A Sense of Unity at Theatre Rhinoceros

Neither New York nor Los Angeles boasts a gay and lesbian theater company that has the history and the clout to qualify as a cultural force. That’s left to San Francisco. The largest operation and, by all accounts, the most successful gay and lesbian company in the country is Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco’s Mission district.

Work produced there is more professional and polished than at L.A.’s only exclusively gay and lesbian theater, the Celebration. And the breadth of the Rhinoceros schedule--eight productions every season--makes it unique among gay theaters nationally.

One reason for its success, says Rhinoceros artistic director Kenneth Dixon, “is San Francisco itself. The homosexual community here is more unified than in New York and L.A. where gay groups are fragmented from one another.”

The scope and diversity of Theatre Rhinoceros eclipses the activity in either New York or Los Angeles. Today, New York’s gay and lesbian theater is largely centered at three venues: The Glines at the Courtyard Playhouse in the Village (run by “Torch Song Trilogy” producer John Glines who, with a grant from the National Endowment, presented the first Gay American Arts Festival in 1980), the predominantly lesbian WOW Cafe in the East Village, and Gotham’s new and ambitious 3-Dollar Theater Company.

The 3-Dollar is an Equity off-Broadway house at the 175-seat Apple Corps Theatre in Chelsea that opened last November with an AIDS’-themed comedy/drama, “Adam and the Experts,” by Victor (“Niagara Falls”) Bumbalo. The 3-Dollar Theatre’s next venture, said Bumbalo, is a political satire, “Rescuing Marilyn” by Kate Ryan, which unfolds during the second administration of Dan Quayle.

But in San Francisco the Rhinoceros is so dominant that outsiders are hardly aware of other and non-exclusive gay and lesbian spaces, such as the leftist Eureka Theatre and the experimental Life on the Water in the Marina.

Rhinoceros’ current attraction, “Hidden: A Gender,” is an agitprop piece about gender blur, written and performed by a transsexual, Kate Bornstein (running through Jan. 27). One of Bornstein’s characters (autobiographical) charts the odyssey of a man who becomes a woman who is a lesbian.

Rhinoceros has made an “active effort to integrate our audiences,” said playwright and house production manager Adele Prandini, “and we have encouraged our directors to cast color blind.

“We began as a white, male theater 12 years ago. About the sixth year, women came in, and three years ago we brought in Latinos and blacks,” Prandini continued. “We’re the only gay and lesbian organization that survived the hard times when arts funding was cut 10 years ago and the rents went up. We survived because people from other organizations came to us and strengthened us.”