Author | Graydon Gund
I recently saw a perfectly integrated new off-Broadway show called The Clearing. Created by Jake Jeppson, the show follows two brothers coping with a shared experience from eighteen years prior and tracks their relationship as the younger one’s significant other is integrated into the family. The relationships were fully fleshed out and subtly drawn by the actors. And the play’s central couple just happened to be two men.
The relationship between a same sex partner and sibling isn’t explored often. In the play, Chris almost sees his brother’s boyfriend Peter as a plaything, picking him up to ‘roughhouse’ within minutes of first meeting. Paul accepts this and goes along with it without cattiness or typical gay disdain. Everyone is just relating to each other and we see what happens with a very close pair of siblings suddenly having a third member of their group. Is he a replacement sibling? Is he competition? It is not a play about gay people, just about relationships, which is often lacking in so called “gay plays”.
The wonderful thing about the script was that it was not about AIDS, coming out, or even bullying (one of the gay experience themes du jour). It was just about two men and their relationship with each other. When Les (Brian McNanamon) and Paul (Gene Gallerano) go to Les’s mother’s house for dinner, she loves Paul, and they bond over wine before she gives Les a thumbs up on their way out. Ella, the boy’s mother, has no problem, saying at one point that she thought her boys would end up living together into old age and wearing the same clothes, until Paul came into the picture. This is a moment that could include a heartfelt and overwrought story of Les’s coming out, but that is left up to the imagination. As a result we don’t have any preconceived judgments of any of the characters on their thoughts about sexuality coming into the show.
This leaves writer Jake Jeppson open to explore human sexuality on a more basic level, with Ella (Vanessa Aspillaga at the performance I viewed) sitting for a nude portrait in Paul’s photo studio. We see not only how she acts when naked but the ways in which that frees her up to be a truer more honest version of herself, unhindered by the usual barriers. In a way this is very similar to what the TV show Looking is doing. We meet the characters all in mid-life, in mid-stream. The first episode shows them getting coffee, seeing ex’s working for their horrible bosses, but no tearful admissions or diseases. In both cases, this elimination contributes to the universality and the way that audiences can eventually identify with the characters. A straight person may not have a way into a coming out story, but they certainly have a way into something as bland as running into an ex in line at Starbucks. Everybody dates, everybody has work issues and best friends, so what if it’s a community of men representing it in a given circumstance?
On stage, more so than TV, there is an opportunity to really experience these relationships. We are never shown the beginning of Les and Paul’s relationship, but there are markers that it’s been a while. Paul, the more open of the two, doesn’t often pass Les without a subtly caring finger glancing across his partner’s stomach. Something it seems they have always done or that developed over time.
