Today's Out Spotlight is Robert Patrick, gay American playwright, poet, lyricist, and short-story writer and novelist. While ignored by mainstream critics and Patrick is a founding father of gay drama in America and an influence in the development of gay drama in England. His work has influenced his contemporaries as well as younger playwrights that followed..
Born in Kilgore Texas in 1937 to immigrant workers, he was raised in various places in the South and Southwest. But it wasn't until he arrived in New York in the mid-1960's when his real life began when he found his way to the Caffe Cino, where both off-off-Broadway and gay theater in America were born.
Patrick, then known to his friends as Una O'Connor, worked by day as a typist in the city morgue but after work threw himself body and soul volunteering at the Cino, as actor, stage hand, publicist, co-manager, and playwright. His first play, The Haunted Host, was produced at the Cino in 1964.
After Joe Cino's death in 1967, Patrick, who had already written dozens of plays, moved his base of operation to the Old Reliable Tavern Theatre in the East Village and, occasionally, to La Mama, the center of downtown theatrical experimentation.
By the late 1960s, he had produced off-Broadway and once, with Kennedy's Children, briefly on Broadway. When London's Gay Sweatshop began presenting plays in 1975, two of his plays, One Person and The Haunted Host, were included in the first season. (Kennedy's Children had been produced in London in 1974.)
Patrick's early work reflects the restless experimentation with theatrical form of the late 1960s. Monologues, musical extravaganzas, television parodies, nudity, drag, and camp humor fills his varied early work. Patrick's best work is in his more conventional plays, satirical look at the many ways gay men, trained to hate themselves, avoid the possibility of love. The hilarious, biting satires of gay life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s.
His play T-Shirts (1978) pictures the sexual marketplace of gay society as "a conglomerate as heartless as Con Ed," in which youth and beauty are the only currency. In T-Shirts, Patrick dramatizes a conflict between a handsome hunk and a cynical, flamboyant queen that results in a tie in which both learn about the compromises they have made.
In The Haunted Host (1964), a playwright, determined to avoid repeating a disastrous past relationship, is visited by the spitting image of his beautiful ex-lover and realizes that he has shut himself off from the possibility of love.
Patrick can also, as he does in the one-act plays contained in Untold Decades (1988), celebrate the ways in which gay men have managed to love in times of repression and, recently, epidemic.
Patrick's self-portraits appear throughout his work, never more poignantly than in his best-known play, Kennedy's Children (1973), in which, in alternating monologues, five regulars of a bar recollect where they were the night John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Sparger, a sometime drag queen and gay actor in a welter of experimental theater events, recounts the history of a thinly disguised Caffe Cino, which for him represented the 1960s.
In the 1970's, the 1974 production of The Haunted Host marked the first time Harvey Fierstein appeared on the legitimate stage as a male (having previously only acted as a drag performer. Fierstein, later on, included a recording of Patrick's monologue, Pouf Positive on his compact disc, This Is Not Going to Be Pretty. The same year was also the first season of gay theater in the United Kingdom, to which Patrick contributed three plays. The Broadway-theatre production of his play Kennedy's Children (1975) earned Shirley Knight a 1976 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play. Patrick's play My Cup Ranneth Over (1976) was commissioned by Marlo Thomas, a vehicle for her and Lily Tomlin. Although a production with them never happened, that play went on to become Patrick's most produced.
In the 80's Patrick wrote, Blue Is For Boys, which was the first play about gay teenagers, and "Blue is for Boys Weekends" in honor of the play were declared by Manhattan Borough Presidents in 1983 and 1986. His work, The Trial of Socrates was the first gay play presented by New York City. Patrick also wrote Untold Decades (1988), a history of gay-male life in the United States, told in a humorous vein; and Temple Slave, a "totally romanticized" novel about the early days of Off-Off Broadway and gay theater.
Patrick now lives in California and still writes. He has ghostwritting several screenplays for film and television; contributed poems and reviews to Playbill, FirstHand, and Adult Video News magazines; and had his short stories included in numerous anthologies. He reviews adult gay-male videos for several publications. He has also wrote a novel Temple Slave in 1994, which chronicles the years of Caffe Cino before writing his memoirs, Film Moi, and the plays: Hollywood at Sunset and Michelangelo's Models.
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