Review: Unbury Your Gays by Broad Theatre, Austin
by Michael Meigs

 

BFF.

 

Best friends forever, right? Think back. Or look around. How often does that cheery acronym come true?

 

Maxine Dillon's Unbury Your Gays offers a lively series of scenes that turn out to be a meditation on that question. In retrospect -- both the playwright's and my own -- there's a faint, bitterness to what is otherwise an entertaining and often amusing story. That's not the fault of the production, for director Kairos Looney cast impressively capable actresses and an engaging jack-of-all-trades actor, then gave them the concepts and movements needed to deliver the story. 

 

Dillon gives us a couple of 14-year-old bestest friends still guileless about the wider world but excited by their prospects. In brief opening scenes they're watching horror movies at a sleepover, big-eyed, just a little bit scared, but happy to be together. The Necromancer particularly makes them shiver. The playwright makes these characters intrinsically different and over the course of the action will move them through high school years, away to college, apart, and then, tentatively, into the wider world.

 

 

After the production has ended you may intuit that this must have been an exorcism play. Not because of the abrupt interlude that sounds written by Bram Stoker and set in the days of Mary Shelley, but because Carolina, played by Amara Johnson, is shown to be a listener and thinker who eventually realizes that she doesn't fit in to the whirl of clothes, bangles, dances and . . . boys. Her friend Sawyer, played by Iliana Griffith-Suarez, has eagerly absorbed all the shallow flash, giggles, and entertainments of materialism and surging hormones. Delan Crawford has a good time as the happy, brainless highschool boy who bounces about, fascinating Sawyer and (perhaps) appalling Carolina.

 

 

A guess: the exorcism is the playwright's revisting of misgivings and feelings of being somehow oddly different as she was growing up. The wildly breathless monologues she writes for Sawyer are mercilessly satirical, while Carolina's reticent responses suggest that she understands her friend but is far from convinced by her. These two are onstage almost continuously throughout, and they're completely convincing in those assigned characters. Griffith-Suarez delivers those darting, dizzy monologues as if the words were just popping into her head, fed by the latest sights and sensations presenting themselves to her. Johnson subtly shows Carolina's youthful restrained astonishment at her friend developing over time into a distance that's not unkind but certainly is inevitable.

 

One quibble, and that's related to the solo scene when Carolina, overwhelmed, disappears from the high school dance. She calls her mother, but the words the playwright gives her have no semblance of a conversation; rather, they're a monologue addressed more to the audience, going into depths that the constrained character would be unlikely to share fully with her mother. Mom doesn't have more than two seconds to reply at any point during the call, and otherwise she's absent entirely from the story.

 

And the interlude . . . it works as a tour-de-force for Amara Johnson, who becomes the Necromancer Witch pondering upon love, attraction, and death in a rich, precisely-paced British received pronunciation. Griffith-Suarez is ethereal and largely silent; Crawford becomes a Brit narrator in a bow tie that suits him far better than the goofy mop of hair in earlier appearances. Since this scene is dropped into a slot that would make it a very short Act II in this uninterrupted piece, the audience doesn't know quite what to expect as the continuation. After the spooky lighting has faded, the story snaps back to the duologues as the two girls, now women, go separate ways in their lives.

 

Technical aspects of the production are minimalist but accomplished; the intimate setting of the Hyde Park Theatre works well. Set design requires some interruptions to haul about and revolve relatively large set pieces, including a couple of wooden bedframes; these changes interrupt the action but they're carried out efficiently. J Mwaki's lighting is properly atmospheric. In the spooky interlude it puts us into a mystic neverwhere in keeping with that sandwiched setting.

 

Broad Theatre folks have good and courageoous hearts, partnering with local-non profits that share their orientations. Their next project, set for November is Gloria by Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins. It focuses on working Americans and the dynamics of the workplace.

 

EXTRA

Click to view the Broad Theatre program for Unbury Your Gays

 

 

 

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Unbury Your Gays
by Maxine Dillon
Broad Theatre

May 22 - June 7, 2025

Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m.

ASL night May 24, 2025

Affinity Night June 6, 2025

Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St., Austin 78751