 |
| Sam Stoneburner, Alan Castner. |
FOREPLAY [Drama/Homosexuality/Marriage/Nudity/Sex] A: Robert M. Lane; D: Nicholas Rock; S/L; Leo B. Meyer; P: Sweet Alice, Ltd.; T: Bijou Theatre; 12/11/70-1/10/71 (38)
After seven years of marriage, a man named Neil (Sam Stoneburner)
realizes he’s gay, leaves his wife, and goes to New York to begin life as a
practicing homosexual in a Central Part West apartment.
 |
| Tara Tyson. |
This play was much concerned with preaching the
virtues of same-sex love, and aimed to convince those who had a problem like
the hero’s to come out of their closets. Edith Oliver berated it as “shoddy stuff—badly
written ad much given to moralizing, persuasion, and those awful, italicized
star-spangled jokes.”
Foreplay
was
saved from being “the worst play of its genre,” wrote Mel Gussow, by the
generally effective production values, but “the writing is ordinary, the humor
forced, the staging at times mechanical.” Like other such works, it had an
obligatory nude scene, although it was played in dim light. A story that went around at the time was that a certain actor had turned down the role of Neil because of the nude scene.
