'Southern Baptist Sissies'
at South Puget Sound Community College
by Alec ClaytonOriginally published in The News Tribune (Tacoma) Nov. 18, 2005
South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia opened its new $22 million Center for the Arts with a production of Del Shore’s "Southern Baptist Sissies" – a roller coaster of a play that takes audiences from heights of hilarity through outrageous anger, and into caves of depression and out again.
I should warn you that you will leave the theater emotionally depleted.
"Southern Baptist Sissies" is the story of four gay men in a Southern Baptist Church in Texas and the various ways they cope when they discover urges within themselves that go against the teachings of their church.
The playwright has lived the life he writes about. A preacher’s son, Shore grew up gay and Southern Baptist in Texas, but he did not admit he was gay, even to himself, until after he moved to Los Angeles in 1980. He believed it was sinful to act on his feelings of same-sex attraction. Today he is openly gay and proud of it. And he is one of L.A.'s best-known playwrights, as well as a TV writer for such shows as "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "Ned & Stacey," and the writer and director of the hit film "Sordid Lives," which he adapted from his play of the same name.
"I wrote this play as a response to Matthew Shephard's death - and seeing a picture of Jesus on the wall of one of the killer's apartment. It made me wonder were they able to commit this horrible crime because of justification in the name of the Lord, or were they taught hatred towards homosexuals in a church like I was."
The play opens with choral singing and hellfire-and-brimstone preaching in church, where the four teenage boys share a pew. Periodically the action stops while one of the boys, Mark (John Baughman) addresses the audience and argues against the preacher’s sermon. Mark is an angry young man at odds with the teachings of his church and secretly in love with T.J. (Garrett Bays), who ultimately denies his homosexuality, rejects Mark and marries a local girl. The other boys are Benny (Brian Jansen) and Andrew (Alexander McConnell). Of the four boys, Benny is the most comfortable with his sexual orientation and the most flamboyant. He becomes a drag queen performer in a local gay bar. Andrew, the most severely conflicted, suffers from self-hatred and prays for God to make him not gay.
The lives of these four boys play out with alternating scenes involving the preacher, their mothers (one actress, Jaime Tai Ming Coplan, plays all of the mothers), and the denizens of a gay bar.
In the bar, an aging homosexual named Peanut and a down-and-out straight alcoholic named Odette serve as a Greek chorus of two – their comments and reminiscences paralleling the lives of the four young men. Jon S. Robbins plays Peanut, and Karen Johnson plays Odette. They are the only actors in the production who have extensive theatrical experience, and it shows. Johnson also spent 12 years singing blues and jazz in Kansas City, Mo., and that also shows when she belts out a beautiful blues gospel song near the end of the play.
Robbins, a professional actor with theatrical and network television experience, is a former professor at SPSCC and current media arts manager at The Evergreen State College. In this play he masterfully handles the challenge of playing a sympathetic drunk homosexual with a heavy Southern accent.
Most of the other actors are students. Their acting is good overall but a little raw and overblown in places - forgivably so because the kinds of characters they are playing really are like that.
The political and religious commentary in "Southern Baptist Sissies" is highly charged. It contains explicit language, simulated sex and brief nudity.
The play first opened in 2000 in Los Angeles, where it won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding L.A. Production and the Backstage West Garland Awards for Best Writing of a World Premiere. Director Don Welch deserves accolades for his courage in bringing this play to Olympia.
© 2005 by Alec Clayton