JORDAN SEAVEY.
The playwright on the power of language and bringing Homos, Or Everyone In America to the UK for its European premiere.
Provocatively titling his latest play Homos, Or Everyone In America, Jordan Seavey is fascinated by the power of queer language and its reclamation: “I think it’s a complicated conversation with a lot of necessary nuance to it, especially generationally,” ponders the Brooklyn-based playwright. “But I do think there’s a sense of empowerment in embracing the word ‘queer’. It obviously comes with a long history of negative connotations but it’s now being reclaimed. It’s the same with the title of my play. People have said it’s using a derogatory word but that’s done on purpose.”
Jordan admits to being both shocked and thrilled by the advertising campaign for this year’s star-studded Broadway revival of The Boys In The Band – where words like SISSY, FAGGOT, FAIRY and QUEER were plastered in bold capital letters on posters outside the theatre. “For me ‘faot’ was the word in that campaign which hit me the hardest,” he says. “I was surprised and in a way delighted to see that they were using it and owning it. That word probably upsets more people I know than any other, but for that play and that advertising campaign I was like ‘Fantastic, reclaim away!’”
Originally staged Off-Broadway in 2016, Homos is getting its European premiere at London’s Finborough Theatre from 7 August to 1 September. It starts with a first date between two gay New Yorkers in what one of them calls a ‘post-gay’ America on the brink of marriage equality and evolves into an examination of love and friendship, prejudice and homophobia, and the personal versus the political.
Some reviewers have found its language to be surprisingly frank. “But I don’t find it to be all that shocking or blunt, to be honest,” its author asserts. “I think that’s coming from people who are maybe a little more conservative. If you flick on any TV show I guarantee you’ll hear a lot more graphic language and see much more sex than anything in this play.”
Jordan was more interested to see the reaction to references about poppers. “A fair number of gay men use poppers but it’s not something you ever really hear discussed or shown on stage. One older gay friend of mine said ‘I feel so naked and revealed just hearing a conversation about poppers on stage’. That’s an interesting reflection of what we do and don’t talk about and how comfortable we are.”
The play’s frankness about sex has also been remarked upon. “But there’s only one moment of actual sex in it. I don’t mean to undersell my play, but there are a lot of plays out there with a lot more sex in them. It’s almost matter-of-fact in the play because people do have it in life so again that’s reflective.”
A key theme is about how queer people come to be family for one another, with the two protagonists ending up as more than just boyfriends and more than just friends. “They form a new kind of kinship for one another by having to become each others’ caretakers. That’s the overarching theme, along with how homophobia affects gay people’s lives sometimes with physical violence – that’s probably the most extreme version but homophobia can also create self-hatred and can infuse queer people’s lives in other ways, sometimes subliminally.”
Jordan agrees that there’s a certain complacency amongst big-city dwellers. He recently read a New York Times review of a play, written by a gay man and featuring gay characters, where the reviewer actually asked something like ‘What is the state of the gay play now that life is just so great for gays everywhere?’ That angered Jordan, who says: “It’s fiction to sort of imagine that life for queer people is now universally great. People are suffering in big ways and small ways every day. That said, we’ve come so far in the last ten to 20 years and the way the entire conversation around queer people has unfolded is remarkable. But as the play asks, what does it mean to have come this far this quickly? What does it mean for those of us who are a little older than the current millennial generation to have identified as the outliers, as the rejected members of society? Some of us around age 17 sort of embraced that as what we were going to be, now we’re sort of mainstream.”
The play was inspired by a couple of Jordan’s past relationships. “It feels extremely personal. Like many gay writers I do a lot of thinking about the ubiquitous boy-meets-girl narrative most of society espouses and most of us as children grow up learning. So the play is also an attempt to put front and centre an ‘unusually’ – meaning not unusual at all, but rarely seen – raw and intimate portrayal of gay love.”
Having penned more than 15 works, many but not all of them on gay themes, he feels representation is organic to him. “I’m discovering as I grow older and get a little further into my playwriting career that’s it second-nature and I can’t avoid it. I do write about non-gay characters and non-gay subjects, but I see life through a political lens so I write about what I know and through my own perspective, which is a queer one. There’s no doubt that my plays are going to keep representing gay people.
“I think we’re in a moment where we’re asking ‘Who gets to tell what stories?’ It feels riskier and riskier to me to write about people who are very really different from myself, which isn’t stopping me from doing it; I think writers should write about what they want and need to express to the world. But in the New York theatre world, especially in regard to gender and race, we’re having some intense moments of reckoning about who gets to tell which stories. That’s on my mind a lot and I don’t want to only write about gay Jewish men, but I’m sure through my work I’ll keep putting some version of myself out there.”