The new love that dare not speak its name

Volume 1, Number 33 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | May 4 - 10, 2007

An Octopus Love Story
By Delaney Britt Brewer
Through May 20
Center Stage Theater
48 West 21 Street
(212-868-4444; smarttix.com)

Courtesy of DARR Publicity
Playwright Delaney Britt Brewer. “An Octopus Love Story,” her play about love between a lesbian and a gay man, is provocative by design.

By Vivienne Leheny

It’s a terrible thing — dangerous and romantic — to be swept up by a love affair and carried past the perimeter of our natural element. What happens if our essential truth is in conflict with the desperate need for a particular lover? This is the question that Delaney Britt Brewer elegantly limns in her play “An Octopus Love Story,” in previews now and opening at Center Stage on Saturday, May 5.

“An Octopus Love Story” is the tale of Jane and Danny, two 20-something New Yorkers who meet and fall in love. There is but one complication: Danny is a gay man and Jane is a lesbian. Their story is set against the sociological backdrop of gay marriage rights.

But Brewer has not written a political play. Rather, she explores the possibility of finding and nurturing a love that lies outside her characters’ innate boundaries. Their unlikely love becomes plausible as they discover they’re kindred souls — unsettled in their personal and professional lives, searching, confused, and resistant to choices that seem to them too easy. They’re fellow travelers in emotional adventurism, and they share an aching desire to be understood and accepted.

Also, they’re quixotic. On the night Jane and Danny begin to unconsciously fall for each other, he tells her a fateful love story of ill-matched partners. When Jane asks him whether the smitten lover understood that the relationship would likely kill her, Danny tells Jane, “I can’t figure out which is more heart-breaking – if she didn’t know, or if she knew.” Regardless, Jane and Danny embark on their affair and, as the old legend has it, “beyond this point, there be dragons.”

The two are initially set-up in a promotional gambit that’s cooked up by Tosh and Alex, gay coworkers at a heartless marketing firm (a redundant description, perhaps). Alex is Danny’s best friend and may be harboring deeper feelings for him, while Tosh is Jane’s worldly and controlling Sugar Mama. They persuade Danny and Jane — selected because they’re very attractive “passers” in the straight community — to officially take their wedding vows while publicly declaring their homosexuality. Alex, in his bullying pitch to Danny, describes how the political protest will work:

You — an openly gay man will marry an openly lesbian woman as an act of pure defiance to this conservative Christian swell that has pickled our nation in brine. You both will exist as open homosexuals and pursue relationships with members of the same sex. You will do all of this under the umbrella of a church sanctioned union — and you will receive every amenity any ‘straight’ couple receives under this umbrella. All of the rights, securities, legalities, will be yours while you’re giving the ultimate middle finger to conservative legislation. You won’t divorce until the gay community has the right to marry legally, at least in the state of New York. And not a civil union either. Marriage. And this will domino to the next state and the next state. Until everyone is standing like a queen robed in purple mountain majesties, holding each other in amber waves of mother
fucking grain.

The protest goes forward. The media is contacted. Jane and Danny are interviewed. Jane and Danny discover they know each other better than they know themselves. They are in love.

But it turns out that knowing another, without knowing oneself, is no real knowledge at all.

Brewer, who is possessed of an easy beauty and looks younger than her years (she’s in her mid-20s), recognizes that the framing conceit of the gay marriage protest, not to mention a love story that seems to contradict a central tenet of the gay rights movement — that sexuality and desire are immutable — may invite controversy. The protest was the catalyst for bringing the characters together but it is not the thrust of the play. “The plays I’m interested in seeing, the plays I want to write, establish that critical contract with the audience: they provide catharsis.” To achieve this, the story must be intimate and human, not “didactic or over-archingly political,” says Brewer.

As a gay woman writing for the theatre, Brewer smilingly acknowledges having a sense of responsibility about how themes of homosexuality are explored. “I understood what it would mean for Danny and Jane to end up together. But I wanted to look at this from as many angles as possible. I was curious: can the romance work?”

“I did a lot of reading of gay political plays,” Brewer notes. “Many are so essentialist. They had to be, at that moment [the Reagan years during the AIDS crisis], so the dramatic point could be made. This disease is raging, they’re dying — there’s nothing nebulous about that.”

Brewer says that the topicality of the gay marriage protest was appealing for its potential to reveal personal truths and biases, both straight and gay. Particularly intriguing is the question of how some of us come to the decision to value some loving relationships but not others. What makes a love worthy of recognition? When a stricken Alex calls Danny out about his romance with Jane and charges him with betraying his gay identity, Danny fires back:

I don’t want to give this a name. It is. It breathes. And it is ever changing. Don’t try and stop it because it doesn’t fit your image. That — would be the ultimate malevolence.

The focus of “An Octopus Love Story” reflects, perhaps, a generational shift in the discussion of sexuality and sanctioned relationships — extending out from the gay rights movement toward a universal humanism.

“I recently read an article that surveyed New York City teenagers,” says Brewer. “They found so many gradations of sexuality among them — straight, gay, bisexual, omni sexual. It gave me hope that a generation may come up with fewer lines being drawn. They seem to have a willingness to remain open to others and to other experiences. If that’s the way youth are seeing sexuality and love, what does it mean for views on marriage down the road?”