THEATRE: David Le Page
The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me represents a medium familiar to South Africans, and one that is oft- reviled: it is protest theatre. The issue is not race, it is gay rights, but the anger and rhetoric are familiar. Frequently the stage becomes a podium, and Robert Finlayson, the sole performer, a prancing, gesticulating demonstrator spewing hatred at the “oppressor straights”.
This type of theatre jars. If a medium is capable of such subtle power, when it offers so many more powerful avenues of persuasion than simply shouting a cause, why resort to the latter, unless you are without the skill or patience to do more?
Fortunately such moments are not unrelenting in this play; indeed, there are many more of charm and humour.
Written by David Drake, an American activist, The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me is a series of sketches that encapsulate his experience as a gay man. The title refers not to an actual kiss, but to Drake’s experience of a play that dealt with gay issues.
>From the mirrored narcissism of a gym to the smoky depths of a gay night club, we are taken on a guided tour of one man’s experiences. The gym scene is typical of Drake’s method. It begins with an amusing litany of wicked thoughts as gay mingles with straight in the temple of the body, then swerves off into a cascade of furious language.
Drake is obviously concerned with representing a variety of gay experiences. At times, though, he seems merely to caricature them (though doubtlessly it is caricature which gay audiences will relish). When, in the nightclub, various personas prance and posture, presenting their sexual manifestos, it is difficult to see such self-objectification as anything other than self-hatred, a “gay demon” Drake claims to be trying to exorcise. More effective is when Drake has his performer recount, in a ring of candles, his memories of a dozen friends who have died of Aids.
Finlayson is an adept and energetic performer, who alternately thrills and chills, particularly in the stinging final segment, which leaps forward in time to an era where gays have seized by violence the right to live without persecution. The play represents the curse of Aids as an anti-gay conspiracy. “Active homophobia caused Aids,” says Drake. While in the US the statement may represent the pain of a marginalised community, in Africa it has the ring of a paranoid delusion which ignores the millions of heterosexual sufferers.
Perhaps it is easy to be smug about these issues in a country that now constitutionally protects sexual orientation. Still, as a vehicle for advancing gay rights, the play falls far short of efforts such as Priest, a Trojan horse of a movie that one can imagine slipping the gay cause into hearts long hardened against it.
The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me runs at the Laager at the Market until October 14