It's All In The Gesture

The Boston dramatist Ryan Landry has a made a play entitled "M,"which is both a very funny and very serious account of the workings of German Expressionistic cinema of the twenties and early thirties and a look into the artistic triumph of that art form, the great classic 1931 film by Fritz Lang starring Peter Lorre.  It is currently ending its run at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston.  Among the remarkable features of Landry's piece is the constantly changing projections and designs of the set which are among other things immensely amusing as a contemporary ironic account of the German Expressionist style, but it is the unerring reference to language, gesture, walk, and talk that is constantly exciting for anyone knowledgeable of the medium and that era. Landry is a master at creating dramatic ironies, as he has demonstrated for years in his enormously amusing parodies, one might call them, of various famous theatrical personages or films.  Most recently he amused and instructed the public with the play Mildred Fierce.  That the usual venue for his offerings is a theatrical space in the lower level of a gay bar will suggest that he counts on a gay audience for his success, but whatever celebrity he achieved in that cohort has long since been transcended; he is for everybody, as was the late, great Charles Ludlam, whose Theater of the Ridiculous in New York early on rated reviews in The New York Times. Irony is key to the dramatic expression of both these gentlemen, the defining key to their authenticity, which is I suppose another form of Susan Sontag's famous definition of camp.  Irony is a powerful feature of the gay male accounting of things, perhaps the most significant.  The gay male sexual experience is of essence an exercise in irony, which no doubt accounts for the way in which that sensibility best expresses the gay male's projection of himself and the world in which he finds himself.  The act of sexual intercourse between two men, whatever interlocking body parts are involved, celebrates a biological act which is absurd: the orgasm cannot fulfill its destiny since there is no egg to which the semen can  travel.  Odysseus will never get home, because there is no home and no Penelope awaiting him there.  Not every sexual act, of course, ends in making a baby, for which we must be thankful on behalf of the already overburdened globe.  But the potential is always there in the majority of those moments of ecstasy.  For two males panting toward fulfillment, deeply engaged perhaps in the demonstration of not only sexual desire for another masculine body, but profound love and adoration for the partner who shares their bed, their explosions can be entirely satisfying, but somewhere sometimes in the back of their minds one imagines, (or, let's say this one imagines, having often contemplated the notion in post coital repose), the essential irony of the act must dawn on them.  For the longest time gay males were helped in their creation of life on ironic terms by the very nature of the society in which they lived, profoundly hostile to homosexuality and demanding the perfect assimilation to the larger society's aims and behaviors.  In recent years when "coming out" for gay males is almost as ubiquitous as a young debutante's night of triumph at a ball in the Plaza, the larger world could only marvel at the repressed gentleman's previous years of brilliant interpretation of butch, straight behavior, which as an exercise in irony, made every gay male's life a constant high drama of high camp.