Review: Jack and Aiden by Lane Michael Stanley -- Workshop Reading at Austin's Ground Floor Theatre
by David Glen Robinson

Jack and Aiden has a cast of two attractive actors giving a positive, almost ethnographic depiction of twenty-first century urban gay life. They quickly drill down past the gay ghetto to the sub-sub-culture of hook-up practitioners who practically exist in their cyber technology and the on-line world. Please forgive the brief sociology essay: the place is the urban gay village--post-Stonewall, post-AIDS, post-Covid19—where people meet anonymously through texts, transmitting emojis and avatars instead of photographs, seeking conquests and climax. Understand that a little coarsening is inevitable. For the word dating, substitute hooking up. For the word sex, substitute fucking. For the word love… well, don’t start with the word love.

 

The play is a great credit to playwright Lane Michael Stanley. He is a master of the detailed hook-up/gay patois filling his script. His credit for the book of this musical is huge. With time, his Jack and Aiden will outshine his well-regarded Rain Falls Special on Me.

 

One of the first lessons of the play is that by the time one has learned to navigate the gay meat market, one has become the meat. But that doesn’t happen until the callouses on one’s psyche match the callouses on one’s genitals. We don’t progress much into the play before things become more than a little grisly. The story of Jack, (he, him) establishes that early on. He is the experienced cis-male gay, in recovery, with a pat answer for everything in urban gay lingo. Newly transitioned Aiden, (he, him), is thoroughly seduced and exploring the hook-up life with Jack, as his open-access partner. Jack was Aiden’s finding in his first on-line hook-up experience.

 

Jack’s story is one of multiple rehabs while mastering the hook-up lifestyle and living life with Aiden. He illuminates the theme of focusing too narrowly on one slice of life and failing to develop the skills needed to deal with the larger issues. When he meets adversity, he relapses. The voice of addiction is compelling, telling him in every setback that it has something that will solve the problem. That solution is always meth. And that clearly brings us to one of the best songs of the show, where Jack sings and acts of feeling and being “amazing.” He sings out of his drug high. The song is a bold choice for any musical theatre production, especially in our current time of the fentanyl crisis, the worst of which we probably have not yet seen in 2023. It is instructive to hear, in the fine arts, what it means to be on a serious, life-threatening drug high. Audiences of privilege rarely hear of such states from the inside.

 

One of the play’s themes is of inadequate preparation, and it involves Jack’s aging mother. Rather than preparing for her advanced care, Jack frets with Aiden about what he doesn’t want to show her about his and Aiden’s activities. A huge additional issue is Aiden’s trans status, and the couple breaking it to Mom that trans can’t reproduce. Mom was hoping . . . In some respects, life was moving forward for Mom, but not for Jack. We never gain the sense that Jack breaks the addiction/rehab cycle.

 

To this reviewer’s memory, Aiden does not mention his family, except possibly in a few brief lines. This creates a notable asymmetry in the play because in any decision to transition, the family context is involved, at least in background. And Aiden makes the leap, all the way. Then, like so many, Aiden finds that not all things become new upon transition. His grievous loss to death of a pre-transition partner comes back in dreams, anxiety, and depression to haunt the new Aiden. This happens, as it often does, when Aiden comes up against the serious planning for a marriage with Jack, as Aiden had been doing with the partner he lost. A blast from the past like few others.

 

 

Jack and Aiden is a musical tragedy from the urban village. The musical finishes on an upward note that may pass for a happy ending, but the outlook for all, even with insights gained, is for more of the same risky instability. In this sense, the free, liberated characters onstage and off, are living in provincialized confinement. Value systems of the larger society are firmly rejected. Much is given up to keep their freedom.

 

The largely gay and transitioned workshop audience at Ground Floor Theatre reacted to the workshop presentation as to a comedy. Many of the responses were to the keen dialogue exchanges of the actors or their musings in monologue. The audience affirmed the linguistic truth of the characters; to the audience, this was real language they could hear around the corner and down the block in their neighborhoods, including and especially the gay sexual details. The play depicted the gay urban village in which many of them live, conveyed largely by means of the scripted language. Kudos to Lane Michael Stanley for writing Jack and Aiden with his ear as much as his word processor. In addition to the work of art, Stanley has created a research study in sociolinguistics, the branch of linguistic anthropology that studies how language is conditioned by society and is conditioned in turn by its members in order to navigate social groups, gain membership, enhance personal power, and negotiate and change roles within the target group. In this case, the society is the gay hook-up milieu of Jack and Aiden, depicted smoothly, adroitly, and knowingly by playwright Stanley.  To repeat, this play may rightfully be viewed someday as Lane Michael Stanley’s apex work in playwriting.

 

The Jack and Aiden workshop at Ground Floor Theatre was a reading with minimal design fields. The plan is for further work on the production in all areas and a premiere in December 2023. Jack and Aiden is for the deepest thinking theatre mavens out there, those who'll lose all street cred if they miss it. The extremely coarse language in several places renders it thoroughly inappropriate for children.

 

It promises to be one of the peaks of the 2023 theatre season in Austin.

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Jack and Aiden
by Lane Michael Stanley
Ground Floor Theatre

September 18, 2023

Ground Floor Theatre

A staged reading