The
first night of the 1968 Stonewall riots “from the inside” as it were, is the
canvas of Ike Holter’s Hit
the Wall, at the Barrow
Street Playhouse. Like a lot of plays
meant to examine the effect of a circumstance upon a society—come to
think of it, like all of them—the stock-in-trade of the play is
archetypes. To mention only a few: Carson (Nathan Lee Graham) a black drag queen who is both proud and
terrified; Peg (Rania Salem Manganero) a young butch lesbian; the uptight older sister (Jessica
Dickey) who would pave the way for family
re-acceptance if Peg would only “hold it in”; Alex (Matthew Greer), a bigoted cop so arbitrarily brutal that the
obvious question (is he in denial?) never has to be articulated; and about half
a dozen others.
Because
the archetype-collection is the inevitability of an ensemble social-awareness
play, and because the template is far more transparent a device than it used to
be upon first appearance (when the likes of A Raisin in the Sun [1959] and the Boys in the Band [1968], upon
their debuts, were examples of bracing candor—among my favorite plays,
lest that seem dismissive), Hit
the Wall has inspired a much different kind
of controversy than its predecessors, both milder and more cynical; and that
because enjoyment of the play depends in part on your willingness to buy into
the contrivance of a cross section that hits so many representative colors on
the standard-issue palate—and in part upon your suspension of disbelief
that the neatly categorized cross-section represented was intersecting at the
heart of the conflagration. (The play’s repeated documentary-style refrain,
“The reports of what happened next are not exactly clear,” provides a good deal
of literary license.)
What
allows you to get past that, if you’re willing to take the ride, is the
particularization of the characters, the memorable details that transcend
archetype. And in this, Holtzer and his cast have created several portraits you
may well find indelible. This is aided and abetted with great élan by director Eric
Hoff, whose more or less in-the-round
staging (well, anyway, there’s audience on all four sides of the auditorium,
which for this engagement has been configured into a somewhat larger-than-usual
black box) puts you right in the thick of it along with the characters.
Personally, I thought it was an exhilarating and important evocation of a
turning point in history. As to what you think…you’ll only know that after you
attend, which I recommend highly.
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