Out Lines – Episode 5

Episode Transcript

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0:00:01.1 Mark Finley: Having the privilege to know Doric, to have watched him watch himself, I’m very blessed to have had that experience.

0:00:07.3 Paxton Whitehead as Silvadorf (And He Made A Her, 1961): The one thing a person who is everlasting should maintain is a somewhat palatable appearance.

0:00:14.9 Virginia Baeta: That line you just heard, it’s from a reel-to-reel recording of the 1961 Caffe Cino presentation of And He Made A Her. That may have been Doric Wilson’s first produced play, but it wasn’t where his story began. I’m Virginia Baeta. Welcome to a special intermission episode of Out Lines, where Jordan, Mark, and I spend some time on the mind behind Now She Dances!. As Doric told it, he wrote his first play in high school for an assignment. His teacher accused him of plagiarism and gave him a failing grade. Doric never forgot that teacher, and he never forgot that grade, but it’s possible Miss Shriver never thought of that intense, handsome, young man with the fiery red hair again, and if she didn’t, that’s a shame, for several reasons. Let’s jump back to the beginning.

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0:01:05.5 VB: Doric Wilson was born Alan Doric Wilson in Southern California on February 25th, 1939. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest on his grandfather’s ranch. Doric once said, “When I was young, I wanted to be a spy. I dressed in a trench coat and slouch hat and lurked about looking mysterious. When I recognized I was gay, I thought it was as good as being a spy.” Doric may have recognized a parallel to the spy life in his own, but he never embraced deep cover. He came out while he was in school and he started making noise right away.

0:01:41.1 MF: He moved to New York City in 1958 from Washington, where he was, I believe at Washington State, and had been asked to leave the university because he had posted notices around campus warning students that people were getting beat up in a nearby cruising area. And he was called into the Dean’s office and asked very politely to leave, so he came to New York and became self-made man, Doric Wilson.

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0:02:12.9 VB: Before leaving university, Doric had received some formal theater training. He brought that experience and his admiration for the works of George Bernard Shaw and Thornton Wilder with him to New York. His original goal was to be a set and costume designer, but that wasn’t his destiny. As Doric tells it, he wrote And He Made A Her for his straight English roommate and brought the play to Joe Cino at the Caffe Cino to be considered for a run. Well, a Caffe Cino run.

0:02:40.8 MF: Schedules were a little different. They weren’t doing runs the way we do a run, the way like this play will be running for two weeks or the month of February. It was very much Joe Cino. The legend is he would ask you what sign you are, and you’d say Aquarius, and he’d say, “Okay, how is next Saturday?”

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0:03:02.2 VB: And He Made A Her was a hit, so much so, that it was one of the first off-off-Broadway plays to make the step up to off-Broadway with a production at the Cherry Lane. The Cherry Lane run was not conventionally successful, but something happened during that production that is key to the origin story of Now She Dances!

0:03:21.9 Jordan Schildcrout: The way that Doric at least wrote about the origins of ‘Now She Dances!’ is that he actually had another one of his plays, often credited as being like one of the earliest of the Caffe Cino plays called And He Made A Her, and this was actually being showcased at The Cherry Lane Theatre in 1961, and Doric writes that he was arrested for sexual “whatever,” is what he called it, and then notes in parentheses, “I was innocent.”

0:03:45.0 VB: Of course.

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0:03:45.3 JS: And then it was actually the producer, Richard Barr, who famously produced a lot of the plays by Edward Albee, it was Richard Barr who bailed him out of jail, and he says that he ran right to the safety of the Caffe Cino, sat at a table and wrote Now She Dances! And this was produced at the Caffe Cino in 1961 and was one of the four major plays that Doric produced very early on at that time at the Caffe Cino that really made him something of a downtown celebrity.

0:04:13.7 MF: Yeah, I think the “sexual whatever” you were talking about is entrapment. That’s big on the Doric Wilson checklist. He’s famous for the story about when he watched two undercover cops essentially entrap each other, and this story which he saw happen made its way into Street Theater. So I’m assuming that that’s what he’s talking about when he’s saying sexual whatever.

0:04:37.6 Seymour (Street Theater Character): Hot tonight.

0:04:38.2 Donovan (Street Theater Character): Sure am.

[audience laughter]

0:04:43.7 Seymour: The weather.

0:04:44.6 Donovan: Oh, yeah. Muggy.

0:04:47.8 Seymour: Yeah, me too.

0:04:48.9 Donovan: Muggy?

0:04:50.0 Seymour: Hot.

0:04:51.8 VB: This is just the beginning of the Street Theater entrapment scene. We would have inserted more of it here. It just happens to be the least family-friendly thing Doric wrote for the stage. We were talking about a different play, anyway.

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0:05:05.2 VB: The 1961 Caffe Cino version of Now She Dances! is wildly different from the published version of the play, and that pun is intended. This 45-page one-act play inspired by Doric’s encounter with the NYPD is still Oscar Wilde’s Salome in the style of Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, but in this version, the lines of the fated prisoner, Jokanaan, were direct Oscar Wilde quotes.

0:05:32.5 JS: “Nothing makes one more vain than being told one is a sinner.”

0:05:35.6 MF: “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”

0:05:41.6 VB: “While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity, no man may yield and remain free at all.”

0:05:50.1 JS: What I really like about the lines is so much of Wilde’s writing, while it’s known for being witty and satirical, particularly around sort of the comedy of manners and the British class system and so forth, but that he also was a political thinker.

0:06:02.0 MF: Oh yeah.

0:06:02.9 JS: And that he has many philosophical and theoretical writings about socialism as well as aestheticism, and that this also, to me, really jibes with what I know of Doric and Doric’s writings, that while, yes, he’s out to be funny and sexy and so forth, that he’s always got a political perspective on what he’s sharing with an audience, and so that he’s finding a sort of camaraderie with Wilde, I think, is no accident. And in fact, in this 1961 version, if I’m not mistaken, the voice of the prisoner is just heard offstage, but he doesn’t actually appear on stage. And in performances, that voice was actually coming from Doric Wilson. But it creates then the stacking of the persecution of John The Baptist, of Oscar Wilde, and then of the playwright himself, Doric Wilson, all put together in one.

0:06:50.4 VB: And then also imagine, to step back to what it would have been like to be at the Cino at that time, a lot of people know each other, right? They know Doric personally. And so that first moment when you first hear his voice hollering from wherever he might have been hollering from, there’s that laugh that you get, that moment where it’s like, “Oh, that’s Doric yelling into his own play. Isn’t that hilarious?”

0:07:14.1 MF: And very Cino-y.

0:07:15.3 VB: And very Cino, but then also consider then that progression from the playwright, who is basically quoting another playwright from offstage commenting on a play, to these lines he has chosen getting darker and more philosophical and more pointed, but still being delivered from offstage and still by the playwright. And how many people at that time knew his story and what motivated him writing this play. All of those pieces all converging in this moment in that little cafe in New York City.

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VB: Besides And He Made A Her and Now She Dances! Doric wrote two other plays for the Caffe Cino, Babel Babel Little Tower and Pretty People. What Doric referred to as a stupid fight with Joe Cino, ended Doric’s Caffe Cino tenure before the space closed in 1968. You’ll hear more about Caffe Cino in Episode 7 of Out Lines. But the theater wasn’t the only place Doric was making his mark.

0:08:18.1 MF: At this point, he was a bar star, he was bartending downtown.

0:08:23.0 VB: What would it mean to be a bar star in New York City?

0:08:27.0 MF: I believe, basically, it is essentially, people come to a certain bar to come and see you if you’re behind the counter. Which bar owners, I would imagine, particularly loved because people are coming into that establishment to see that person. And for me also, it’s a little bit of a chicken and the egg. Was Doric a bar star before he was known as an artist, or vice versa? But I think both things were mutually dependent upon each other. I do know that he was known, he was very known. I talked to people who were around during that time, who you wouldn’t think would have any sort of connection, but they knew him. They knew him, and they knew his work from all across, every sort of life and economical experience. Which I think is fascinating, especially when you’re looking at a time before, way before social media. How do people know each other so quickly and so across the board? I do know that he was present at all three nights of the riots, different locations, different set-ups. What I like hearing about that is he would give different perspectives about what was happening depending on where he physically was located, which I think is fascinating. He always talked about Stonewall as being like that story about the three blind men and the elephant.

0:09:54.3 MF: The three blind men who’d never seen an elephant before, they go up and feel it, and one of them feels the trunk and one of them feels the sides, and one of them feels the tail, and they all have a different description of what an elephant is when they come out of it, and they all argue about it. That was his Stonewall experience. What I love with that is the details that you don’t hear so much. The fact that people were throwing pennies at the cops, along with saying, “Who takes the payoffs?” Just that notion of throwing pennies, you just don’t hear about, and it’s a great detail. And it seems like every kind of eyewitness account I hear or see or read is somehow different. So I absolutely believe Doric’s experience that your experience depended on where you were.

[The following lines are from Doric Wilson’s Street Theater – audio from video of 2002 performance]

Jack: Who takes the payoffs? You take the payoffs.

C.B.: Who takes the payoffs?

The others: You take the payoffs

Donovan: Okay

The others: Who takes the payoffs?

Seymour: That’s it –

The others: You take the payoffs.

Donovan: Break it up.

The others: Who takes the payoffs?

Seymour: Let’s move along.

The others: You take the payoffs.

C.B.: This street belongs to us.

Donovan: Yeah?

Ceil: Us and our friends.

Seymour: Says who?

Boom Booom: Says me.

Jack: And me

Timothy: Me, too.

Jordan: That includes –

Gordon: – us.

Heather: Look who’s united!

Murfino: We don’t want no trouble on this street!

[music]

0:11:04.3 VB: You’re hearing dialogue taken from a recorded TOSOS production of Doric Wilson’s Street Theater, Doric’s most frequently produced play. Street Theater was Doric’s fictionalized retelling of the events leading up to the Stonewall uprising. The late ’60s and ’70s were tumultuous across America, and particularly in New York City, where class and cultural conflicts were coming to a head. Doric met those conflicts with his signature blend of activism and humor.

0:11:32.7 JS: One of the things I always loved about Doric’s work is that he seems to always have an awareness of class issues. Where the upper classes, he often depicts them in these really comic terms, while he really sees the radicals as the people who often have nothing left to lose, that they’re the ones in the streets fighting the battles to really make a better world. And that’s part of the satire of the play too, I think. So, yeah, it fits in totally with the 1970s ethos of the city.

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0:11:58.5 VB: We spoke in an earlier episode about TOSOS, ‘The Other Side of Silence’, which Doric co-founded in 1974. One of the first full productions mounted by TOSOS was a revised ‘Now She Dances in 1975’, which Doric had expanded into a two-act play. This expanded version featured a critical change reflecting a topic Doric would revisit in much of his future work.

0:12:22.5 JS: It really reflects the changes of the gay liberation era, which one of the major rallying cries of it was, “Come out.” That coming out of the closet was one of the major personal and political things that any queer person could do. And therefore to see the sort of person who remains closeted in order to maintain his position within so-called respectable society, Doric definitely satirizes that. He does that in many of his plays. He certainly does that in Street Theater.

0:12:47.3 Sidney (From Street Theater): I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong. I don’t frequent this street, I don’t frequent any street. I’m innocently walking my dog.

0:12:54.3 MF: Yeah. Well, all of them really. A Perfect Relationship, Forever After, all of them.

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0:13:00.4 VB: Doric’s most productive years as a playwright were in the ’70s and early ’80s. 1975’s Now She Dances! was followed by The West Street Gang in 1977, A Perfect Relationship in 1979, Forever After in 1980, and Street Theater in 1981.

0:13:17.3 JS: During the height of gay liberation, and so let’s say between 1977 and 1982, every single year, there was a Doric Wilson play being produced in New York City that was a hit off-off-Broadway. During that period of his career was mostly produced by The Glines. And so once it was being produced in New York, it would also be produced in a string of theater companies across the country, what was loosely known as The Purple Circuit. All of these LGBTQ theater companies that had emerged really quite recently during the whole gay liberation era, being seen as part of the culture and community that was important for coming out and social activism and so forth. So Doric’s plays were seen every year in New York, were being produced around the country, and then the AIDS crisis comes, and that changes not just Doric, it changes the world that he’s writing about, it changes the world that he’s writing for. And there’s really a major shift, and Doric’s voice is not heard as much, frankly. It’s not as prominent.

0:14:12.5 VB: Jordan, you referred to a term that I was not terribly familiar with. Could you tell us a little bit more about Glines.

0:14:18.2 JS: Oh, sure. So when Doric was running the TOSOS Theater Company, he was approached by a man by the name of John Glines, who had first… Glines had tried to make his career as an actor and then as a playwright, and his plays didn’t do very well. And so Glines had the idea that if he became a producer himself, that he could do a better job of producing his own plays. But how do you learn how to become a producer? So he talks to Doric Wilson and Doric Wilson agrees to take him on as the administrative director of TOSOS. So Glines spends a year basically learning from Doric. Doric became his mentor, and Glines was always very clear about that, that he credited Doric as being the one who really taught him about the business of theater and theater making, particularly off-off-Broadway and particularly for the queer community. And the following year, in 1976, John Glines starts his own theater company called The Glines. And it really just followed the TOSOS model of being a very community-based for us, by us, about us and near us art center for the queer community, and he’s extremely successful. And so while Doric’s TOSOS goes a bit into hibernation around this point, I think this is just my theory, I think Doric wanted to focus more on his own playwriting than on being a producer, ’cause being a producer is a lot of work.

0:15:31.2 JS: So he actually was very supportive of John Glines starting his own theater company that became… In one interview Glines referred to it as, “The son of TOSOS.” And, indeed John Glines then became the primary producer of Doric Wilson’s plays. So he did a revival of West Street Gang, he did Perfect Relationship, he actually commissioned Doric to write Forever After for what Glines called the First Gay American Arts Festival, which was in 1980, which was actually kind of a big deal, ’cause it was supported by the NEA. The fact that the NEA in 1980 supported something called the First Gay American Arts Festival is actually kind of remarkable, and Doric was one of the centerpieces of that. So amongst the playwrights that John Glines regularly produced, I would say it would be Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick and Jane Chambers. Glines famously produced Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, which became one of Jane Chambers’ most successful plays.

0:16:22.8 JS: And then Glines went on to bring Torch Song Trilogy to Broadway, he brought As Is to Broadway, so he had some mainstream success. But at the same time, Glines like Doric, really always returned to the community. And so even after Torch Song after As Is, after winning Tony Awards, John Glines continued producing off-off-Broadway for the LGBTQ community, and he basically did that for two more decades. So it was a long career, and Doric was instrumental in beginning it, but also then Glines repaid the favor by really becoming one of the main producers of Doric’s plays in New York City.

0:16:54.3 MF: Are we gonna talk about leather or opera or…

0:16:57.6 VB: Only if you want to.

0:17:01.3 MF: I brought it up. Where’s my fan? [laughter]

0:17:05.8 JS: So it’s true that Doric saw his plays produced at the Mineshaft and at The Eagle, both of which are gay male leather bars. And particularly the Mineshaft was very rigorous. They had a dress code posted out front, and of course, no women were allowed. And so in certain ways, this might seem like the wrong place to try to stage a play, but in other ways, there was something really subversive about this that Doric just laughed about. I remember when I spoke with him about it. So for example, when they were producing Street Theater at the Mineshaft, there were rules at the Mineshaft, for example, you’re not allowed to wear cologne inside the Mineshaft. And so the performers that were playing the drag queens, Ceil and Boom Boom, would just be spraying perfume everywhere and laughing about it. And, of course, Doric thought that this was hysterical, being very subversive. And, of course, within the Mineshaft there was a separate space that they renamed The Den Theatre, and on the posters it said in all capital letters, “ALL ARE WELCOME AT THE DEN THEATRE”. And I think this was part of Doric’s point, that while it was useful to stage it in the Mineshaft, ’cause it was organically part of the community, he also recognized that there could be divisions within the community.

0:18:11.3 JS: So to make sure that people… That, first of all, were not men, were not part of the leather scene, and who might not normally have felt like they “belong to the Mineshaft”, were welcome in his theater within the Mineshaft. And one of my favorite anecdotes from the Mineshaft production is actually Dorothy Allison, the novelist.

0:18:28.5 MF: Yeah.

0:18:28.6 JS: She’s the one who wrote ‘Bastard Out of Carolina’, I think. Am I right about that?

0:18:31.4 MF: Yeah, that’s her. Yeah.

0:18:32.0 JS: So, Dorothy Allison actually came to this show and wrote about it for The Advocate. And so, as a woman in this supposedly all-male leather bar, she writes about how welcoming she actually found the theater space and says, “Who thought that a leather bar could be so cozy?” And it speaks to me about the same way that he could be so into the leather community, but also be one of the most knowledgeable speakers about opera that I ever listened to. He was so erudite and had such a wide breadth of culture and this to me seems emblematic, not just in his own plays, but in how he actually approached theater production and theater community.

0:19:04.0 VB: He wrote those differences also and that subversion into West Street Gang.

0:19:07.8 MF: Oh, absolutely.

0:19:08.8 VB: As far as this list of rules that then different people subvert in different ways.

0:19:14.5 JS: And again, that was done site specifically, when The Glines produced that they did it at a bar called The Spike. So basically, it’s a play set in a bar that was produced in a bar. And so, it really had that layer of like, “Oh, we actually are doing something a little subversive within this space, that’s about our own sense of belonging in queer community,” just sorta brilliant comedy.

0:19:32.5 VB: Yeah. And great piece of the story around that one as well, when the audience wasn’t quite sure, [chuckle] the actors who were coming in from the street, if they were actually actors or if they were, you know, actually people to be kept outside.

0:19:44.5 JS: Absolutely.

[music]

0:19:46.4 VB: The early ’80s brought success to the Glines and to Doric. But as the decade progressed, the HIV/AIDS epidemic decimated the close-knit community, Doric and so many others have fought to build.

0:19:57.9 MF: Doric really loved New York, but he talked about how he really just couldn’t stand living here anymore, so he moved to California for a while. I’m not really sure what he was doing out there, but I do know that he came back in the ’90s and had retired essentially from theater. I met him in 1998 through a mutual friend, and in 2000, he asked me and Barry Childs if we’d be interested in reviving the TOSOS company. Now, I didn’t even know what TOSOS was, so he explained to me what it was, and got me really excited about it and making this happen again, and we decided to re-launch the company under the title TOSOS II.

0:20:58.8 MF: We made an agreement that there were kinds of plays that we weren’t interested in producing. Underwear plays, or ‘Will I ever find a boyfriend’ plays, and AIDS plays. And basically, we all kind of agreed that there was more out there. When we started talking about this, really the bulk of plays that were coming out were really either about AIDS or in the shadow of it. So, we were, at Doric’s guidance, very focused on broadening that picture of the gay person, that it was more than just this disease and the toll that this disease was taking on all of us. I think now, going forward with TOSOS, we are revising that approach to dealing with AIDS and HIV, because I think it’s got the real danger of being a real rearview mirror thing that, “Oh, it never happened.” And given what I lived through, I don’t wanna contribute to that. And I think there’s always room for underwear, there’s always room for underwear.

0:22:03.5 VB: I would say that underwear has definitely featured in several TOSOS productions that I know of.

0:22:08.4 MF: Yes.

0:22:08.7 VB: It might not be the sole focus or the primary focus of the play, but…

0:22:12.8 MF: Well, you know, you gotta change with the times.

0:22:15.4 VB: Exactly.

0:22:16.5 MF: Yeah. Doric was essentially retired from actively being in the arts, and when he asked me to be artistic director, he sort of took over as founding director and producer. So he was essentially our executive producer and did so much work for the company, so much work for the company. Which is amazing to come from not doing anything but wanting to, and not as a young person, and really jumping on and finding the endless energy that it takes to do that, to mount off-off-Broadway productions in a continuing kaleidoscope of venues and casts and crazy characters. It must have really reminded him of the old days, the kind of perennial excitement of the people, these were his people.

0:23:07.9 VB: I wanna talk a little bit about how supportive he was…

0:23:11.0 MF: Absolutely.

0:23:12.6 VB: Of artists, of just across this spectrum, he was just always so excited about the work that people were doing, so excited about actors and about writers and about just people that were in this sphere. He would come and see… He would see everything.

0:23:32.1 MF: You’re absolutely right, he just loved actors. I miss this, too. It used to annoy the crap out of me, but now I really miss it. Being somewhere in the theater and you knew when Doric was in the audience, he had this big voice, but he would turn to comment to anybody next to him or to the person that he came with and go, “Oh, they’re just fantastic. Oh, they’re brilliant.” Thinking that he’s whispering, but he was not. [chuckle] I wanted to go, “Doric, we can hear you.”

0:24:00.9 JS: And that’s why… I remember when going to see TOSOS shows or speaking with him, he would often just introduce whoever, some up-and-coming new artist was, some actress, some playwright or someone that he was a fan of, he would always introduce them as “The Newest Member of TOSOS.” It seemed like he just distributed membership to whoever he just, you know…

0:24:21.5 MF: Yes.

0:24:22.4 JS: Thought was coming along, that had something to contribute, that could be part of the community. And part of that was about welcoming them in, making other people feel like they belonged. But also I feel like Doric desperately wanted to also feel that he belonged still to the new generation of people that were creating and, for that matter, coming to the theater.

0:24:40.4 MF: Oh, yeah. And as you were talking, Jordan, I was just thinking about Doric saying to me after a performance, “My best audience is little old ladies.” Like, “What are you talking about?” He’s like, “Yeah, they love me, they absolutely love me. Check it out.” And we’re sitting in the audience and we were watching this group of older ladies, and they were howling at every single joke. The raunchier, the better. They loved it.

[music]

0:25:05.9 VB: He made his presence known outside of the theater as well. The 21st century brought Doric into orbit with a new community.

0:25:13.4 JS: One of the places where he had fellow travelers actually was in academia, that there’s a flowering of the field that became known as “queer studies.” And that really looked back to that original liberation generation that Doric was so much a part of. And so, Doric would actually appear at conferences, and pretty much, if you invited him, he would come. He just was so community-minded and so generous. And so, as a scholar, I would often encounter him under these circumstances.

0:25:45.6 JS: There was one season I was leading a reading group at the LGBTQ Community Center, and we were reading his play and discussing Street Theater. And, of course, he was happy to arrive and he didn’t need an honorarium, he didn’t need anything special. He was just happy to be in the room. And, of course, once he was in the room, he was charming. He charmed my mother, [chuckle] who came to one of the sessions. And he just had this way of knowing who’s in the room, how to appeal to people. And again, this wasn’t just vanity on his part, it was really about connection. It’s about some sort of sense of belonging, ’cause I do think… And maybe this changes with the generations, but for a queer person of a certain generation, I think one of the traumatizing things is just a sense of alienation, of being alone.

0:26:26.3 JS: And Doric came to New York and he was in the theater and he was in the queer community because then he wasn’t alone. He actually had people. So, coming to these academic conferences, yes, maybe it was a way to kind of solidify his legacy as a sort of gay theater elder, but I also think it was just that sense of belonging. The other thing that does this is the Internet. Not to be ageist, but for a gentleman of his age, who was used to a certain kind of networking and socializing, he took to the Internet quite well. He kept a blog. He had his own website relatively early on. And on this website, he would make his plays available, the manuscripts, basically to anyone who asked for them. If you logged in and put in your name and address and why you wanted to read this script, he would just send you the manuscript, because he wanted his voice to be out there. And not just, again, his voice, in some very self-centered way, but rather, I would argue, he wanted the memory of that generation…

0:27:20.0 MF: Yeah.

0:27:20.7 JS: To continue.

[music]

0:27:23.5 VB: Doric passed away of natural causes on May 7th, 2011. His blog, and much of his website, doricwilson.org, are available as of this recording. Doric hadn’t completely given up on playwriting. In May of 2011, he had a play in progress.

0:27:41.0 MF: He was working on a play called The Boy Next Door which we have an Act One for and a beginning of Act Two for. He did, near the end of his life, pass it on to Chris Weikel, to say, “If I don’t finish this, will you please finish this?” I did, actually, follow up with Chris about this last year, and he actually came to me and said he had an idea for making it work. So hopefully, it will get finished and we’ll be able to do some kind of reading on it, but watch this space. It’s out there.

0:28:19.6 JS: I remember a scene from that was performed at Doric’s memorial service at the Lucille Lortel.

0:28:25.5 MF: Right. You’re right.

0:28:25.5 JS: Yeah.

0:28:26.3 VB: And just in case you missed that, Chris Weikel is the voice of Lane in our actor bits.

0:28:32.4 MF: And an amazing playwright in his own right.

0:28:35.2 VB: Yes.

[music]

0:28:38.4 VB: Doric’s final blog post was dated April 10th, 2011. It seems fitting that the post titled, “Giving Credit Where It Is Due” corrects an error made when mainstream publications dismiss gay culture, particularly that of the liberation generation.

[music]

0:28:55.4 JS: Just to be clear, Doric Wilson was never once reviewed by The New York Times. In the decades of his career, never once. And so, there’s a way that the mainstream critics just didn’t take someone who was just so dedicated and immersed within the gay theater world, quite as seriously, unless they somehow crossed over the way that, oh, I don’t know, like Harvey Fierstein did. So the scholars are really the ones that picked up Doric’s work and took a closer look at it.

[music]

0:29:25.2 VB: Which, I suppose, is what we’re up to with this season of Out Lines.

[music]

VB: House lights are flashing, intermission has come to an end, and so, we end this episode of Out Lines. In our next episode, we return to Herod’s Garden for Act Two of Now She Dances!, and a discussion of how Doric wove current events into every rewrite of the play.

0:29:48.9 MF: Thank you for listening to Out Lines. Subscribe, get lost in our show notes and check out some awfully cute kitty pics at outlinespod.com. Season One of Out Lines features conversations and readings recorded between September 2020 and June 2021. In this episode, you heard Paxton Whitehead as Silvadorf in a recording of the 1961 Caffe Cino production of And He Made A Her, and also cast members of TOSOS’s 2002 production of Street Theater at The Eagle, which was directed by me, Mark Finley, and it was awesome. You can find the full cast list for that production in our show notes. 2002 was eight years before I got my cat, Simon, and Simon is the Hebrew name for listening. Makes sense. He’s a quiet little cat. Thanks to Sarah Wardrop for the production magic, to the dastardly Morry Campbell for the theme music, and to Free To Use Sounds. You are all stars.

0:30:44.7 VB: Out Lines is a production of the Weakest Thing.