Royal Flush
Gay theater in America may as well be on life support: most gay plays are inert, kept alive by a sense of social obligation, not social necessity. It’s nearly impossible to find one written in this decade that does more than restate obvious and facile truths while suggesting that references to ABBA and Judy Garland are outrageously original. Show me a play with mostly gay characters, and I’ll show you two earnest hours spent skimming the surface of pressing contemporary issues, passing time until the lead actor’s pants come off. Yet even mediocre gay fare is good business; apparently we gays feel obliged to see ourselves rendered maudlin and cardboard again and again–how else to explain the popularity of Love! Valour! Compassion!? This isn’t theater anyone needs. Some days I’m convinced it’s time to issue a Do Not Resuscitate order.
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Then along comes an ambitious mess like Royal Flush, billed as “the story of one gay man’s idealistic and sometimes hateful view of his world and how it is challenged by his three flamboyant and gossipy friends.” The toenails curl reading such tortured prose, and one wonders what this play’s got that can’t be had for free sitting in a corner of the Lucky Horse Shoe. And indeed, the first few scenes seem to secure playwright Tom Hietter a place next to Terrence McNally in the lavender dustbin of irrelevance. Teddie, the straight-appearing, straight-acting, just-right-of-William-Bennett career man, meets Dwight, the flighty gothic club kid, at a drag bar (why Teddie sets foot in the place is anyone’s guess), and a single reluctant spark flies. Under the watchful eyes of reigning drag royal Camille and his spiteful, violent cokehead manager-lover Louis, the unlikely couple make fumbling attempts at courtship–despite Teddie’s contempt for all things gay (not to mention his obsession with a straight college buddy) and Dwight’s inability to find two nickels to rub together.
Hietter maintains this level of emotional and ethical ambiguity for the better part of the play, so that even when his scenes dawdle and his dialogue fizzles, his lead characters fascinate. As Dwight, James Gibson is a mercurial cipher, someone who switches imperceptibly from persona to persona to get what he wants. Yet Gibson also finds Dwight’s vulnerable side; your heart goes out to him even when he’s lying through his teeth to get money from a friend.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Royal Flush stage photo (uncredited).
