Women in Love and Other Dramatic Writings by Larry Kramer

Author:Larry Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2002-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

A Minor Dark Age

A Play in Three Acts

Writing A Minor Dark Age was a strange experience.

Brad Davis, or Bobby, which was his real name, had showed up for an audition for Sissies’ Scrapbook. He’d been sent, not by Stark Heseltine, his agent famous for discovering stars, but by Stark’s secretary, Susan Bluestein, who was living with Bobby. He was to be in two of my plays, Sissies / Four Friends and The Normal Heart. He would have been in three if Lynne Meadow, head of the Manhattan Theatre Club, had not kept us waiting so long for her turndown on The Destiny of Me, by which time Bobby had died (as had Colleen Dewhurst, who was to play my mother; oh, the exasperation I still have for Lynne!), and he would have been in four if A Minor Dark Age had ever been put on.

Bobby and I had been sitting around talking about his life. He’d told me about it before, but I was asking about it in more detail. Sissies had opened and closed, and we were waiting around for something to happen with it or I was looking around for something else to write. We’d become friends. He was a withdrawn and exceptionally shy young man when we first met, and he had not wanted to come to the audition because it was for a gay part and he was afraid I would make a pass at him, as evidently many guys had done over the years, and he wasn’t gay. Susan made him come. He was becoming so choosy and difficult about pursuing a career that Stark was losing interest in him. But something about me reassured him, and he took me back to their studio apartment right after a first lunch we had, which almost gave Susan a heart attack; Bobby had never done anything like this. Their apartment in the West Village was a smelly mess, mattresses on the floor, a bunch of cats, a couple of dogs. That’s how Bobby lived, and he was boss, at least with Susan. It was a touching relationship, this not particularly attractive overweight Jewish princess from Long Island trying to become an agent and this gorgeous muscular gentile kid from some hick town in Florida. But whatever it was, it worked; they were together until he died.

I thought I would write a play for Bobby. Yes, Bobby is in it, walking onstage in the very beginning and getting everything going; but so is Penelope Mortimer, an intense English novelist acquaintance who was more nuisance than friend; and so was the central character of Forbidden Colors, the Mishima novel I had adapted; but so are other people I don’t recognize. When I wrote it I was conscious that I didn’t know what the fuck I was writing, or who or what it was about or where it was coming from inside of me. I’d never had that kind of writing experience before. I’ve read interviews with writers like Pinter and Albee who claim they just sit down and write not knowing what will come out, or some such.

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