Arrangement for Two Violas
If a play like Susan Lieberman’s elegant, plainspoken Arrangement for Two Violas–about two gay doctors in 1938 Wisconsin–opened anywhere in Kansas, its audience would be greeted by a picket line. Members of Fred Phelps’s Topeka-based Westboro Baptist Church regularly protest any performing-arts event within a day’s drive. (When I was a student at Kansas State University, Phelps’s minions protested every musical my friends and I ever appeared in, including a uniquely ungay production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.) While most Kansas churchgoers are ashamed of Phelps’s “God hates fags” rhetoric, many also draw a perverse comfort from his existence: he allows Christians in meat loaf country to be antihate without being progay. Such rationalization is what opened the door for 11 gay-marriage bans, and it’s what makes red state “tolerance” no different in its effect than hard-nosed bigotry.
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Though Lieberman excels at depicting small-town midwesterners, Rader’s cosmopolitan doctor is also impressive in Henry’s few scenes of self-righteous explosion. Fey and piss-elegant throughout, Rader resists the temptation to camp things up, and the payoff is a stunning intensity when Henry demands to be heard. Sanders’s feat, on the other hand, is to give Peter a dignified, genuine masculinity. When his friend Karl chides him for crying in the face of an emasculating tragedy–Karl tells Peter point-blank to be a man–Sanders looks up without flinching and says, “I am a man.”
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