It may sound like an alphabet stream timed to the Folsom Street Fair: "LGSM." But for many in Britain of 1984, those letters brought to mind an alliance of a different sort of bedfellows. Michael Kerrigan's For the Love of Comrades draws on a coal miners' strike across the UK, an epic showdown between labor unions and the policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. "LGSM" was shorthand for Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, a support many of the labor leaders were reluctant to embrace, but which found welcome among the rank and file.
Kerrigan's play was first staged in 2013 in Derry, Northern Ireland, where he was born and raised, and it is now having its U.S. premiere at New Conservatory Theatre Center. While the recent movie Pride looks at the big picture of LGSM and its founder Mark Ashton, For the Love of Comrades takes matters down to a more intimate level. A gay couple living in a London flat provides lodging to wary strikers from Wales, with all of the action taking place in the couple's living room (designed by Devin Kasper).
This means that exposition is often delivered secondhand, with characters talking about what has happened offstage or reading newspaper articles to each other, and through television news reports. But Kerrigan is able to draw us enough into the specific worlds of his characters, whose issues often transcend politics, most effectively in the first act as relationships are established, and less so in the second act where there is less to reveal.
This is a first play for Kerrigan, a college teacher and veteran gay-rights activist, who lived in London during the LGSM days. With script development by Patricia Byrne, it is an impressive debut with but a few glaring missteps. Director Jeffrey Hoffman provides the performers with space to develop natural rhythms among the characters in almost all cases.
Gay partners Sean and Gene are a somewhat mismatched pair, with Sean an impetuous full-time activist from Derry and Gene a fastidious music student from Canada. Sean, often haunted by memories of a friend killed during the Bloody Sunday carnage of 1972 Derry, tries to forget with a manic devotion to social-justice causes. Gene has a more subdued interest in politics, and is mostly focused on preparing for a concert that is part of his final exams.
Gene is slow to get onboard when Sean arrives with two burly strikers who need a place to stay. But miners David and Rhys aren't too comfortable either when they realize their hosts are a couple of poofs, and much of the play is built around the confidence that slowly builds among the quartet even as Sean and Gene face cracks in their own relationship.
Miles Duffield anchors the play with his performance of the take-charge Sean, though he is embarrassed by panic attacks brought on by the ghostly appearances of his dead friend (Adam Odsess-Rubin). Stephen McFarland has a jittery intensity as music student Gene. Shane Fahy and Paul Rodrigues warmly navigate from gruffly masculine miners to revelers at the LGSM's fundraising Pits and Perverts Ball (an actual event headlined by Bronski Beat). Where the playwright and the production have problems is in the recurring appearances of Gene's opera-singer school partner, a character of one-dimensional hauteur played with a pushed posh by Alyssa Stone. It's the play's one big false note.
For the Love of Comrades was actually titled Pits and Perverts when it premiered in Derry, a moniker adopted by the LGSM group after a headline in a tabloid newspaper coined the phrase. It's a catchier title than the manifesto-y For the Love of Comrades, but maybe a harder sell away from the original happenings. And the current title does better reflect the mutual benefit that came from the alliance, as coal miners returned the original favor with support for gay-rights causes. Go-go boys are fine in a pride parade, but a few marching coal miners can really give homophobes the shaft.
For the Love of Comrades will run at New Conservatory Theatre Center through Oct. 11. Tickets are $25-$45. Call (415) 861-8972 or go to nctcsf.org.