Play on Boxer, Fighter Pulls No Punches in Look at Gay-Bashing

Stories about gay-bashing are a staple of today’s news. At Cal State Northridge last year, flyers were posted advertising free baseball bats to make the job easier. What’s behind this regression to attitudes of the past?

One explanation is found in “Cock & Bull Story,” opening Saturday at the Fountainhead Theatre in Hollywood’s Theatre Row.

“Three or four times a week,” says the production’s director, Billy Hayes, “I’m cutting articles out of The Times about gay-bashing, about people being beaten up on the streets.” That’s what attracted Hayes to the play. “It deals with homophobia.”

Hayes, 45, who is best known as the author of the autobiographical “Midnight Express,” has since then become an active actor-director. In Los Angeles he has directed a production of William Inge’s “The Last Pad,” and was a member of the famed San Quentin Drama Workshop. He directed an all-female version of Rick Cluchey’s “The Cage” in New York, and also appeared in the L. A. production at the Odyssey Theatre.

The authors of “Cock & Bull Story,” Richard Crowe and Richard Zajdlic, spent eight months of soul-searching improvisation in developing the two-character play. Crowe has since given up acting and writing and is now the landlord of the Essex Skipper in Frinton-on-Sea, in Essex, England. And Richard Zajdlic’s first play without his writing partner, “Infidelities,” won the 1991 West London Playwriting Competition.

Two English actors who knew “Cock & Bull Story” from its successful run at London’s Lyric (Hammersmith) Theatre brought it to Hayes. The problem it faces head-on is, after all, universal.

One of the actors returned to England, but his friend, Mark Sheppard, and Hayes became dedicated to staging a Los Angeles production. Another English actor, Trevor Goddard, has taken over the other role. The actors, both 27, have special insights into the heart of the play, which concerns the friendship of a young boxer, Travis, and his street-fighting mate, Jacko. The action takes place on the night of a bout that will decide whether Travis is going pro.

“That’s the bottom line that really attracted me to the play,” Hayes says. “It’s about deep friends who are about to part. They’re going to go their separate ways. Their friendship is over. In the hour and a half of this play, they’ve both learned something about each other, and about themselves. The audience can interpret it any way they want. A lot of questions are posed; the mirrors keep changing. Things seem to be one way, then they change back, and they change back again.”

Hayes grins as he listens to his actors rehearsing across the room. “And--it’s funny,” Hayes admits. “It gets funnier as the actors interact.” It’s the humor of camaraderie, hiding the truth.

The problem investigated beneath the surface of the play is not so funny. Jacko, who has just killed a gay man in an alley behind a bar, has heard rumors about Trevor, that he gets “excited” in the clinches with his opponents.

“With both of these characters,” Hayes says, “it’s their fear of what they’re feeling, and how they react to it. Travis fights within a boxing ring to legitimize the violence, as it were. He fights down his fear of what he’s feeling. And Jacko does the same thing outside the ring. Jacko kills people because they think he’s queer. He pulls them out of bars. How clever must he be to be able to pull somebody out of a bar! He has to play the part enough to get them to trust him. It says an awful lot about who Jacko is. Methinks the lad doth protest too much. Something is going on underneath.

“My wife read the play and was fascinated with its view into the masculine world. It’s the fly-on-the-locker-room-wall kind of feeling, to see how men talk about things, and dealing--or not dealing--with their own sexual feelings, how they cover over what they’re feeling. These guys are talking constantly about ‘birds’ and getting laid, and underneath it is what’s allowed between men. Two friends can punch each other, but they can’t touch each other.

“It’s a very strange world that will allow a punch, but not a touch. It’s the world we’re living in right now. Various people at various times would have different opinions on what’s allowed between friends. I want to raise those questions for audiences who see the play. I want them to ask those questions about themselves.”

Mark Sheppard, who plays Jacko, has writhing dragons on his tattooed arms. It’s a street look. Don’t be fooled. Although he started playing drums when he was 12, became a professional musician at 15, left school at 16 to tour Europe with a rock band, played with the hit Irish group “Light a Big Fire” and with “just about every band in Europe that almost made it,” he definitely didn’t come off the streets. His father is W. Morgan Sheppard of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“He did ‘Marat/Sade’ with Peter Brook,” Sheppard says. “All that fun stuff they did. Dame Judith Dench and people like that used to look after me when I was a kid. I was always around the theater. My dad acts, but I play drums as a trade.”

He also acts, in spite of his denials. “It’s something I love doing. And this play is so right, it’s been worth waiting a year to get it to happen.”

Growing up in London, he did gain experience that helps in solving the riddles of “Cock & Bull Story.” “I’m London Irish,” he says. “Travis and Jacko are similar to a lot of the people I went to school with. The mentality is very similar. The way Travis and Jacko grew up, I find comparisons with myself and my best friend. Not that we ever went out queer-bashing, because we didn’t, but there were people in our neighborhood who did. Some places are very homophobic. And I lived in Ireland, which is an even stranger place.”

The boxing world of the play is one in which Sheppard’s stage partner, Goddard, grew up as an amateur, then as a professional. Goddard matter-of-factly explains his successful boxing record: “I was 50 and 1 as an amateur. And 6, 1 and 1 as a pro.” Even as an amateur boxer, he studied acting. “I knew the boxing career was a short career. The acting was something that I loved and wanted to pursue. Knock on wood, I’ve been pretty fortunate.”

Goddard also remembers homophobia. “In England, yes,” he says. “But maybe that was because I was younger. You know, as kids growing up, you hear ‘Well, he’s a queer boy.’ No one wants to be picked out, separated. That’s what this play brings to the front. It’s fear, fear of their own sexuality. I should think it’s because they don’t know their own sexuality yet. And society stereotypes everyone, putting everyone into groups: good, bad, whatever. It’s unbelievable. Why do people do it? There’s something inside themselves that they can’t face.”

Hayes hopes the play will open some eyes. “I want the women who see it to see an aspect of male sexuality, of men dealing with their own fear of their sexuality. Most people are hesitant to move beyond what are the accepted boundaries that they’ve set upon themselves. Part of what’s going on in the play, you’ve got men in a really masculine environment, and they’re restricted from accepting their own feelings about their sexuality. In this case they transpose their fear into violence. I watched it in prison, too.” Hayes is referring to his doing time in Turkey before he rode the “midnight express” out. “It’s a fact of life in jail. It certainly gave me an insight into what’s going on in this play.

“Travis’ fear of what he feels, and the fact that society won’t allow him to feel what he does, translates right down to Los Angeles, obviously to these people who are so afraid of somebody else’s sexuality that they’re willing to throw violence on them, literally beat them and put them in the hospital. The play is right now, here, in the streets of L. A. It shows part of the mentality that’s going on.”