In 2003, the principal of Cranston East shot down a student petition to start a Gay-Straight Alliance on the grounds that if the gay students got a club then everybody would have to get a club. (His remarks, made at a faculty meeting, were more specifically anti-Semitic than that.) That was a long time ago, and that jerk is long retired, but still it makes me happy that the boundary-nudging Epic Theatre Company has settled into a home just blocks away from that high school. Robert O’Hara’s Bootycandy is an ambitious, in your face production about being black and gay and into theatre. A preacher comes out before his whole congregation, two brothers-in-law describe in great detail all the sex they’d like to have with one another, and – in one of the more uncomfortably funny scenes – a mother blames her son for being followed home by a strange older man. There’s also a panel discussion within the play, the third panel-within-a-play that I’ve seen in the past month. Tighter direction would maximize the laughs in Epic Theater Company’s no-frills production, but it still warms my heart that bawdy, sinister comedies about gay black men are being performed in Rolfe Square. (Plus the show’s free for students!)
Bootycandy
