His first gambit is a very funny Christmas pageant starring the Founding Fathers, including a Thomas Jefferson who is on Santa’s naughty list for owning slaves, and a controversially gay Abraham Lincoln. In 1837, the 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln arrived in Springfield, Illinois, to found a law practice. The teacher who staged that pageant undergoes a Scopes-like trial, which is seen from three different angles, all of them pretty revealing. It was delivered to a joint session of Congress by President Abraham Lincoln, exactly 150 years ago today. Almost immediately, he struck up a friendship with a 23-year-old shopkeeper named Joshua Speed. It is astonishing that blacks vote for democrats at all. The focus of the Presidents speech was, of course, the Civil War. For the 100 years prior to Lincoln the democrats were historically the party that supported slavery in the south. In 1860 when Lincoln was elected the democrats elected a person who debated Lincoln and argued why the idea of freeing the slaves was stupid. But President Lincoln took a short detour, and with a few bare sentences, he summed up an issue that remains with us to this day. There may have been an element of calculation to this friendship since Joshua’s father was a prominent judge, but the two clearly hit. But, this being a democracy, an audience representative gets to decide which among the three angles, espoused by different characters - smarmy reporter Anton (a wonderfully oily Arnie Burton), fiery prosecutor Regina (Stephanie Pope Caffey) or conservative politico Tom (Robert Hogan) - gets to go first.Īnton, for instance, is painfully unscrupulous, seducing Tom’s closeted son Jerry (Ben Roberts) one moment and selling his dad up the river the next. Tom’s a mean-spirited bigot, but he loves his boy and it’s sad to see a man who prides himself on being principled become a shadow of his former self. Loeb’s twists and turns aren’t without some plausibility problems - the legal proceedings at the center of the play are pretty much one long mistrial, and the political machinations between fixer Lloyd (Ted Koch) and aide Tina (a very good Lisa Birnbaum) are nearly impenetrable.īut ultimately, the plot twists are beside the point.
Slavery big gay meme series#
The whole thing seems to be a setup for a smart series of intellectual fistfights between folks like Regina and Anton - a conservative straight black woman and a liberal white gay man who just can’t stand each other.
These exchanges actually sound like two people arguing, not like a playwright venting his frustrations at people he’d like to tell off.Ĭhris Smith’s direction has all the benefits and all the drawbacks you’d expect of a show that comes from the New York Fringe Festival. It looks like the actors are having a blast, particularly in the dance-off interludes, but the show as a whole has a lot of air in it and could probably shrink by about 20 minutes without losing any lines of dialogue.