Who doesn't love a wedding? What little girl doesn't adore the Barbie decked in tiered white tulle? Or fetishize her. Who ever thought such beloved and at times tacky traditions would be so political? And also terrifying? Standing on Ceremony, a new evening of plays at the Minetta Lane Theater, features eight playlets by the playwrights Mo Gaffney, Jordan Harrison, Moisés Kaufman, Neil LaBute, Wendy MacLeod, Jose Rivera, Paul Rudnick, and Doug Wright. If you cry at weddings, straight or gay, you can consider these cathartic canapés.
In Wendy MacLeod's "This Flight Tonight," Polly Draper and Beth Leavel are leaving for their wedding in Iowa; one gets cold feet: no, a wedding at the beach is not an option in the midwest. In Jordan Harrison's "The Revision" a couple, Craig Bierko and Richard Thomas, re-imagine the customary vows in the funny, ironic language more fitting for advertising. One by one the plays illustrate a frontier, unexpected emotions. In Moisés Kaufman's poignant "London Mosquitoes," a dying man will not marry in his final weeks. "If we marry now," recalls his partner (Richard Thomas), "What would that say about the last 45 years? That we were just messing around?"
Harriet Harris is hilarious as a bigoted neighbor in Paul Rudnick's "The Gay Agenda." In Neil LaBute's "Strange Fruit," interwoven monologues by Bierko and Mark Consuelos illustrate that no matter if gay marriage is legal, same sex love may still be life-threatening. The gentlemen in Jose Rivera's "Pablo and Andrew at the Altar of Words," (Bierko and Consuelos) do throw their bouquets. On opening night, one landed at my feet and I carried it to the wedding reception at 24 Fifth Avenue. Actor Hunter Herdlicka caught the other.
The Standing on Ceremony concept came from Brian Schnipper, realizing one day in California in 2008, we may be breaking ground with our first African American president, but we may lose Prop 8. Feeling diminished as California laws made something as important to him as the right to wed arbitrary, he initiated the project, asking friends, writers in the theater world to contribute these dramatic takes on gay marriage. Only Edward Albee declined, said Schnipper, but it's Albee so he's entitled.
A version of this post also appears on Gossip Central.