A
Comedy of Eros was inspired by a news item in the New York
Times in 1993 reporting a serious immorality in the office of
Michael J. Bowers, the then State Attorney General in Atlanta,
Georgia. When Bowers learned that Robin Joy Shahar, a brilliant
lawyer working in his office was a lesbian and going to marry
another woman, he fired her, declaring that she was violating
"the State's law against homosexual sodomy."
This
same Bowers, in June 1986, directed his law enforcement officers
to enter the private home and bedroom of citizen Michael Hardwick
and to arrest him and another male even though both were engaged
in consensual sex. Bowers declared the Constitutional law of
Georgia held sodomy illegal wherever it could be found.
A
Comedy of Eros borders on the tragic or the farcical as does
the reality of Attorney General Bowers' antics in Atlanta's court
case - of course, depending on one's point of view. The various
forms of love alliances are examined by a cast of zanies, like
the original models for this play.
The
climax is explosive in its life-or-death confrontation, exemplifying
that each person in his or her own life must configure and evaluate
one's own sense of true love, to respond to the ultimate sacrifice
in the true love relationship whether heterosexual, homosexual
or lesbian. The outcome of this play's confrontation signals
the presence of true love, proving the moral values basic to
this play.
Traffic Light Wunderkind Creates Comedy of Eros, Jan. 25-Feb.
17 Off-Bway
25 Jan 2002
Oh sure, pick an Off-Off-Broadway play and the author will
likely have a long list of writing, acting and directing credits
� and Paul Firestone is no exception. His play, Sublime
Lives, was staged on New York's Theatre Row in 1991, and his
latest, A Comedy of Eros, will play the Hudson Guild Theatre
Jan. 25-Feb. 17, officially opening there Jan. 27.
But this actor-director is no mere double-hyphenate. According
to production spokesperson Jim Baldassare, Mr. Firestone is an
actor-director-inventor, who recently secured a patent for "a
traffic control signal with displayed time-elapse."
Controlling the two hours traffic on the Hudson Guild stage
will be Harland Meltzer, founder of the Shakespeare-in-the-Park
in Westerly, RI. He'll be guiding a modern-day, satirical silly
sex farce about a conventional widow, Lulubeth, upset that her
daughter, Delia, wants to marry a woman. Since Delia's girlfriend
works for the Attorney General, mom hopes to use his influence
to subvert the marriage, at which point hijinks, mistaken identities
and even a murder plot ensue.
Joan Copeland, who was supposed to be in the Neil Simon comedy
45 Seconds from Broadway but, along with Carol Woods, left the
company, stars in Eros as Lulubeth. Copeland's credits include
The American Clock and Two By Two. Also in the cast are Jordan
Charney, Andrea Leigh, Paul Romero, Jennifer Dorr White and Travis
Wood. Designing Eros are Matthew Myrhum (set) and Brian Aldous
(lighting) and Mary Myers (costumes), the latter receiving a
helping hand from veteran designer William Ivey Long, who'll
do Copeland's frocks.
For tickets ($15) and information on A Comedy of Eros at the
Hudson Guild Theatre, 441 West 26th St., call (212) 662-6728.
� By David Lefkowitz
A scene from Act I of " A Comedy of Eros"
Click on image to view larger.
THE MACHINE MESSIAH
The
Machine Messiah is a play that dramatizes the non-heroic
life of Henry Ford and his distorted relationship with his son
Edsel and with the Jews. America's richest man in the 1920's,
Ford made every effort to end World War I, in order to set up
Ford factories in Germany distinguished for its engineering excellence,
even as he wielded power in Washington to halt the Eastern European
Jewish immigration. Ford saw himself as a modern Messiah for
Americans bringing mobility in his cheap Lizzy which he produced
on an assembly line, a form of ruthless slave labor that resulted
in the exploitive Five Dollar Day. The war between Capital and
Labor was declared in Detroit, even as the disease of anti-Semitism
disrupted the nation.
THE GOOD FATHER
AUGUSTINE
The
Good Father Augustine is a true and terrible tragedy that
dramatizes the life of homosexual, Roger Bruckner. An English
teacher in a Westchester private school, Roger meets a seductive,
orphan street-boy of 11, Shade, in Times Square and falls in
love with what he sees as an image of himself twenty years before.
In a dual life, Roger marries the naïve Brenda and attempts
to adopt Shade. She escapes from the marriage by informing the
Westchester police that Roger has drugs in his glove compartment,
a felony which puts him in Attica prison for five years and gives
Brenda her freedom. After a failed suicide attempt, Roger, a
Jew, finds solace in Saint Augustine's Confessions, of
that Saint's sinful sexuality and conversion to Christ. Roger
believes Christ would have compassion and forgive the pederast
as he too renounces all sexuality in his love of Christ. He vows
to be a loving father to Shade and give him the strength to face
the world morally and courageously.
The
action of the play begins in mid-Westchester County when Shade
is 16 and Roger has been released from prison. Shade cannot understand
Roger's vow of celibacy. The wheel of the tragedy moves cruelly
when Shade, an aspiring ballet dancer, angrily and willfully
becomes incapacitated by liquor and drugs, leaps from the third
floor balcony, fracturing his shoulder and hip.
In
Act II Vincent De Santis appears to answer Shade's sexual needs
and to assert Satan's, not Christ's power manifest in the world.
Roger
fights a losing battle against Vinny, contending for his paraplegic
adopted son's loyalty and love. The tragic moment of Roger's
murder is an inexorable agony.
LET THE WHIRLWIND
COME
Let
The Whirlwind Come is a trilogy that deals with the lives
of three great Abolitionists in the 19th century, the action
of the play beginning in 1803 and extending beyond the Emancipation
Proclamation of September, 1862.
Angelina
and Sara Grimke are the daughters of a family of slave owners
in Charleston, South Carolina, and for their rebellious acts
are driven from the State and reviled. The girls' experiences
with slavery and the slave trade fire the sisters to become ardent
Abolitionists and Angelina marries the foremost of all Abolitionists
in the United States Theodore Weld, more ardent than the rousing
editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison.
Paralleling
Gone With the Wind that dramatizes aristocratic Americans
of the South, Let the Whirlwind Come is an historical
romance of dedicated libertarians who believed in the words of
the Constitution that declared all men were created equal, and
that the emancipated slave and all women had the right to be
free citizens and to vote their conscience as free citizens.
The risks to their lives and the animus that possessed these
dedicated people is reflected in the difficult era of the Civil
War and the years following that conflict.
The
climax of the play is the turn-about, that the Grimkes, once
a white slave-holding family, has changed dramatically. All the
white male Grimkes have died and their offspring, all black sons
of black slave mistresses, proudly bear the Grimke name as they
accomplished the unthinkable, becoming outstanding scholars in
America's finest colleges as they prepare for their professions.
THE PATRIOT ACT
The
Patriot Act is a one act play that reflects the tyranny of
Communist Russia in the 1970's. The Refusenik Jews who have expressed
their wish to emigrate to Israel have been named enemies of the
State. The need for man to be free to express his true feelings
and seek justice for himself and others is dramatized as the
moral foundation of this short drama. The community of desperate
people anxious to be free are tormented within a terrifying Orwellian,
thought-controlled society. The four actors of this play become
the same four who play parts in The Proofing.
THE PROOFING
The
Proofing is a one act companion piece to The Patriot Act.
The metaphor of the bakery, the method of proofing to produce
a predictably excellent and uniform product does
not apply to human beings whose lives are filled with negative
feelings, paranoia, anger and hatred. The action of the play
takes place in a poor Bronx apartment where a family has been
baffled by the tragedy that has confronted them, the suicide
death of their daughter, realizing she has become pregnant after
a grotesque rape.
Joey,
the late-adolescent son of this immigrant family has been hospitalized
in trauma. Mr. Z has become a shell of man, devoid of feeling, pained with guilt and hostility. A devout Catholic, Mrs. Z
seeks refuge and solace in the plaster statue of the Virgin.
The young psychoanalyst who has come to help the family is himself
troubled and incompetent to help.
BEYOND THE HORIZON
Beyond
the Horizon is an adaptation of the great Eugene O"Neill
play providing insight into the plight of the African American
as he considers his helplessness in his relationship to his native
Africa.
It
is O'Neill's play with a serious motivation on the part of the
hero, Robert Mayo, to follow Marcus Garvey's call for black men
to return to Africa to bring the benefits of democracy to those
nations from which black men were kidnapped and sold into slavery.
The
incompetence of Robert Mayo as a farmer and his loveless marriage
evidence the wasted life of a young idealist-dreamer who could
have mattered in another clime.
