I would to see this but i'm in another country.If anyone here manages to see the play i would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Jennis.x
Theater: Gay men face special dilemmas in farm country
"Farm Boys" explores the divided feelings that gay men have about the rural areas that nurtured them, but sometimes hold them at arm's length.
Graydon Royce, Star Tribune
Last update: April 21, 2006 – 3:05 PM
How often we are reminded. A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country. You can't go home again. Pleasure never is at home.
Yet home is where the heart is, the seminal source of memories that cut to the quick.
Playwright Dean Gray's relationship with that singular place is fraught with pain and pride. He had a happy childhood in central Wisconsin, milking cows and baling hay. The farm might have been a lifelong touchstone, but for the unpleasant evening when he told his parents he was gay. After that revelation, the place he called home represented not only warm but cold imagery for him.
So it made sense that Gray would respond when author Will Fellows sought to interview gay men about their lives in rural America. Fellows put the stories into a book called "Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest." Gray, a theater artist in New York, asked permission to use Fellows' book as the basis for a play, which has its area premiere Saturday at Great American History Theatre in St. Paul.
Gray collaborated with writer Amy Fox, using the mood and imagery rather than the specifics of the interviews in Fellows' book.
The result is a story about a man living in New York who inherits a farm and confronts the choice whether to sell his boyhood home or try to live there. The dilemma fits the circumstances of both Fellows and Gray, who said he often feels neither fish nor fowl.
"Being in the arts, I always feel a little second-class because I come from the farm," said Gray over the phone from New York. "The books we had in our house were the encyclopedias and the Bible, and when you don't grow up with the arts, it's not second nature to you."
Fellows, who has lived with his partner for 12 years in Milwaukee, has great farm-kid memories. His parents even let him run a little antiques shop when he was a teen.
"There wasn't an overwrought concern about what the neighbors thought," he said. "A lot of guys had mothers and fathers who had rigid ideas about what boys and girls are supposed to be like. Anything they did that was gender atypical, like gardening or landscaping or sewing, they were often forbidden or got a lot of flak."
However, he too feels the split mentioned by Gray -- never happy in the city but never happy in the country either.
"My dad has asked if I and my partner would want to live in my parents' home when they die," he said. "And it's hard to see that as a satisfying setting for my life."
Experiences have changed
Fellows interviewed about 75 men for his book, which was published in 1996. He was intrigued by how strongly generational the experiences of gay farm men turned out to be.
"You definitely see a change," he said. "The older men were often married and had extended bouts of depression and psychotherapy. In the youngest group, those things are almost absent."
Actor Jake Gyllenhaal created some buzz when he said in an interview last December that he and Heath Ledger were given books about the Midwestern gay experience to help inform their portrayals in "Brokeback Mountain." A producer for the film confirmed through an aide that "Farm Boys" was one of the books to which Gyllenhaal was referring.
The play by Gray and Fox has had one production -- an off-off Broadway run in 2004. Artistic director Ron Peluso brought it to the History Theatre for a reading as part of "Raw Stages" that year and was heartened enough by the response that he decided to slot it for a full staging.
"This is an important play for us," Peluso said. "We've never dealt with the history of gay lifestyles in Minnesota, so it's a bit of a risk."
John Miller Stephany, associate artistic director at the Guthrie Theater, has left the mother ship for the first time to direct "Farm Boys," which includes actors Joe Leary, Matt Guidry, Phil Callen, Muriel Bonertz and Harlan Chambers.
"The play goes beyond the specifics of gay men who grew up in the sticks," said Stephany. "It's really questioning what constitutes home, and that's a good question today because of how transient people have become in the job market."
Further, Stephany said, the play reflects on how relationships affect our lives long after they are over.
"If we had a bad relationship, do we learn from that or retreat from the pain and confusion," he asked. "None of us is a blank sheet of paper. We learn about love from our parents and siblings and we carry that baggage, whatever it is. And are we able to rise above and learn from experience?"
Gray said he will be at opening night this week. Four siblings will be there; one brother is estranged over the issue of Gray's sexuality. Then Gray will sneak away for a short visit with his parents, driving east into the countryside of central Wisconsin. It is, after all, springtime on the farm.
Link to original source
http://www.startribune.com/1526/story/383549.htmlPhil Callen (standing), Matt Guidry and Muriel Bonertz in "Farm Boys" at the Great American History Theatre in St. Paul. The play looks beyond the specifics of gay men to ask what constitutes home.
