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Now a new play on view at the Theater for the New City attempts to shed light on the secretive and semi-secretive lives of gay men during the time leading up to the Stonewall riots of 1969. It's called A Hard Rain, and it was written by a British writing team, Jon Bradfield and Martin Hooper, best known for their gay-themed Christmas pantos for London's Above the Stag Theatre (sample title: Jack Off the Beanstalk). This is their first foray into a serious full-length work. A Hard Rain focuses on the habitués of a Greenwich Village dive bar: Ruby, a gay Vietnam vet/drag queen; Josh, Ruby's closeted banker boyfriend; Danny, a corrupt cop; Jimmy, a teenaged street hustler; Frank, the bar's owner with ties to organized crime; and Angie, the bartender. The resulting interactions make for a strangely old fashioned melodrama, so much so that you might feel you are watching a revival of a play from an earlier era rather than a new work. Ruby (Carson Alexander), filled with resentment and frustration, is itching to raise a ruckus but finds the established gay-supportive organization, the Mattachine Society, to be too staid for his liking. His boyfriend Josh (Andrew Schoomaker) spends most of his energy worrying about juggling his public and private image and is unable to commit. Angie the bartender (Xandra Leigh Parker), a single parent who wants a better life for herself and her mixed-race son, takes up with Danny (Nick Ryan), a cop who spends his time shaking down the likes of the bar's owner Frank (Michael Garrahy). Frank has his own issues, up to his neck in a crime syndicate and with a penchant for good-looking teenagers like Jimmy (Teo Rapp-Olsson). This gathering of types, without the addition of insight and depth of characterization, makes for a very superficial outing. The significance of the time and place in history is truly only acknowledged at the end of the two-hour play as sirens are heard in the background and reports come in that the gays at the Stonewall Inn are fighting back against a police raid. The actors do their best to humanize their characters, under Michael Luggio's direction. Carson Alexander as Ruby and Teo Rapp-Olsson as the foolishly naïve street hustler Jimmy, do a particularly good job with their respective roles, and the subject matter is truly worth examining, but the story leading up to the summer of 1969 and the Stonewall riots needs a much stronger vehicle than this play has to offer.
A Hard Rain
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