For those of us still grasping at paper covered with flecks of ink, also known as newspapers, a character's remark in the opening scene of The Homosexuals has a wicked resonance. "When I'm reading bad news, I prefer that a tree dies," says Peter, a theater maven, who could have more easily found online that Catherine Zeta-Jones has won a Tony Award than wait for this horror to appear in print. The year is 2010, and as the play regresses two years in each subsequent scene, we don't see Peter again until the final scene set in 2000. "The future is ambiguous," says Peter at a party attended by all the characters, "like capri pants."
It's s flip comment, and if the ambiguity of the future is an obvious notion, it's one that Philip Dawkins' play explores with graceful insight. New Conservatory Theatre Center is the first area theater to showcase this ascendant Chicago playwright, with Marin Theatre Company soon to follow with Dawkins' Failure: A Love Story.
Before the final scene, which, chronologically, is the earliest in the play, we are able to see how past, present, and future can be a dispiriting mix when taken in together, but have their own life forces when experienced individually. We view this through the eyes of Evan, a character a decade into gay life after fleeing Iowa, disapproving parents, and the closet, and he appears in each of the two-person scenes featuring characters that he met at the party that will end the play.
Something like Bobby in the Sondheim musical Company, Evan is a bemused witness to life with a cipher-like personality onto which the other characters can project their own hopes and desires. These desires often have a sexual activation, which can become relationships, flings, and splintering confrontations. As Evan, Robert Rushin has the right combination of laidback charm and accessible good looks, and Rushin is also able to show us the character's pain and uncertainties through cracks in the veneer.
Each of the other characters gets a scene with Evan, and in each case to memorable effect. Following the order of the play's introduction of these characters, there is Matt Weimar, who deliciously laps at the pool of snark as theater-queen Peter; Daniel Redmond, who projects visceral sexual intensity as the character known as British Mark; Gabriel Ross, as sexual wallflower Michael, who beautifully delivers a soul-baring monologue; a confident Alyssa Stone, as the gal pal to the boys; Keith Marshall, who infuses the older character of Mark with a hostile sense of seniority; and Scott Cox, who empathetically plays Collin as he must still host a Tony Awards party despite the fact that his lover has just left.
Director Arturo Catricala smoothly handles the transitions, both in time and mood, of the multi-scene play for which Yusuke Soi's set easily accommodates. Those scenes span a decade, and while we all know the enormous changes for gay rights that have happened in those years, Dawkins' play reminds us that freedom is much easier to legislate than internalize.
The Homosexuals will run at New Conservatory Theatre Center through June 28. Tickets are $25-$45. Call 861-8972 or go to nctcsf.org.