Seattle Gay News
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Issue 36, Volume 42, September 5, 2014
Getty
Icon. That’s the word you will see time and time again associated with the legendary Joan Rivers, dead at 81, on Thursday. She was an icon of comedy. She was most certainly a Gay icon. And nobody can deny Joan was a fashion icon.
every now and then Johnny Carson would be absent from “The Tonight Show” and this loud-mouthed crazy lady would sit-in for him. Well, that is the way my five-year-old mind registered Joan Rivers anyway. In fact, I used to get her and another icon of comedy that passed away in 2012, Phyllis Diller, mixed up. However, right about the same time I discov-
credibly funny; at the very same moments it’s terribly tragic. The kind of laugh-and-cry-at-the-sametime moments where the characters themselves are reacting or where the audience finds relief in the humor while recognizing the pain. There are three basic intersecting stories: a heterosexual couple, Joe and Harper, who are falling apart due to Harper’s deepening mental health crisis and Joe’s refusal to admit he’s Gay; Louis and Prior, who are falling apart due to Prior’s descent into the illness of AIDS and Louis’ inability to handle sickness; Roy Cohn, the famous or infamous lawyer of the Republican Right, who falls ill with AIDS and refuses to acknowledge the disease and instead publicizes his illness as “liver cancer.” The intersections start with Joe refusing a position in Justice (the U.S. Department of Justice) offered him by Roy Cohn, and then finding himself drawn to Louis, as Louis abandons Prior. There is also a metaphysical and fantastical element where some of these characters find themselves in dreams with each other, even with-
Marya Sea Kaminski and Adam Standley in Angels in America
by Miryam Gordon SGN A&E Writer ANGELS IN AMERICA INTIMAN THEATRE Through September 21 Some people consider Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by Tony Kushner one of the great plays of the 20th Century. Some consider it one of the great
plays about Gay characters ever. This is a sprawling play, spanning six plus hours, generally done in two parts (Part 1, Millenium Approaches and Part 2, Perestroika), that delves deeply into philosophical ideas of the meaning of life, love and whether angels are real, and that encapsulates the 1980s in the time of AIDS and Gay rights clashing and clanging for attention. Part of its genius is that it’s in-
nobody pushed boundaries quit like Joan Rivers. And if you think that is offensive, well, as the old saying should go, if the stick fits … Take for instance this classic Joan Rivers rant to TMZ less than one year ago in November 2013 defending actor Alec Baldwin after his MSNBC talk show was canceled in light of the controversy surrounding his alleged use of a homophobic slur: “Everybody just relax,” Rivers said to the camera, before dropping a string of racial epithets directed at every race and sexuality. “Everybody is either a wop, a nigger, a kike, a chink…,” she began, not stopping until she hit every ethnic group. She closed by telling people they should be glad we live in America and to “stop being so uptight.” “And this [message] goes for the Indians, both dot and feather,” she concluded. And with that, she walked off camera and into the headlines where, try as they might, people who so clearly could not see that Joan Rivers was pointing out a whole bunch of truth, began their latest assault. see Joan Rivers page 8
Sony Pictures Classics
Joan Rivers was a no-holds-barred comic who found humor in subjects you aren’t supposed to talk about at the dinner table and now, for the first time since her career launched in the 1950s, silence has filled the air and the world just got a little less funny. Joan Rivers is gone. I, like most Gay boys of the 1980s, grew up with the knowledge that
Chris Bennion / Courtesy of Intiman theatre
by Shaun Knittel SGN Associate Editor
ered Bette Midler, Cher, and the rest of the mandatory Diva’s that every Gay man loves without question, I most certainly knew the difference between Diller and Rivers. Joan Rivers, as far as I was concerned, was the funniest woman on the planet. And even later still – past my teens and twenties – I began to see her as something totally different, but oh-so-obvious: Joan Rivers was an activist. She was an activist later in life quite by accident. In recent years Joan Rivers was attacked again and again for telling jokes about the topics she had been telling jokes about for decades – like race, gender, sex, and the like. Apparently, somewhere along the way, America has lost its collective sense of humor. People lashed out at her, calling her a racist, and a this or a that and … oh who cares anyway? Joan certainly didn’t. Instead, she did exactly what her fans knew and loved her for – she told more jokes about those same topics and ranted from the stage, in front of television cameras and in books and newspaper articles about how many of the offended masses needed to take the sticks out of their asses and get a grip. Comedy pushes boundaries and
Ira Sachs
by Gary M. Kramer SGN Contributing Writer LOVE IS STRANGE Opening September 12
Love Is Strange, director/co-writer Ira Sachs’ thoughtful, wistful film, concerns a couple – George (Alfred Molina) and Ben (John Lithgow) – who have been together 39 years. The men marry in the opening moments, but spend most of the rest of the film apart. After (and because of) the wedding, George is fired from his job at a Catholic school, which causes them to lose their apartment. As a result, George moves in with his downsee Angels page 4 stairs neighbors, Roberto (Manny
Perez) and Ted (Cheyenne Jackson), while Ben goes to live with his nephew Elliot (Darren E. Burrows), his wife Kate (Marisa Tomei), and their son, Joey (Charlie Tahan). Watching these men who love each other live apart forms the emotional core of this authentic, observational drama. “It’s a film about intimacy, and about the possibility of love to grow with time,” the soft-spoken Sachs declared over tea last month at The Marlton Hotel in New York City. “It’s called Love Is Strange for a reason: every intimate relationship is different from the next. Every stage of our lives, we experience love in a see sachs page 7