Word: men
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Well, you can always write plays. The first act and a half of John Herbert's Fourtune and Men's Eyes, a 1967 Off-Broadway play now at the Craft Experimental Theatre, is full of today's fag minstrelsy. In this case, the setting is a Canadian men's prison. The inmates, three decidedly homosexual, the fourth forced to undergo the initiation, are the chorus. The star among them is Queenie. Played with bravura by Marlo Ferguson in a tarnished Carol Channing wig, he--or, as you begin to accept the play's terms, she--is an irrepressible performer...
Damn, but I wish plays like this didn't make it so easy for us to laugh at homosexuals. Thankfully, Fortune and Men's Eyes is somewhat unique in this respect. It is more honest than the average minstrel show. Before it ends, it shows us a true hell where the whole world is a prison, where the homosexual must fight brutally so that he can stay...
...direction, the conversation, the pleading, the reaching, and the grappling tumbles out so quickly that an audience can't sort out all that is happening. We see love as the confusing and desperate and tortured state it sometimes it. And, for once, we feel it, when the two men are denied the humanity they seek. And there is no laughter, no laughter to protect...
From its rather conventional first act, Fortune and Men's Eyes develops into an exceptional play. Given the power of its final minutes, minstrel shows may soon be gone entirely. It may not be possible for us to laugh away the homosexual for as long as we managed to laugh away the black...
...issues reduced, more or less, to formalistic gabble, the verbal talent still in play diverted to scoring of debater's points, and the participants--persons deserving at least of interest, if not of affection--making themselves generally intolerable. I was, of course, merely imprisoned in that bituminous vacancy which men call the Experimental Theatre of the Loeb Drama Center, sharing space with some remarkably brave young actors...