Peabody freshman Matthew J. Viator's Descent into Acceptance covered interesting subject matter, but lacked the character development and realistic dialogue required to captivate an audience. The play, which ran last weekend in Arellano Theater, is about a 30 year old naval electrical engineer, Lance, played by Christopher Hamel, who is desperately afraid of letting on that he is gay. He ends up falling in love with Eric, played wonderfully by Lance Esteibar. Once Lance is no longer afraid of hiding his sexuality, his fellow naval officers find out that he's gay and proceed to beat him. Luckily, Lance is saved by his friend, Patrick, and is taken to the hospital. There, he has to face and come out to his parents, after the hospital called them explaining that he was the victim of a gay-bashing.
It is a decent enough story, so what went wrong?
One of the most obvious shortcomings was the length of the play. It ran for about two to two and half hours, depending on the night. Part of the reason for this was the grand sets that illustrated each scene. For example, there was a real gurney on the stage for the hospital scene, and most scenes had multiple set pieces, all of which needed to be set up and accounted for, taking up more precious time in an already long play.
"If there had been more tech hands, the play would have been shorter. Ideally, a whole bunch of people would have rushed out, set the scene, done. The cast got involved in the last few weeks and were workhorses. I'm really very proud of the tech crew," said director Viator.
Disregarding the length of set changes, the play was still extremely long. This was probably because the play ends more times than Return of the King. The scene where Lance is on his gurney goes through three fade-outs, instead of just continuing on and letting the audience figure it out for themselves.
Some of the gay audience members felt that there was way too much kissing in this play. However, the kissing in the play was really appropriate, because this was a play about being afraid to be gay. "The kisses in the play were designed to be a punch in the gut. Most people don't realize the trauma of the simple act of kissing their boyfriend in public," said Viator. It makes sense that people would be uneasy and offended seeing two men kiss in a play, simply because it rarely happens in plays or movies.
But the kissing wasn't the real punch in the gut for me -- the dialogue was. Viator tried to make the dialogue as Southern as possible and it really hurt the story. This particularly stood out in the scene where Lance is coming out to his parents, still in pain from the beating, using a lame, unauthentic Dixie verbiage.
"I wrote it in two days, and I had the first scene's dialogue sitting there for five months. And then a week before going to Hopkins I revised it," explained Viator. It becomes clear during the first scene -- which has some of the play's strongest dialogue -- that each of these characters are well-crafted to fit their own set stereotype, but we are still able to sympathize with them as individuals. Soon, however, the play reverts to slow and preachy interaction, to the point of being unnecessarily melodramatic. The message of acceptance would have been much more effective if it were shown to us through character interactions, rather than explained by the monologues of each character.
It was also hard to watch the constant women-bashing in the play. Perhaps it served a purpose to show that these men really didn't find women appealing, but really it just made it clear that these whiny men were probably no better than the homophobes they were fighting. And as a political play, I'm surprised that it put down women, because it seems that straight women are much quicker to accept homosexuality in other people than straight men are.
The best scene was the dance scene, where we meet the model, Greg Morgan, played by Marshall Ross. The music is this wonderfully silly house song, and Greg is just dancing around, and then he walks right up to Allan, played by Garrett Clark, and starts flirting. Drinking and flirting, that was the most entertaining scene in the play. And Lance Esteibar gave by far the best performance, as much of the silliness of the dialogue was saved by his delivery.
Descent Into Acceptance has a lot of potential. The story is intriguing. However, it needs to be shorter, more colloquial, and more believable, accessible characters. It is refreshing to see a play independent of the other theater groups on campus, and it is also refreshing to see a play about such a foreign genre. But audiences looking to accept their homosexual peers had better stick to The Laramie Project.
