During Robin Stanton's tenure as producing artistic director of the Spokane InterPlayers Ensemble, the city's anti-gay mayor was caught up in an Internet sting in which he was found to be soliciting young gay men for unpaid intern work. Mayor Jim West admitted to gay encounters, tried to hold onto his job, but was overwhelmingly removed from office in a recall election.
In the play Speech & Debate, which Stanton is directing for Aurora Theatre, a parallel situation is playing out in Salem, Oregon, and an aggressive reporter for the high school newspaper is trying to convince his faculty adviser to let him pursue the story. But ironically, Solomon, the young reporter, is trying to yank the mayor out of a closet for which Solomon himself hasn't found the exit.
Stephen Karam's play, which debuted in New York in 2007, is unabashedly a comedy, though its subject matter, of which the fictional mayor's peccadilloes are just a small component, finds its way into darkly complicated places. "I think comedy makes discussions easier in our society," Stanton said on a recent afternoon before rehearsals. "I remember when Mel Brooks said in an interview about The Producers that the best way to deal with Hitler was to laugh at him. Otherwise your heart can break."
In addition to the aspiring reporter (played by Jason Frank), the young characters include Diwata (Jayne Deely), a would-be diva who wants to take down the drama coach for thwarting her dreams, and Howie (Maro Guevara), an openly gay student whose online chat with the prowling (and insufficiently anonymous) drama coach opens the play. These three misfits form a speech-and-debate society as they use each other to further their own personal agendas. That their Oregon hometown of Salem shares its name with a Massachusetts community with a dark past is not lost on the kids. They concoct a musical in which a time-traveling character from Arthur Miller's The Crucible meets up with a gay Abe Lincoln.
In addition to the three teens, the cast includes two adults. The same actress is double-cast in the roles of a teacher and a reporter, and in the Aurora production, that actress happens to be married to the director. Holli Hornlein and Robin Stanton became wife and wife during the brief window of opportunity in California when same-sex marriages were legal. They had met in 1996 when both were living in Chicago, and they made the move together to Washington when Stanton got the producing artistic director job at the Spokane InterPlayers Ensemble.
When they read about Mayor Gavin Newsom's independent, and soon disallowed, decision to sanction same-sex marriages in San Francisco, they decided to move here as soon as Stanton's contract with the Spokane theater would allow.
"Spokane is an area that thinks it wants to celebrate diversity, but it does not," Stanton said. "The discrimination we felt there was a constant discrimination, and we never wanted to face that again. We felt we needed to empower ourselves, and when we heard about what Gavin Newsom was trying to do, we thought this was the place we should be. We are so happy about that decision."
Both work in the youth theater program at Solano Community College, and Stanton shuttles between her job there and as a frequent director of Aurora Theatre productions. Stanton, who had spent the morning of our interview dealing with various crises in Solano's production of Thoroughly Modern Millie, is already in pre-production for Alice Childress' Trouble in Mind, opening Aurora's new season in August, and then it's back to Solano for a production of Annie with high school and college students.
"One of the things that popped out at me when I first read Speech & Debate was the state of arts education," Stanton said. "The arts is a place we can go to learn confidence, self-esteem, group work, and tolerance. Tolerance is a big part of arts education. And in this play, it's not just tolerance of the people around us, it's also about accepting ourselves. This is a relationship-based play where you come into your own through your journey with others."
Speech & Debate will run at the Aurora Theatre June 11-July 18. Tickets are $34-$45. Call (510) 843-4822 or go to www.auroratheatre.org.