NEW YORK — The traditional gay play — you know: about gay white men in nice apartments — is having an existential crisis. That is only fitting. How much more drama can be mined from coming out, fighting AIDS, demanding dignity and registering at Room & Board?
In particular, marriage, for all the questions it raises about assimilation, has been too much of a political success to support much counterargument onstage.
(One notable exception: Drew Droege’s furiously anti-matrimonial “Bright Colors and Bold Patterns.”) Even when complicated by parenting, as in “Dada Woof Papa Hot,” “Steve” and “Breeders” — all delightful — the subject feels settled now, drained of emergency. Progress in the world is not always good in the theater.
But progress is drastically uneven, suggesting that the future for gay plays may look more intersectional: less white, less male, less wealthy — and more transgender. Already, works like “Charm” and “Bootycandy” are taking apart the LGBT rainbow to examine its constituent parts and to ask if they really fit together in the first place.
Certainly that is where Jordan Harrison tries to situate “Log Cabin,” a hot-button gay-versus-trans comedy that opened Monday at Playwrights Horizons. Looking at what happens when the rainbow turns on itself, it is marginally less homogeneous than the traditional gay play. Unfortunately, it is also less coherent.
That is not just my complaint: It is also the main character’s. He is Ezra, a gay man in his late 30s. (Embodied by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, he may remind you of Mitchell Pritchett, whom Ferguson plays on “Modern Family.”) You sense that Ezra would like the world to stop spinning now that it has landed him in a good situation. He has got his husband; their lesbian friends Jules and Pam; and, through them, the promise of parental engagement (but not too much) as honorary uncles to the baby the women are expecting.
The four are barely characterized beyond that; each has just a trait or two. Ezra is quippy and white; Chris (Phillip James Brannon) is dry and black; Pam (Cindy Cheung) is laconic and Asian-American; Jules (Dolly Wells) is irreverent and British. Mostly they are notable for their complacency, which is not just economic. Having lived through the liberation wars, or at least having read about them, they now intend to enjoy the success they inherited — quince paste, anyone? — by doing whatever they like.
Into this nest of mild-mannered entitlement — most of the action takes place in Jules and Pam’s sleek Brooklyn apartment — comes Henry, a transgender man whom Ezra knew in childhood as Helen. Everything about Henry (Ian Harvie) is a challenge to the gay couples, and not just in throwing them off their pronouns.
“They want us to get it wrong,” Jules says. “They’re filling a quota of perceived transgressions.”
But it is more profound than that; Henry’s rendition of masculinity is the kind they all suffered from, and learned to loathe, as homosexuals. He is, for instance, notably condescending to his chatterbox young girlfriend, Myna (Talene Monahon) — but then so is the play in giving her that name.
Henry’s aggressiveness, which may be a side effect of the hormones he takes, is also political. Though he bristles with self-confidence sexually, he is quick to complain of betrayal everywhere, lumping his gay and lesbian friends with the rest of the cisgender world in failing to fight for transgender rights as they once fought for their own.
That schism is real; some gay and transgender people are beginning to re-evaluate their current and historical stance toward one another. But it is too much for Ezra, who sees himself being caricatured as a neocon. (The play’s title alludes to Log Cabin Republicans, a gay conservative group, and also to a kind of bunkered frontier mentality.) “My whole life it’s ‘Smear the Queer’ and getting slammed into lockers,” he says, “and then I wake up and I’m Mr. Mainstream Privilege. I didn’t see it happening.”
As for Chris, he is incredulous that anyone could think a gay black man has “some sort of advantage, in this society, over a white trans guy.”
This wrestling over aggrievement — who will win the prize for suffering the greatest injustice? — is what passes for the main action of “Log Cabin,” leading it into many tortured and baroquely extended arguments. (Terrorists, social media and Elphaba somehow factor in.)
By contrast, the characters seem like megaphones or missiles, and the plot a Rube Goldberg contraption for moving them into position for the next fusillade.
Harrison, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the devastating “Marjorie Prime,” tries hard to hide the machinery, but it keeps showing through anyway. To keep the discussion going he is eventually forced into plot improbabilities and surreal workarounds. Not to spoil anything, but babies are involved.
There is something brave and bracing about his putting all his ideas out there, taboo though many are. And no one can say Harrison is highly invested in making his main characters look good. But unlike “Marjorie Prime” and, more recently, “The Amateurs,” “Log Cabin” seems shapeless: offering tough medicine, perhaps, but nothing to store it in. It dribbles away.
As such, there is little the actors can do to contour their performances; they are left to hone line readings, which are always sitcom accurate. Likewise, Pam MacKinnon’s direction is largely concerned with keeping the dialogue and the furniture moving.
It is a shame that the powerful ideas Harrison means to conjure about mainstream gay people’s “failure of empathy” are trivialized and in some ways negated by his own failure of empathy: his failure, that is, to make his characters human.
As a result, he cannot prove, as he seems to intend, that we are now, in effect, over the rainbow.
—
Production Notes:
‘Log Cabin’
Through July 15 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; 212-279-4200, playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
By Jordan Harrison; directed by Pam MacKinnon; sets by Allen Moyer; costumes by Jessica Pabst; lighting by Russell H. Champa; sound by Leah Gelpe; production stage manager, Amanda Spooner; associate artistic director, Adam Greenfield. Presented by Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford, artistic director, Leslie Marcus, managing director, Carol Fishman, general manager.
Cast: Phillip James Brannon (Chris), Cindy Cheung (Pam), Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Ezra), Ian Harvie (Henry), Talene Monahon (Myna) and Dolly Wells (Jules).
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.