STREAMING THEATER
Rainbow of Plays Bringing Pride Home
Michael Urie, Doug Nevin, Nick Mayo Zoom in on Pride Plays
BY DAVID KENNERLEY
In June 2019, the Pride Plays
festival debuted at the Rattlestick
Playwrights Theater to
honor Stonewall 50 during
the World Pride celebration. The
event made such a splash that creators
Michael Urie, Doug Nevin,
and Nick Mayo felt compelled to reprise
the festival for Pride 2020.
Pride Plays was programmed
and ready to move forward. But in
March, when theaters in New York
and beyond went dark due to the
COVID crisis, plans were thrown
into disarray — but the project was
not abandoned. Event co-producers
Urie and Nevin, along with director
Mayo, sat down with Gay City
News via Zoom to chat about the
festival’s extraordinary rebirth.
“At the beginning of the pandemic
we had high hopes that the coronavirus
would be at least under
control if not a memory,” said Urie,
referring to their planned opening
in late June. “We kept thinking
we’d be the fi rst ones back and we
can still do this.”
For a solid month they thought
the target date was still possible.
But as the lockdown kept extending,
it became clear the original
plan had to be scuttled.
“The idea of packing the Rattlestick
with people in masks and
gloves wasn’t the spirit we wanted,”
Urie said of the historic, intimate
venue. “And yet we had engaged all
these artists. Pride was going to
be in the month of June, whether
there was a parade or not.”
“I would say that the straw that
broke the gay camel’s back was the
canceling of the Pride Parade,” said
Mayo. “Once we heard that, the
curtain came down.”
So they set out devising a plan
to move the entire shebang online.
According to Nevin, they began to
expand their vision beyond staging
LGBTQ-themed plays.
“In addition to supporting new
playwrights and plays selected
through our submissions process,
we also were thinking how to celebrate
Pride in a larger way, in a
more publicly available way, because
Pride Plays honchos (top row, left to right) Doug Nevin and Nick Mayo and (bottom row, left) Michael
Urie chat about their upcoming online programming with Gay City News’ David Kennerley.
events like the parade and
the Garden Party and Broadway
Bares would not be happening this
year,” he explained. “What could
we do to help the community gather
in a virtual way?”
As they were struggling with
this challenge, Playbill miraculously
reached out offering a partnership.
“We were like, well yeah!” said
Nevin. “That would give us a platform,
it would give us deadlines,
and it would help us with structure.”
They landed on a series of
four prime time plays to be livestreamed
every Friday in June, in
addition to nearly a dozen developmental
productions (full casting
yet to be announced). The festival
will culminate in a Pride Spectacular
Concert to livestream on the
evening of Sunday, June 28.
According to Urie, the mission of
Pride Plays is evolving. Last year
they focused on telling stories that
came from a place of pride, not a
place of shame.
“When we looked back, we realized
that so much material written
for so many years had to do with
the punishment of being gay,” he
said. “You end up alone, in a sanitarium,
DAVID KENNERLEY
or dead. We wanted to tell
stories that were about the next
step.”
In adjudicating this year, they
tried to ensure the works were not
only prideful, but also with a component
of activism and standing
up to our enemies and demons.
“Pride Plays is curious,” said
Mayo. “We are lucky to be a part
of the LGBTQ community, which
is one of the more diverse communities
there is. Where does your
story fall within the lens of pride
and activism? We want to be a culture
of support. Our job is to give
a platform for the stories to be told
because they exist and they are
worthy.”
The slate of prime time plays is
impressive, a potent mix refl ecting
large swaths of the LGBTQ spectrum.
Up until this week, the festival
had been scheduled to debut
on June 5 with “Brave Smiles…
Another Lesbian Tragedy” written
by and starring The Five Lesbian
Brothers. However, because
of the grief and outrage sparked
by the Memorial Day police killing
of George Floyd in Minneapolis,
“Braves Smiles…” will be rescheduled
for a later date.
“#BlackLivesMatter is the only
thing that matters right now,”
Nevin, Urie, and Mayo said in a
written statement.
When “Braves Smiles…,” a biting
satire, premiered in 1992 at the
WOW Café Theatre in the East Village,
the piece was groundbreaking
for skewering the myth of the
lonely, doomed lesbian typically
portrayed in literature. Amazingly,
The Five Lesbian Brothers are reprising
their original roles, directed
by Leigh Silverman. The event
will be hosted by Judy Gold.
One goal of Pride Plays is to introduce
audiences to playwrights
they might not know. That’s why
they chose “One in Two,” an electrifying
drama about Black men living
with the stigma of being HIVpositive,
written by Donja R. Love.
The piece, which had a sensational
run at The New Group earlier this
year, promises to resonate anew
since it speaks to coping in a pandemic.
They also selected “Masculinity
Max,” an irreverent comedy
about a trans man, because the
playwright MJ Kaufman is one of
the most exciting LGBTQ writers
emerging now and deserves wider
exposure.
The fourth prime time offering
is “The Men from the Boys,” Mart
Crowley’s 2002 sequel to the iconic
“The Boys in the Band.” This revival
will be directed by Zachary
Quinto, who wowed audiences as
Harold in the Broadway revival of
“Boys” a couple of years back. Sadly,
Crowley’s sequel was not well
received.
“‘The Boys in the Band’ was indisputably
the original Pride play,”
said Mayo. “One of the joys of that
revival, and of revisiting all the
LGBT works, is hearing what those
plays have to say about the world
we are now living in. Zach will be
approaching the sequel from the
perspective of the artists who recently
lived in the original work.”
Urie concurs that the highly acclaimed
“Boys” Broadway revival,
which featured an out-and-proud
cast including Jim Parsons, Tuc
➤ PRIDE PLAYS, continued on p.29
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