Love (Can Sometimes Be) a Real Read
By Justin Hayford
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The revival-meeting format favored by the group is at once its strongest asset and greatest drawback. With 20 pieces on the program, it’s easy to envision a performance that splinters into 20 unconnected vignettes. After all, being black, gay, and in love is hardly a unifying theme, given the multiplicity of experiences and points of view that category might include. And despite a general unwillingness to venture beyond middle-class life, A Real Read has cast a wide net in culling pieces for the show. C.C. Carter relates the tragicomic trauma of coming out to her mother, not knowing that her girlfriend had let the cat out of the bag via telephone five minutes earlier. Adopting an entirely different persona later, Carter relives the violent end of an abusive relationship. Lynnell S. Long bullies her way through leather bars in search of true love. Pat Mickey explains how being stoned all weekend gives her the fortitude to return to her ersatz heterosexual life during the week.
For much of the time, especially during the show’s first half, the performers mush about in a vague world of prefab emotions, a world seemingly created by committee; by and large their achingly good intentions get in the way of articulating complicated realities. In their self-aggrandizing introduction they describe their work as “remarkably universal,” but in truth much of the work is remarkably generic. The group needs to push beyond the heartfelt complacency that often renders its world featureless.
