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Terence
McNally’s Some Men (which received its world
premiere in Philadelphia nearly a year ago)
might be considered the Cliff Notes version
of gay American history as lived during the
past eighty years. Unlike August Wilson’s
ten-play oeuvre about the African-American
experience in the United States in which
Wilson gave each decade its own play,
McNally neatly sums up the American gay
male’s history in little more than two
hours. Pithy, we’ve always been—less known
for our oral folklore than our snappy
one-liners.
Writing in almost a playwright shorthand, or
perhaps more accurately, a kind of dramatic
haiku, McNally distills the essence of each
decade into a brief scene. Hitting our high
points and lows, there’s a scene from the
Harlem Renaissance and another scene
(beautifully delineating the differences
within the gay community) set during the
night of the Stonewall riots—as well as
scenes played out on an AIDS ward, and
another in an Internet chat room, and a
couple of scenes, separated by decades,
taking place along the beach at the Hamptons.
The nine-member cast, nimbly directed by
Trip Cullman, shifts from decade to decade
and character to character, in a kind of
roundelay, with most of the characters
connected to each other through a series of
chance encounters over the years. Arguably
stereotypical—the drag queen, the show
queens, the hustler, the closeted soldier,
the married gay—each clichÈ is given fresh
life by a cast of experienced performers,
particularly Michael McElroy in his
depiction of Angel Eyes, a Harlem
Renaissance club owner and friend of
Bricktop, who opens the second act and
brings down the house with his rendition of
“Ten Cents a Dance.”
According to production notes, music was the
seed for Some Men, which was, at one point,
a series of scenes set to songs most often
associated with the gay American male.
Mercifully, in the current incarnation,
“It’s Raining Men” has been cut—though “Over
the Rainbow” remains, a song which, in spite
of itself and after nearly seventy years of
overuse, becomes (as sung by David
Greenspan) the centerpiece for one of the
most touching scenes of the entire piece.
That’s the beauty of Some Men—just when you
think you don’t need or want another play,
another scene, about gay men in America,
McNally reminds you how far we’ve traveled
and how many obstacles we’ve overcome, and
why we deserve to celebrate our history. As
one elderly gay pair states, the heroes in
our journey have not been our stage divas
and screen legends so much as each other and
all of us.
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