With an eye to gay rebellion

Farther down on 7th Avenue, some 20 blocks south of this coffee shop in Michael Mayer’s quasi-Chelsea neighborhood, gay men are already crowding the areas around Christopher Street for tomorrow’s parade. The influx is palpable; the restaurants seem busier this weekend. Mayer, still partly soaked from his one-block dash through today’s thunder showers, mentions that tomorrow, June 27, is also his 44th birthday, falling on the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion.

Mayer asks where the rebellion has gone. He concludes that, these days, “the gay community is less political than it ought to be.” It’s still raining out. Who knows if it’ll rain on tomorrow’s parade?

“In one way, we’re everywhere, we’re visible, and there’s a lot to be proud of,” says Mayer, director of “A Home at the End of the World,” starring Colin Farrell, which landed in theaters a week ago. “But by the same token, gay pride has also become a little bit of a circuit party, and that’s just not my world.”

Tomorrow, three-quarters-naked men will dance to Beyonce on large decorated flatbeds towed by pickup trucks. Not Mayer’s scene, granted, and there are certainly better ways for a funny, opinionated, successful Jewish artist -- the three-time Tony-nominated director is still one of the busiest on Broadway -- to occupy his time in New York. (On Broadway, his “After the Fall” opened Thursday and a fall revival of “ ‘night, Mother” starring Edie Falco and Brenda Blethyn is set.) But surely there has to be one type of float that could persuade Mayer to see the parade on his birthday.

“OK,” Mayer says, becoming more animated as he imagines the scene just above his eye line: “I would like to see Bush, John Ashcroft, Condoleezza Rice and this whole nightmarish administration as these huge, enormous balloons. And then I’d like to see Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Michael Cunningham and all the great gay writers and political leaders come out with these giant -- hat pins! And then stick their pins in and blow up every single one of these figures. Now that would be a party.”

Kramer, Kushner, Cunningham -- for Mayer, there’s the rebellion that still rages for those still willing to sit down and listen up. And it’s with Cunningham’s adaptation of his 1990 novel that Mayer, in his feature film debut, has helped re-create that generation of arts and culture when gay dissidence was beautiful because, for him, it mattered.

“I remember directing the national tour of ‘Angels in America’ back in 1994,” says Mayer, referring to Kushner’s 1992 AIDS drama. “Back then, it already felt like a period piece -- as if we were saying, ‘Thank God we got out of that.’ ” Now, Mayer says, the country isn’t out of anything.

“If you look at [Kramer’s] ‘The Normal Heart’ and the politics of silence it explored,” says Mayer, “of what wasn’t being said, the lack of openness, the lack of full disclosure -- it’s going on today.”

The fortunate constant for Mayer, who attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1980 to ’83 as an acting student, is that art somehow responds to the challenge. Today, HBO’s “Angels in America” leads the Emmys field with 21 nominations, and a robust revival of “The Normal Heart” has just extended its run at New York’s Public Theater until Aug. 15. Parts of these two works still pulsate with that explosive wake-up, act-up theatricality.

But that’s certainly not the way to describe the constant light rain of a Michael Cunningham novel -- prose so gently consuming it keeps wetting the reader’s skin even when its world is perfectly still and silent.

“I love this novel,” says Mayer, who had read “A Home” many years before. “Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., I knew what that world felt like: suburban America in the ‘60s and ‘70s, where the songs on the radio and culture at large were about the Age of Aquarius. Reagan hadn’t been elected yet to turn back the clock, we had booted Nixon out of office. It was the dawn of a new age for many people.”

The challenge for Mayer was to extract a dramatically inspired tempo from a novel celebrated for its delicate, patient, startlingly sober clarity -- one that follows two boyhood friends, straight Bobby and gay Jonathan, who in their adult lives (played by Farrell and relative newcomer Dallas Roberts) connect with a free spirit named Clare (Robin Wright Penn) in New York’s East Village. Together in the ‘80s, with Clare’s baby on the way, the three consider a new family unit, a different type of home.

Luckily, Cunningham (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hours” as well) accepted the director’s invitation three years ago to adapt his novel. The friends bounced ideas around and, in the end, some characters were lopped off, some condensed, one character’s fatal illness was absorbed by another. But there’s one substantial redesign in the movie version that readers of the novel will notice from the first few scenes: This is Bobby’s story, the straight boy’s story. It’d be interesting to gauge the reaction of the novel’s most devoted legion of gay readers, many of whom have held Jonathan’s perspective as a touchstone to their own lives. Some may even entertain the idea of foul play: In one of the few great pieces of literature that the gay community can also call its own, the straight guy (or the bi guy) beats out the gay guy for the lead role.

“Look, I’m Jonathan when I read the book,” Mayer says. “But a movie of a heterosexual guy in love with his gay best friend, that’s a story we have not seen before. It’s something we don’t know. We’ve seen plenty of stories of gay boys in love with their straight friends. This is the way Michael wanted to tell the story cinematically.”

Although the novel has four narrators -- the fourth is Jonathan’s mother, Alice, played in the movie by Sissy Spacek -- Mayer makes a case that the story is really about relationship triangles. After Mayer does the geometry, connecting the points in the air with his index finger, he proves that Bobby is the vertex. And for a character who has buried his family by age 14, “the search for calm at a home at the end of the world articulates Bobby’s longing more powerfully than any other character.”

Could Farrell do it?

With the center of Bobby locked down from the very beginning, the more pressing question was whether Farrell could embody the “passive, gentle soul” of the character. All of Farrell’s past roles told Mayer, well -- no.

“I frankly didn’t know who he was at the time,” admits Mayer, mentioning that an agent at Creative Artists Agency was able to get the script into Farrell’s hands without an offer to go with it, a rare feat in Hollywood considering Farrell’s A-listing. “He was shooting ‘Daredevil’ at the time, so he had a shaved head and tattoos all over, chain smoking and drinking beer at 11 in the morning. I saw him in ‘Tigerland,’ which was amazing, but I said: ‘That’s not Bobby!’ And this creature in front of me certainly isn’t Bobby.”

Word was going around that if Farrell didn’t need to read for Steven Spielberg, he certainly didn’t have to read for a theater director making his feature film debut with a mere $6-million budget. “I said, ‘Look, I think he’s terrific, but he really, really needs to read for me,’ ” says Mayer. “The role seems to go against everything that he is.” Farrell immediately agreed, and after a couple of hours in the lobby of West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, Mayer finally made his peace with Farrell. “There’s a lot of things about him that the public doesn’t know and hasn’t seen yet,” says Mayer. “There’s a gentle, beautifully poetic spirit in him.” There’s something else about Farrell that a small percentage of the public has seen, in an early cut of the movie, in which Farrell has a full-frontal scene that generated a lot of buzz.

“That topic is so boring,” Mayer says. “Let’s put it this way: No scene was taken out. We used a different take.”

Mayer prefers taking the subway to 42nd Street, where he’s working on Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall.” “We just had our first preview last night, which was harrowing,” Mayer says. “But Arthur was very happy, and that’s all that matters to me.”

Once at the theater, where everyone is expecting him, he apologizes for being late, and the first order of business is to place last night’s big “swoosh” sound; Mayer says the effect has to be moved to a better moment in the play. As the production crew listens to his notes, against the backdrop of the stage, Mayer’s theater life looks intricately creative, large, constantly imminent and under control. This is his home at the center of the world.

Though Mayer says Cunningham is planning to write an original screenplay for him, filmmaking remains largely outside of Mayer’s front door. He says that he knew enough about film to surround himself with an unjaded filmmaking crew who inspired him each moment of the 34-day shoot and to film certain scenes in one take to prevent censoring edits. (That’s the only reason, he says, an intimate bedroom scene between Jonathan and Bobby as teenagers made the final cut. He also fought to put back a Farrell-Roberts kissing scene.)

Beyond that, “I didn’t know what I was doing on the movie, and that’s the truth,” Mayer says. “I winged it.... I don’t think I could make this movie again, and that makes me happy and sad. The miracle of this movie was I didn’t know that I couldn’t do it, so I just did it.”

But by directing Cunningham’s celebrated story for neighborhood multiplexes, Mayer sees himself contributing to the rebellion that still lives for him, if not for the queer-eyed programs of network television. He often thinks fondly on his first film experience, though it’s hard to tell if he’s thinking about what he directed or what he lived.

“It was very moving for me working on the set,” Mayer says, “to reinvent that moment in our time when a mom could take a hit off a joint with her son and her son’s friend, and then the three of them can dance together listening to Laura Nyro. That doesn’t seem like the world we’re living in now, and that makes me sad.”

It didn’t rain the next day, and so the parade worked its way down to Christopher Street. Nobody was dancing to Laura Nyro; Beyonce ruled the day. But a Roberta Flack record was heard from someone’s fire-escape party, and some would argue that’s a good start.