shadow to my next two schools,
this play, eventually to become the linchpin around which
my understanding of theatre revolves.
What is it in the end that makes Antigone eternal? It
dramatizes an irresolvable tension: it is right vs. right.
There are no clear villains and no absolute heroes. The play
reminds us that if we’re honest, we’re uncertain. And if we’re
rigid, that we’ll break.
On my trip to Cape Cod, also in the Seventh Grade—
God, do we ever really recover from being 13?—I did and
said some things that I still have trouble thinking of with
mercy. It started in Provincetown, with a flag.
The flag was a rainbow one, posted at the entrance of a
white-clapboard colonial home near the Army Navy surplus
store. Straddling my bike, I pointed it out to some friends
and snickered and called it “a disgrace.” With the kind of
pseudo-intellectual language lots of us cling to before we’ve
lived long enough to shed the pseudo, I went on and on
about “the gay agenda.”
30 • Saint David’s Magazine
I rhapsodized on this theme for much
of the week and, cruelly, targeted many
of my joke-sheathed barbs at one of my
classmates, who I’m sure remembers
them just as well as I do. If you’re reading
this, old friend, I’m sorrier than I can say.
When we’d been back at school a few
days, Mr. Kilkeary held me from Chapel,
and I knew I’d been found out. He
looked at me so quietly through his wide
frame glasses. Just a few nights before,
he’d been reading my cabin of boys to
sleep from a legendary paperback of
scary short stories. A few months later,
he’d direct me in the play that would
carve out the shape of my life. I could
feel acutely that I’d let him down. After,
while I sat on Ms. Peavy’s bench awaiting
judgment, I cried and cried. I knew then
as well as I do now that I’m gay. But it
would be another six long years before
anybody else did.
Theatre begins with the premise that
we can be pulled by the force of deep
feeling nearer to understanding—that
we might really be able to extend beyond
the chamber of our own being to share in the pain, the joy,
the rich interior life of another. I have to think that this is
a noble goal, even as it seems harder to believe in of late, as
identity politics—the organizing attitude du jour—yanks
from Left and Right at our faith in a common truth.
Since I left Saint David’s, I’ve been lucky to perform
in, write, or direct over 40 plays. With other cast and
crew members, I have navigated stories of sexual violence,
American slavery, and anti-black hatred—sashayed for
laughs in the comedies of Oscar Wilde—embodied rapists
and villains, kings and jesters, doctors and priests—have
died at least a dozen times and been resurrected once—given
my voice to fathers, sons, and, once, Marina Abromavich.
In all this work, if it has hopes of being any good, there
is no choice but to move through it with respect. With a
listening ear and heart. With the solemn acknowledgement
that every player on the stage of the world, more often than
not, believes they’re in the right.
Respect, as I understand it, is awareness that my fellow
human being feels his life as deeply as I do mine. That there
are worlds familiar and yet, in so many ways unknown to
me in the deep folds of his soul. That in this life, we don’t
just live with each other, but magically, for each other too.
There, another memory: Do unto others as you would have
them do unto you.
On my way from the pharmacy some recent October
afternoon, I walk a few extra blocks uptown to watch the
old dismissal train pull out between Madison and Fifth.
Turning the corner where the Lower School gym used to
be, where I learned to play kickball and met my first best