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Hit the Wall
Reviewed by Bob Verini
Los Angeles LGBT Center
Through October 25
RECOMMENDED:
After well-received productions in Chicago and Off-Broadway, Hit the Wall delivers nothing less than a gut punch in its West Coast debut at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Playwright Ike Holter calls his absorbing treatment of the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots a “remix” of scholarship, oral history and legend, beginning in the wake of Judy Garland’s Upper East Side funeral and ending in the Greenwich Village streets. Its impact under Ken Sawyer’s direction is undeniable, and if the play is more impressive as agit-prop than as history — and it is, by some margin — one must still give it credit for never sacrificing character to polemics, and for taking a seminal event in gay liberation in a more artistic direction than other passes at the story have done.
Those include two films entitled “Stonewall,” one from 2004 and one opening this very week (Sept. 25). Each is founded on the perspective of a naïve and young white-bread émigré whose sexuality is expanded, consciousness raised, and radicalism brought to the fore as a result of his immersion in this brave new world of gay bars and same-sex attraction. Exploring a culture through an outsider’s eyes is, of course, a standard movie trope. But the Stonewall riots were brought to a flashpoint — and the battle mostly fought — by out-of-the-closet gays, Lesbians, cross-dressers and transsexuals, with a high representation of men and women of color. Thus, the choice to make a white boy the pivot point, disheartening enough in 2004, has exploded into active controversy that threatens to overwhelm the virtues of Roland Emmerich’s about-to-debut feature.
Holter is not averse to inviting white newcomers to his party: Jason Caceres is a mostly silent “newbie” and co-producer Adam Silver plays Cliff, a hippyish draft dodger with an apparently late-blooming interest in unconventional sexuality. But neither is permitted to act as our surrogate, or to serve as “the” activist who sets things in motion. Instead, our principal guides are Peg (Charlotte Gulezian), a stone-cold young Lesbian whom we meet at a breaking point, and Carson (Matthew Hancock), a self-described “true-blue bitch through and through” with a touchingly vulnerable streak.
Peg is the Alice in this Wonderland, Gulezian doing a touchingly beautiful job, reflecting the frustrations of someone who just wants to be left alone to be herself. Carson’s softness comes through in her blue, Garland-honoring mourning outfit and in a furtive conversation with Cliff on the dangers of public displays of affection, grief and women’s couture outside Campbell’s Funeral Home. (Matthew Hancock’s evocation of this fascinatingly complex figure, from defiance to abject humiliation and back again, is one of the glories of this production.)
Other emcees with varied perspectives on the run-up to the riots include radical feminist Roberta (Shoniqua Shandai), her larger-than-life warmth amusingly contrasting with a take-no-prisoners axe to grind; and Tano (Roland Ruiz) and Mika (Blake Young-Fountain), a snap-filled Greek chorus whom the escalating events of 6/28/69 propel off their safe stoop and onto the mean streets. All these folks banter, bray, clash and conflict as neighborhood strangers are wont to do, especially under 100 degree summer heat. Which means Hit the Wall breathes real life, if impressionistically rendered, again and again in its 100-minute running time. And when these antagonists find themselves turned into a passionate band of brothers and sisters fighting the powers that be, it’s truly exhilarating, even at a 50-year extreme.
One has to make mention of the thankless roles played by Donnie Smith (standing in for all the cops that night), Kristina Johnson as an uptight upper-class urbanite, and Burt Grinstead as a self-hating predator. All three actors do their considerable best with one-note-evil caricatures. But in the classic agit-prop tradition, they simply cannot be allotted the understanding and sympathy that those who fought back at Stonewall enjoy, and no amount of thespian skill can inject that which the script denies. (Nor should it, since Hit the Wall is after all meant to make us mad, glad and defiant, in which efforts it largely succeeds.)
Anna Waronker and ex-Go-Go Charlotte Caffey provide some smokin’ incidental music and songs performed by a hot trio on a platform above, though I wish they — or Holter, or Sawyer, or someone — had not elected to open with a foot-stomping “I Was There” number. It preempts the edgy, nervous, even dangerous mood within which the riots are forged, and fills the room with celebration before celebration has been earned. It’s premature.
At the same time, a couple of elements crucial to the historical record are ignored or blurred. I doubt very much that previously unfamiliar audience members are able to piece out, fully, that the riot started in the bar and exploded out into the street, and that the cops were pushed back into the Stonewall while a quickly expanding street crowd gathered to jeer and cheer. Obviously the sequence of events in such a tumult is easier to convey in a movie or with a stage cast of two-dozen or more, tougher for an ensemble of 13. Still, having the tables turned on the authorities seems so significant, both to the narrative as well as to theme, that its coming through only sketchily here seems a missed opportunity.
Additionally lacking is a sense of the incendiaries going off unexpectedly, surprisingly, out of nowhere, followed by a growing awareness that a community is finally fighting back for the first time ever. Holter’s riot ignites in one big explosion, rather than escalating in stages (and without a sense that the protest went on for several more nights).
Still, when it comes to other, arguably more important things, Hit the Wall gets it right. In quick, broad, believable strokes, it recreates the pre-Stonewall era of oppression, sketching in everyday petty tyrannies, exhausting humiliations, the need to keep looking over one’s shoulder lest a jackboot or club be approaching from behind. More importantly, without begging for sympathy, Holter’s characters clearly convey a conviction that there exists an absolute human right to be who one is without apology or artifice. Even if those characters weren’t articulating it or even conscious of it at the time, that conviction must have permeated the hearts and minds of those who finally stood up, stood tall and said: Enough. No longer. We will not put up with this. No more.
Letting us revisit the thrill of such a last-straw protest, and even better, helping us to feel it as if we were there, is the considerable triumph of Hit the Wall.
Davidson-Valentini Theatre, Los Angeles LGBT Center, 1125 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through Oct. 25. www.lalgbtcenter.org/theatre. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
