Relationships

Leaving the auditorium after Nerdfucker, I felt like a defiant teenager. I found the performance charming and heart wrenching. I was rooting vehemently for the main character by the end of the play, and was ready to rush out and tell all my friends to see this great show! 

But after the audience’s enthusiastic applause was shushed into silence by Cameryn Moore’s insistence that we tell everyone we know about the show because this play deserves a bigger audience than it had (at 7:30 on opening Thursday), I was left feeling like my appreciation was underappreciated. My experience of the past hour...

Hands Around by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by A. Koren, adapted by Dylan Coulter, is disturbing because, though first read aloud in 1900, it is relevant today in its far too realistic account of the messy, gory, sinister assortment that is love.

Set in 1980, Vienna, the story follows ten individuals as they power-play each other in the name of love. As Hands Around progresses, lips are kissed, promises are broken and betrayal becomes expected. There is not simply one perspective of love. One man believes that "all men, really, become disgusted by love." A married man admits to his...

This play is a lament for the painful consequences that radiate in all directions from a violence-infused culture. It’s a reflection on frustration, anger, abandonment, hidden disabilities, and sexual violence. It reveals a struggle to understand the causes of pain across four lives: a dead American soldier, perhaps by suicide, perhaps involved in Abu Ghraib atrocities in the US/Gulf War; his wife, perhaps unloved, a young woman, now a therapist, emotionally abandoned by her father; the soldier’s artistically-inclined, identical, gay twin brother (wouldn’t they both be gay?) worrying about his life; and the father of the brothers, a Vietnam veteran...

What do we want and why do we want it? What happens when what we think we want turns out to be too scary, or too boring, or too confusing? When do you trust your gut, and when do you ask for advice? Who knows anything about anything?

Relationships are hard, and even harder when you have no idea if your instincts are sound, or if you should phone a friend. With every choice, doors slam shut, but windows open. When many of those doors and windows are virtual, and the choices multiply, what’s a love and sanity seeking homo...