But it would be an extremely unusual event, the kind that would merit front-page news stories from coast to coast and fuel much somber commentary about whether we have made any progress whatsoever in accepting our gay brothers and sisters. No doubt that is true-there could be a Leonard Pelkey-like case tomorrow. Lecesne, who adapted the play from his own young-adult novel, would no doubt argue that though Leonard didn’t exist and didn’t have a horrifying end, he might have. Do we really need to be told that gay people deserve respect instead of bullying? Is there any theatergoer in New York who needed convincing on this point?
At times the New York theater world can seem like a closed system in which each member of the choir takes a turn preaching to the whole. The play is an impassioned cry, but one that has little to do with 2015 America. Robin Williams-style, he instantaneously changes his voice and bearing dozens of times, often mid-sentence. As a writer, Lecesne is soulful and sometimes even gently witty. The 75-minute play (at the Westside Theatre Downstairs) is a showcase for Lecesne’s mimicry. Leonard was gay, and in the off-Broadway one-man show The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, actor James Lecesne, who also wrote the play, slips easily from playing the no-nonsense detective on the case to various townsfolk including middle-aged ladies, sulky teens, and a British drama teacher. He stood out like a sunflower in a patch of weeds, and for being different he was murdered. He endeared himself to the local matrons by advising them on clothes and hairstyles, insisted on wearing fairy wings when playing Ariel in The Tempest, and wore mascara and nail polish. His trademark item of attire was the rainbow-colored platform sneakers he made by gluing the soles of half a dozen different-colored flip-flops to the bottoms of his sneakers. Leonard Pelkey was a Jersey Shore teen who glowed with life.
Why are so many cultural elites so reluctant to release their grip on a model that is certainly false today, if it were ever true? Implied in this formulation is that we’re an intolerant, repressive people.
Yet Isherwood seems to think the play is instructive at its core, that it is a guide to a better America, an America to which we might someday aspire. Isherwood is focusing on the way the play encourages us to smile at the memory of Leonard, a delicate and beautiful soul, to appreciate, nurture and adore his eccentricity. “Leave you beaming with joy,” a phrase that appeared in The New York Times in a review of The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, is, critic Charles Isherwood conceded, an odd way to describe a play concerning the murder of an innocent, indeed angelic, teen boy.
0 kommentar(er)
