Theatre Rhinoceros is not yet again a charging beast, but its recently announced 2010-11 season is stepping up the pace from the careful canter of the recently completed season.
"I'm not nervous. I'm not scared," said Rhino Executive Director John Fisher. "Last season I was, like, we'll see, and this season I'm, like, this is going to be good."
Last season saw the long-running LGBT theater choosing to become an itinerant company rather than continue to deal with the rent increases, maintenance hassles, and audience resistance to the 16th Street location. The cash-strapped theater produced only two full-scale productions in loaned facilities, but the upcoming season increases that to three productions, in addition to two familiar names �" Marga Gomez and Suzanne Westenhoefer �" returning to the Victoria Theatre for their own stand-up gigs.
The main attractions are also products of names with which you are likely to be familiar: Oscar Wilde, for The Picture of Dorian Gray; Stephen Sondheim, for Marry Me a Little; and John Fisher himself for a new play about real-life Scottish military hero Hector MacDonald titled Fighting Mac!
Fisher has managed to include Oscar Wilde as a character in his version of MacDonald's exploits, which ended with his gay-shame suicide in 1903. Fisher is also injecting himself, as the adaptor, into Wilde's 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which will open the Rhino season on Aug. 26 at the Eureka Theatre.
"There's really not that much homosexuality in Wilde's plays," Fisher said, "but Dorian Gray is very much a gay book. It's also a very odd book for him, because it is an early attempt at a style he really didn't follow through on. But I think it's very autobiographical, at least as his fantasy of wanting to live the life of a libertine and getting away with it, of wanting to be young forever, and it's like the life he didn't get."
Fisher said he is taking artistic license in his version of the story of a young man whose portrait registers the vagaries of time and the ugliness of his actions, leaving him with his pristine beauty. "90% of what comes out of people's mouths are Oscar Wilde's own words," Fisher said, "but the license will come in the use of space and dance and movement. It's going to be very theatrical, very loose, very free."
As he always does, Fisher will direct his own play. He has fewer credits directing musical theater, but he said he is also the likely director of Marry Me a Little, opening at the Eureka on Feb. 2. "There is a story I want to tell, and the piece is sort of open to interpretation. My interest in it is same-sex marriage."
Marry Me a Little is made up of songs cut from Sondheim musicals or from his musicals that were never produced. First presented in 1981, it focuses on a man and woman, each alone in adjoining apartments on a Saturday night, and basically romantically bereft in a minimal plot that the songs set up. What caught Fisher's attention was a 1999 production, approved by Sondheim, that allowed LA's Celebration Theatre to cast the two roles with men.
Though Rhino was quickly granted rights to stage Marry Me a Little, it took three months before his request for a same-sex staging was approved. "They sent me a contract saying I could use two men, but that I had to do the show word for word as written. So I had to ask about all the pronouns, like changing 'she' to 'he,' and they said go ahead."
For Fighting Mac!, opening June 2 at Thick House, Fisher is tapping into the story of a British war hero largely unknown to Americans. Finishing his career as a Major-General, Hector MacDonald was a commoner who achieved advancement on military merit in such conflicts as the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the First and Second Boer Wars, and the Sudan campaign. Rumors of his homosexuality had long circulated, and when he read in the newspaper that he would be facing a court-martial hearing, he shot himself to death in a Paris hotel room.
"I'm a huge war freak," said Fisher, who, in addition to writing and directing the play, will also portray MacDonald. "One of my struggles is reconciling my feeling about war as adventure and an entertainment and my feeling that it is an abomination as a reality. I'm trying not to get bogged down in what happened here or what happened there, or offering a lesson in colonialism. But this is a great metaphor for the United States, since MacDonald did a lot of his fighting in Afghanistan."
As for the comic parts of the Rhino season, Westenhoefer will be making her third appearance for the theater since Fisher became executive director. The April 8 & 9 appearances at the Victoria Theatre are part of her Totally Inappropriate tour.
As for Gomez, her upcoming seventh New Year's Eve show at the Victoria will be her last under the Rhino aegis. "We both want to go out with a bang and not get into a rut," Fisher said. He already has someone "really great," but for now unnamed, lined up for the 2011 New Year's Eve show.
Subscription tickets ($100 and $135) to the five-event season are now on sale. Call (800) 838-3006 or go to www.therhino.org.
Richard Dodds can be reached at [email protected].