Stage

The only trouble with The Untamed Stage is that it won't outlast the month of March. Then the city's cabaret scene will lapse into its usual torpid state. The natural place for these entertainers to go would be the swing scene, and if the owners of Bimbo's or the Hi-Ball are worried about losing their clientele to a swarm of Marina yuppies and other people inspired to dance because of that goddamn Gap commercial, they should think seriously about introducing some of the cabaret talent that will be set free in San Francisco after The Untamed Stage. Drag queens and vaudeville might be just the right garnish for a watered-down Cocktail Nation.

Traitor to the Cause, a new play by Terri Kasch, deals with a gay New Yorker named Kieran whose apartment gets invaded by two strange creatures: first, a homeless man who remembers him from high school; then, the ghost of his sister, Sarah. Kieran has been agonizing over a eulogy for Sarah, and it slowly emerges that although she was nice and all, she didn't know he was gay. In fact she was part of the repressive provincial culture of his hometown, Benedict Falls. The homeless man -- Jerry -- is openly gay, while the well-off Kieran is out only to his New York circle of friends, and plans to attend Sarah's funeral at Benedict Falls with a phony (lesbian) wife.

Kasch won an award from this paper for a 1997 script called Verbatim, which dealt with language and identity, but I'm afraid her new play trivializes the dilemma of being gay. For some reason she handles her central event with frustrating coyness: At the start of Act 2, Kieran is assaulted by a bunch of thugs and dragged back into his apartment, bloodied and bruised. Who were the thugs? Gay activists. Why did they do it? Apparently because he was walking down the street with his "wife," and because he's known to be gay but closeted. But we never get the whole story, and for the entire second act a man with blood on his shirt rants onstage while the audience wonders about that blood. The rest of the story involves Kieran's decision to come out to his sister's ghost. This is hard to take seriously, as well as being stilted, and the stiltedness finds its way into the acting, so that only Carrie Chantler, as Alice, and Andrew Kelsey, as Jerry, squeeze any life from their lines. Traitor to the Cause is a bomb. It happens to the best of us; but on vaudeville stages they used to have a big hook for this kind of thing.

-- Michael Scott Moore