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| Braden Abraham and Samuel Hunter (Andry Laurence) |
Playwright Samuel Hunter chooses uncomfortable characters or they
choose him, as evidenced in his play, The
Whale, about a morbidly obese man, and in the world premiere play, A Great Wilderness, now being presented
at Seattle Repertory Theatre. Here, the uncomfortable character is an old man
ending a career working as a gay-conversion therapist.
When we get invited to a play, we reviewer-types get press
releases with blurbs written to entice audiences to come to the show, while
encapsulating what it’s about. The Rep said this about this play:
Walt has devoted his life to counseling
teenage boys out of their homosexuality at his remote Idaho wilderness camp.
Pressured to accept one last client, his carefully constructed life begins to
unravel with the arrival of Daniel. When Daniel disappears, Walt is forced to
ask for help—both in finding the missing boy and reconciling his past with the
present.
Sometimes, even when only reading the press releases once,
and cursorily at that, their context can be very influential and not always in
a very positive way. The phrase that resonated with me prior to seeing the play
was “reconciling his past with the present.” In fact, after seeing the play,
what was on the stage really had nothing to do with reconciling his past with
the present.
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.
Hunter is demonstrably a brilliant, up-and-coming playwright
and his challenging topics are gripping. In this play, he clearly desires to
get inside of and “play around in” (no fun intended here) the mindsets of
people he came into contact with as a boy in small-town Pacific Northwest who
believe deeply in Scripture and have been taught that Scripture declares
homosexuality a sin, and therefore, want to help anyone they know stop sinning,
if at all possible. They have been told that homosexuality is a choice, that it
is a “lifestyle,” that it is mutable. Therefore, they can influence someone and
train him (usually him) out of it.
An industry developed, as we know, that worked to “cure”
young boys of their sins of homosexual thoughts or actions, and psychology
participated in the wrong-headed notion of mutability for many, many years. Often,
this therapy was also given in a wilderness camp environment, a get-away from
normal life in order to allow new ways of living to be cemented before
returning.
Now, we are evolving, and we begin to understand that this
is not a “choice” and not mutable. It is as biologically determinate as blue
eyes or brown hair or left-handedness. And we know traits are dominant and
recessive. Yet no one who is righthanded can change to being lefthanded without
almost superhuman efforts after losing an arm, for instance.
We know that boys who went through this kind of conversion
therapy were essentially told that they could not stay who they were, were
sinners, and could be saved. We know that boys who went through this therapy
sometimes committed suicide, probably because they couldn’t change and didn’t
feel like there was any other choice left.
Hunter wanted to illustrate the issue with a man who he
reveals in the play to have had homosexual feelings when younger, and by having
dialogue that states that those who often feel drawn to be therapists in the
field are probably those who struggled with the same feelings as the boys they
take on as clients.
What we see on stage, however, does not nearly get to Walt,
the older man, working to reconcile his past with his present. That would
really be a longer play or a different play.
What is on the stage is more about the legacy of building
something and letting it go when the builder is gone. Much of the dialogue
focuses on Walt’s transitioning to an elder facility and his friends’ desire to
sell the camp he built rather than continuing the services of conversion
therapy he offered there.
If the couple who wants to sell had wanted to go in a
completely new direction, that would have been a clearer topic. But as Hunter
writes this version (who knows if he will consider a rewrite?), it turns out
that the couple consists of his ex-wife and her second husband, a … wait for it
… conversion therapist, though a townie one. At one point, she accuses Walt of
never having loved her, the implication being that since he was homosexual, he
was unable to give her the love she needed. Then why would she marry another
conversion therapist, if conversion therapists are mostly all men who struggled
or struggle with homosexual issues themselves? (Not to mention that it’s a
terrible accusation to say homosexuals can’t love people they’ve committed to,
unless it’s supposed to be a statement from a still bitter ex-spouse.)
Braden Abraham directs a wonderful cast of acting talents in
this interesting subject, who flesh out these characters as fully as they can.
Michael Winter is compassionate as Walt, who is ending his career and uncertain
of his impact on his “boys.” Jack Taylor displays great instincts as Daniel,
the boy at the center who is lost and afraid and gentle and suspicious.
Christine Estabrook plays a bossy, but understandable ex-spouse, with R.
Hamilton Wright as her caught-in-the-middle spouse with few options to know
what to do. Gretchen Krich has a fairly easy role as a forest ranger who doesn’t
need to involve herself in the controversy. Mari Nelson does a solid turn in an
underdeveloped role as Daniel’s mother.
As a non-Christian who is hyper sensitive to Christian
thought, one of the surprises for me was how little Scripture there actually
was in the play. It feels like Hunter missed the boat in this regard: the whole
reason these Christians feel they must root out the sin is because of how
central Scripture is to their whole lives. Everything revolves around the Bible
and everything comes back to the Bible. I feel like I have some insight here
from personal experiences.
Even the mother, married to a man who shunned his son, yet
was one of the pastors of a mega-church, apparently, rarely mentions anything
Biblical. No one prays for the missing boy. No one prays, at least out loud,
for him or herself and for guidance. There is a crisis and yet no prayers are
said? No one holds hands? No one invokes God or Jesus, almost at all?
There is, perhaps, a very important exploration here. Boys
continue, and girls continue, to commit suicide. The
It Gets Better project and online musicals like
TheHinterlands try to penetrate the vast middle of this country to get word to those
small-town boys and girls who feel different and who are afraid of themselves
and what they are told is their sin that they control.
While the production of A Great Wilderness begins to explore
the issue, the best parts of that exploration are the scenes between Walt and
Daniel. The rest of the characters get in the way, right now, and distract from
what probably should be the heart of the experience, and the challenge to Walt
should probably be right in front of him: Daniel. Staying put. Believing in
himself. Showing Walt that Walt can love himself, too.
I welcome your comments.
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