Making moves out of talk from gay chat rooms
What: OUT-stages theatre festival Where: Metro Studio, Intrepid Theatre Club When: June 20 to 24 Tickets: $20, $25 (three-show passes $50) via intrepidtheatre.com or 101-804 Broughton St.
Delving into the world of gay chat rooms as a teen probably wasn’t a good idea, Indrit Kasapi admits.
In his dance-theatre piece MSM (men seeking men), the Toronto actor/playwright uses verbatim transcripts of online conversations he had with gay men as a 16-year-old.
“It did shock me how dangerous those situations could have been. But I didn’t feel they were dangerous at the time,” said Kasapi, now 32.
Staged by Kasapi’s Toronto based Lemontree Creations, MSM (men seeking men) will be performed at the Metro Studio next week. The 60-minute work for five performers is part of Intrepid Theatre’s third annual OUTstages queer performance festival, running June 20 to 24.
Featuring an all-queer cast (including Kasapi as a DJ), the show examines gay hook-up culture, racism, homophobia and fetishism. As well as Kasapi’s own transcripts, the text features excerpts of other men’s online chats.
One critic described MSM (men seeking men) as being “not for the timid.” Kasapi says that’s likely a reference to the dancing, which is sometimes on the suggestive side. “There are dancers who are touching each other, moving with each other. Sometimes it can get violent. Sometimes it can get really sexual,” he said.
Kasapi moved to Canada with his family from his native Albania when he was 15. He started participating in gay chat rooms a year later.
“I wasn’t hooking up. But I was meeting others and inquiring. I was a 16-year-old who wasn’t quite aware of who I was, sexually speaking,” he said.
A decade later, as an adult, Kasapi stumbled across the half-forgotten transcripts of these conversations, still on his computer. Realizing they might make a good theatre piece, he put them aside.
MSM (men seeking men) was first performed at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2013 and at Worldpride Toronto in 2014. It was nominated for six Broadway World Toronto Awards.
The five-day OUTstages festival also includes Tomboy Survival Guide, Country Song, Love with Leila, Diva Cab, a series of free lobby talks and an evening of play-reading featuring emerging playwrights.
Tomboy Survival Guide, which played OUTstages last year, is a collection of tomboy tales delivered by transgender performer/ writer Ivan Coyote. Country Song is by playwright-performer LeeAnne Poole, who learned to play the guitar especially for this tribute to her father.
Love with Leila is created and performed by Toronto’s Izad Etemadi, a former student at Victoria’s Canadian College of Performing Arts. The show is a comic look at the quest for romance by Leila, dubbed a “Persian Judy Garland” by one critic. Diva Cab is a showcase for local performers, including Pacific Opera Victoria pianist Robert Holliston and tenor Joey Bulman. (Full festival details are available at intrepidtheatre.com.)
The OUTstages festival was founded by and is curated by Sean Guist, Intrepid Theatre’s marketing and development manager. Guist says the mandate is to showcase the best of “adventuresome queer theatre” from across Canada.
He stressed the festival is for any theatre lover, not just members of the LGBTQ community.
“What we’re doing with OUTstages is bringing some of those cutting-edge performances that just happen to have a queer lens on it,” Guist said.
Kasapi said that while MSM (men seeking men) is about gay dating, the work has broad appeal. Those who use dating apps will identify with the “funny and frustrating” side of the practice. For others, it’s a “new window” into that world.
Kasapi is now writing a new play for Theatre Passe Mureille, Blood Cycle, about three siblings trying to break away from the Albanian practice of Gjakmarrja, or blood feuding, a tradition in which committing revenge murders to preserve family honour is a social obligation.
As for MSM (men seeking men), Kasapi admitted he’s never told his parents that some of the transcripts in his show chronicle his own conversations.
“When I was reading them in my mid-20s, it was shocking … how open I was in the conversations I was having,” he said.
Asked if he’d have any words of advice for his 16-year-old self, Kasapi chuckled. Then, he said: “Be a bit more careful.”