Play a Day: Joker

Yilong liu

For Thursday, I read Joker by Yilong Liu and available at New Play Exchange.

The recent passing of Terrence McNally took me back to the mid 1990s. I am not proud to say this, but the only McNally play I have ever seen was A Perfect Ganesh at Dobama Theatre. Not one of his better-known works, it tells the story of two older women from Connecticut who travel to India as much for adventure as to escape from the reality of the deaths of their sons.

I learned about the trials of being homosexual and coping with the trauma that comes from living in a society which condemns homosexuality from such plays. Even then, people I knew who were and are gay were not out or were only then in the process of coming out.

And Dobama produced a variety of plays in that time, about that experience, including Ganesh, The Food Chain by Nicky Silver, My Night With Reg by Kevin Elyot, and of course, they were the first Cleveland theater to produced Angels in America. All in the course of just a couple years.

Non-hetero relationships have become mainstreamed in such a short period of time. Eleanor's bisexuality in The Good Place wasn't even a thing, and that was a hit network sit-com. We've come a long way from Ellen.

But not far enough. With Joker Liu chronicles a moment in the recent past, the breakthrough of marriage equality in the United States, in this case in the state of Hawaii, and also the continuing struggle for equal rights in the Philippines. As recently as last January the Philippine Supreme Court struck down another case for marriage equality this time "with finality." Or so they say.

An intimate family drama set against the backdrop of momentous events, Joker is a keen mystery, as we try to understand and sympathize with Joe, a closeted man whose efforts to do right by the man he loves is misinterpreted by all those around him. The playwright does a masterful job creating tension and an inscrutibly frustrating emotional puzzle which when unlocked reveals the many layers to a character who has kept so much pain hidden for so long.

Who should I read tomorrow?

Source:
"Philippines Supreme Court rules against marriage equality 'with finality'" by Juwan J. Holmes, LGBTQNation (1/7/2020)