Acting, heart make this 'Thing' beautiful

By Claire Lundberg

When I was 13 or 14, I was very devoted to this book, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. Perhaps some of you have heard of it. The book is a mock diary of a teenage boy, Adrian Mole, who lives in the English midlands. His family is on welfare, his parents are always splitting up or having affairs, his skin won't clear up, he can't pass his O levels, he writes horrible poetry to the town rich girl...in short, he's a teenage anti-hero, battling the monsters of adolescence with only his sense of humor as a weapon. I loved him.

Watching Beautiful Thing, by Jonathan Harvey, in the Silliman Dramatic Attic, I couldn't help wondering: what would happen if Adrian Mole were gay? The hero of Harvey's play is Jamie, a wise-cracking 16-year-old living with his single mother in the projects of an English midlands town. His mother, Sandra, is a cocktail waitress with a string of live-in boyfriends; they share a tiny apartment where the walls are paper-thin. To the left side of them is Leah, a teenage dropout obsessed with sex and Cass Eliot of the Mamas and the Papas. To the right is Ste, a first-rate football player whose father beats him for burning the tea, and who often ends up fleeing to Jamie and Sandra's apartment for the night. Because the apartments are so small, Jamie and Ste often end up sharing Jamie's bed.

Guess what happens next.

Though Beautiful Thing is the story of Jamie and Ste coming to terms with their sexuality, it is remarkably free of the sturm und drang expected from so-called coming-out plays.

Once they've gotten through their first kiss, Jamie and Ste stay devoted to one another until the end, and seem willing to face any obstacles together. This is a refreshing change, demonstrating perhaps how much more open-minded the world has become. But the same change could also easily become static when coming out is freed from much of its expected conflict.

The script (or screenplay--Beautiful Thing recently played the cinemas, and was a resounding hit in Britain) is not as strong as it could be, and suffers in places from excess--the many insult-filled sessions between Sandra and Leah seem pointless, as does the long LSD scene where Leah believes she's Mama Cass.

Harvey is at his best with Jamie's wisecracks and witticisms, and some of the courtship scenes between Jamie and Ste are very well-done. However, when the play tries to branch out beyond these characters, the dialogue often becomes stilted.

Nevertheless, Raymond Bailey, BR '97, directs his actors well, and his cast turns in some lovely performances. Ed Roggenkamp, DC '00, as Jamie, and David Tittle, MC '99, as Ste, are particular stand-outs. Their developing relationship is the focal point of the play, as much as the script might sometimes want to steer you away from it, and both Roggenkamp and Tittle capture the sweet, awkward flirtation of first love in their scenes together.

Particularly strong in Tittle's performance is its ambiguity--he injects the unpredictable into a predictable situation, which helps the suspense of the plot enormously. The production is also quite lucky to have Chipo Chung, TC '00, as Leah. Chung is a natural actress, and it is her presence and intelligence that turn Leah from the jumble of details the script gives us into a character for whom we can feel genuine sympathy.

Realism isn't the play's strong point. In some ways, Beautiful Thing resembles a fairy tale more than a real chronicle of the experience of coming out. While Jamie's life is far from easy, his experiences with homosexuality aren't as devastating as we might expect. The plot reads, at times, like a fantasy: your handsome lover is, literally, the boy next door--and, remarkably, he loves you back. The crazy neighbor girl threatens to tell his ogre father, but doesn't. Your mother finds out that you're gay, but instead of screaming or crying, she hugs you and tells you she loves you. The ogre father somehow never finds out, nor does his son get scared and bolt. Instead, you all get together and go to a gay bar and dance, and absolutely everyone is completely happy.

All the expected obstacles surrounding the turmoil of teenage sexuality never materialize. In the end, Jamie and Ste are still in love and haven't had to go through a large amount of personal turmoil or violence to get there. And, whether its realistic or not, there's something kind of wonderful about a happy ending.

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