Gay Trailblazer Surveys the Changed Landscape

Anyone who thinks that recent years have made little difference in the way gays are treated in the theater need only talk to playwright Martin Sherman. Between the 1979 premiere of his best-known work, “Bent,” and the 1990s triumph of such plays as Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” everything, he says, has “changed completely.”

He recalls, for instance, dutifully meeting the press in 1979, right before “Bent” opened in New York, starring Richard Gere and David Dukes.

“I remember being interviewed by the New York Times when it was being done on Broadway,” recalls the soft-spoken Sherman, seated in a friend’s West Hollywood apartment the day after he has flown into Los Angeles from his London home. “I talked about being gay, and I guess no one had.”

Sherman has come to L.A. for the West Coast premiere of his one-act play “A Table for a King,” which is part of a larger work called “A Madhouse in Goa,” seen in New York last season. The production, directed by David Schweizer and starring Susan Tyrrell, opened Thursday at Highways.

“It’s hard to think this is true now,” the playwright continues, “but the reporter who interviewed me phoned me three times before they ran the article, saying ‘Are you sure that you want to say that you’re gay?’

“How could I possibly present this play to the public and pretend anything otherwise? But that’s how it was. People would write plays with gay characters, but they would still refer to their bachelor pads.”

Well, what a difference a couple of decades can make. “I find it astonishing now to look back and realize how groundbreaking ‘Bent’ was,” says the playwright, who is in his 50s, referring not only to the Tony-nominated play’s frank depiction of gay themes, but also to its presence in mainstream venues. “You don’t think that when you’re doing it, but it was way before its time in a lot of ways.”

If gay culture has moved from the periphery of the theater world to its center, though, gay identity nevertheless still is largely separate from mainstream culture. And yet, it is his outsider’s sensibility on which Sherman has built his career.

As a first-generation American, gay, Jewish, expatriate playwright, Sherman has a sense of cultural dislocation that is more refined than most. “Most of my characters are experiencing some form of cultural alienation,” the playwright says. “My plays are filled with outsiders, which is actually very Jewish.”

Ironically, Sherman’s reputation in his native America rests largely on “Bent,” which was made into a 1997 film directed by Sean Mathias. But he’s much more widely known in England as the author of a number of West End successes that have served as starring vehicles for such noted actors as Ian McKellen, Vanessa Redgrave, Antony Sher, Rupert Graves and others. The 1986 “A Madhouse in Goa,” for instance, was staged in London’s West End in 1989, with Redgrave and Graves. It premiered in the U.S. at the off-Broadway Second Stage Theatre in 1997, starring Judith Ivey.

Set on the Greek island of Corfu and reminiscent in tone of a Tennessee Williams piece, “A Table for a King” is an intimate play about a quirky American tourist named Mrs. Honey. Refusing to give up her table for the impending visit of the king of Greece, the character also ends up overseeing a coming-of-age affair between a shy visiting poet and a young native man.

The piece weaves together dramatic strands that are both apparent and subtle. “Martin has a very strong gift for the poetics of language,” director Schweizer says. “There is an ease and an elegance that comes pouring out of the writing. And he’s deeply humorous. Beyond that, it is also deeply political work. It is informed by big, challenging ideas about how we occupy the world and what we might be able to do in a better way.

“At the end of ‘A Table for a King,’ what you’ve seen on one level is a little summer idyll about an eccentric traveling lady,” Schweizer continues. “But then, when it’s over and you think again, you realize that there is an intricate portrait of a country that’s recovering from a civil war, of the American presence in a culture, and what it’s like to be perched on the landscape of the world and have no real place in it.”

Not surprisingly, the meditation on the nature of belonging derives in rather obvious ways from Sherman’s own experiences.

The only son of Russian Jewish emigre parents, Sherman was born in Camden, N.J., and remembers feeling like an outsider from early on. “Like a lot of kids of my generation, I grew up hearing another language, which already can give you a certain sense of isolation,” he says. “I grew up with that sense of dislocation.

“That’s not a negative, necessarily, although it sounds like it is,” he continues. “It’s just something that is.”

Sherman studied theater at Boston College, and later at the Actors Studio in New York, with both Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg.

He took his first trip abroad in 1966, and most of his plays since then have been set in places where he’s traveled, including Greece (“Messiah,” “A Madhouse in Goa,” the film “Alive and Kicking”) and Paris (“The Night Before Paris,” “Rio Grande,” “When She Danced”).

Sherman has also chosen, since 1980--the year after “Bent” premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London, with McKellen in the lead--to live as an expatriate, in England. But he doesn’t find this displacement to be negative either. “I don’t think I would have done it if it felt alienating,” Sherman says. “I felt completely at home, totally comfortable.”

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“A Table for a King,” Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica. Thursdays-Sundays, 8:30 p.m. Ends Aug. 30. $16-$20. (213) 660-8587.