The Temperamentals
Opening Night: February 28, 2010
Closing: May 23, 2010
Theater: New World Stages
"Temperamental" was code for "homosexual" in the early 1950s, part of a created language of secret words that gay men used to communicate. The Temperamentals tells the story of two men—the communist Harry Hay and the Viennese refugee and designer Rudi Gernreich—as they fall in love while building the first gay rights organization in the pre-Stonewall United States.
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March 1, 2010
Amazing, isn’t it, what could be hidden behind those sober jackets and ties that made American men look all but interchangeable in the early 1950s. “The Temperamentals,” Jon Marans’s eminently likable docudrama about gay identity in the age of Eisenhower, begins with a classic vision of mid-20th-century uniformity: five guys in off-the-peg suits, as anonymous as the standard-issue, metal-frame chairs on which they’re seated.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 1, 2010
The birth of a movement is a perilous thing to put on stage. It can be fraught with sanctimony or awash in details that seem more dry than dramatic. But "The Temperamentals," Jon Marans’ fascinating look at the fledgling efforts of gay activism, manages to avoid those pitfalls while being entertaining, educational and emotionally affecting.
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March 1, 2010
With The Temperamentals, now at New World Stages, Jon Marans has used his dramatizing wiles to write an instructive and consistently amusing lesson in gay studies by focusing on the seminal if now forgotten Mattachine Society. Indeed, this is the rare docudrama that succeeds at everything it gallantly sets out to accomplish.
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March 4, 2010
In the edifice of gay history built around Stonewall, those 1969 riots represent the birth of gay liberation, and prior labor pains tend to get shunted aside. To the extent that the seminal Mattachine Society of the 1950s is evoked at all, it is often as an image of ineffectuality: the timid suit-and-tie homosexual politely asking for tolerance, please, instead of demanding it on the streets. Jon Marans’s touching biodrama The Temperamentals, which takes its title from a since-discarded code word for gays, makes a strong case for the quiet radicalism and messy courage of the Mattachine founders.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 2, 2010
If the word "educational" had not been tainted as faint praise, we could celebrate "The Temperamentals" as an object lesson in educational theater. If the word "important" didn’t sound so grandiose, it might be a lovely fit for a description of Jon Marans’ entertaining play, which has moved to a commercial Off-Broadway run at New World Stages after a successful summer downtown.
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