Reverie

Abstract

A southern pastor knocks on a door in South Philadelphia and is greeted by a man in a towel who is the former lover of his recently deceased son. So begins Reverie, a new play by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright James Ijames. The pastor, Paul, does not know what he needs from the apartment’s occupant, Jordan, but soon the men are both seeking to connect more to the dead, but not-yet-gone, Lucas, who appears in reveries first with Jordan and then with Paul. Eventually, Jordan admits to Paul that Lucas was not actually his partner, but rather a casual fling, a painful revelation that threatens to break the shared reverie’s power. Instead, both men accept the parts of Lucas they will never know and focus on the human connection they achieved through their shared, incomplete memories of him. As Reverie unfolds, characters and audience alike experience a state of reverie through which Lucas’s angelic form appears to facilitate revelations that remind the two living men about how important love, in all its forms, is to any connection to God. Perhaps the most radical act of Reverie is the way that it does not cast a gay relationship as a point of contradiction to the religious themes in the play, instead weaving queerness and spirituality together in a way that assumes and normalizes that connection.Although the script does not specify the race of the characters, Azuka Theatre’s Philadelphia production cast three Black men in these roles, meaning that Reverie not only focused on a gay relationship in a religious context, but on a Black, gay relationship in a religious context without drawing any conflict from those identity markers. Reverie’s use of gentleness, grace, and love as affective tools connected with religious reverie creates a structure of feeling that puts forth a particular idea of the connection between religion and queerness. Whereas performances such as Hell Houses create feelings that overwhelm facts, particularly around issues of LGBTQIA+ inclusion in Christianity, I believe that Reverie uses performance with the opposite affect to the same effect. In discussing the way that Hell Houses function to create new interpretations of religious texts, Ann Pellegrini writes that the power of performance can lead audience members to “[invest] (or [reinvest]) in a deeper structure of religious feeling that can tie together disparate, even contradictory, experiences, bodily sensations, feelings, and thoughts.”1 Although Pellegrini’s argument uses Raymond Williams’s concept of a “structure of feeling” to explain a performance that can have very harmful effects on audience members, I would like to suggest that the opposite is true of Reverie. Instead of using hellfire and brimstone to scare audience members “straight,” Reverie speaks softly and uses beautiful moments of male bonding to show that queerness can go hand in hand with the tenets of Christianity.Azuka Theatre’s production was staged at the Proscenium Theatre at The Drake, just a mile or two north of the play’s South Philadelphia setting. Marie Laster’s realistic set design presented the audience with the interior of the apartment of a young man—one that has all of the essentials, but nothing that looks brand new. It is relatively tidy, but not perfect. The main features consisted of a doorway in an alcove upstage center that had two potted plants hanging from above and a window stage right that revealed a neon sign advertising the “Yummy Pho” Vietnamese Restaurant below. The lighting design by J. Dominic Chacon and the sound design by Larry D. Fowler Jr. complemented the set beautifully, adding to the feel of a real apartment and then to the effects of heavenly presence that the play eventually calls for.In addition to the colloquial understanding of the word reverie as a derivative of the French rêverie, meaning daydream or dream-state, the word has a more specific usage in a mystical context. Encyclopedia Britannica defines reverie under a group of words describing mystical states, noting, “In reverie states, numinous experiences occur without the inhibition of consciousness, and visions are experienced as revelations rather than as perceptions of externally existing realities. The contents of the visions are often symbolic or allegorical and require proper interpretation in order to be understood.”2 Director Jerrell L. Henderson seemed to incorporate this specific definition of the term as he shaped a production that introduced Lucas into a realistic setting while making clear that he was only visible to one character at a time. Jordan and Paul also spent a great deal of their separate conversations with Lucas trying to interpret what it meant that Lucas appeared to them. Henderson’s clarity of the world of the play was evident in staging that melded internal and external realities into a soft meditation on love, loss, and connection between the living and the dead. Henderson’s direction embraced the multiple realities present on stage by not sensationalizing Lucas’s appearances, at least until doing so became an important reversal.The first moment in which Lucas (Justin Mitchell) appears to Jordan (David Bazemore) initially seems to be a flashback. After Jordan hands Paul (Damien J. Wallace) a book that Lucas had enjoyed, the two discuss the book’s contents, which clearly includes gay sex. Jordan then explains that the sex in the book is realistic and not “smutty,” which prompts Lucas to walk into the room and sit on the couch with Jordan to discuss the book.3 However, the scene shifts from reminiscence to reverie as Lucas says, “Fantasies hear everything you say,” before explicitly stating, “this isn’t real.” This leads Jordan to admit that he wishes he could have had a memory like this with Lucas. And so it is that Reverie introduces the normalcy of both this queer relationship and the ease with which Jordan is apparently rewriting the circumstances of it in his own allegorical version of memorializing Lucas. What stands out in these moments are the ways in which they illustrate “thought as felt and feeling as thought,” which is a key facet of Williams’s structure of feeling.4 In other words, Jordan’s thoughts about Lucas are felt as they are staged, and the staging of these romantic scenes with Lucas show what was thought about but not experienced. In both cases, the structure of feeling creates a scenario in which religious mysticism is the conduit to a happy gay relationship. Performing a play with such a structure of feeling acts on an audience, propagating certain understandings of religious doctrines that might contradict other depictions that churches and individuals have preached. As Pellegrini explains, religious “performances witness to their audiences. The process of conviction may engage preexisting beliefs—such as the notion that homosexuality is wrong, abortion is evil, or Satan is real—but for conviction to take hold something more is required.”5 That “something more” is the structures of religious feeling that can sweep over an audience and make them feel like they belong to a community. By normalizing the connection between a spiritual, Christian-based reverie and a Black, gay couple, Azuka’s production of Reverie created a world within a contemporary American setting in which these realities do not cause conflict.Henderson’s production was able to accomplish this in large part due to some truly moving performances. Jordan is described by Ijames as “Spiky. Honest. Fragile,” and Bazemore delivered all of these layers without ever letting the character’s spikiness read as anything other than a defense mechanism. Bazemore’s Jordan did not know how to react to Paul’s appearance at his door, but his performance perfectly set up a key reveal. Bazemore left Jordan’s guard up for the vast majority of the play, despite the impressive gentleness and care shown by Wallace’s Paul. Jordan’s response could have been read as fear of possible homophobia from Paul, as Jordan’s reticence first manifested when Bazemore focused on the very visible cross on a chain around Wallace’s neck. This was my initial reading, but when Jordan finally reveals that he was never Lucas’s partner, that spikiness was redefined. Jordan could not share his whole self with Paul or talk openly about Paul’s son because he simply did not know Lucas well enough to do so. He must have been anxious about lying, and his realization that he was lying to a pastor must have compounded the stress of that choice. But, through a connection with Paul, he sees a vision of an alternate future full of grace and love.Wallace’s Paul was another truly remarkable performance. His search for answers, and his desire to be close to someone who he believed was close to his son, were beautiful to watch. Whether reliving the moment when Lucas came out to him, or asking Jordan to dance with him, or even eating a breakfast sandwich that Jordan has cooked for him, Wallace was grounded, present, and open in a way that models so many positive aspects of what people often seek from clergy and parents alike. Paul also has his own reveal (and/or revelation): that he was in love with a man when he was younger, but that he loves his wife too. Bisexuality, or anything that falls in between “straight” and “gay,” is so rarely discussed on stage with any seriousness, and watching Wallace take this information about Paul seriously was a rare moment of bisexual visibility. This should come as no surprise from Ijames, who has often represented bisexual and pansexual Black men in his plays. Bazemore’s reaction to this news from Wallace was also very important, as there was no judgment, no bisexual erasure. Just grace. Although it is exciting when Lucas arrives to speak to Jordan and Paul, the scenes between Jordan and Paul are the heart of Reverie. They swept over a rapt audience the night that I saw this production.At the play’s conclusion, after Paul leaves, Lucas and Jordan finally have a romantic encounter that is more than they had made time for in reality. As the two men stand together, music begins to play, leading Jordan to ask if Lucas was responsible for the sudden soundtrack. Lucas reminds him, “This your world. Maybe you did it.” Moments later, shiny rainbow confetti falls, and Lucas says, “Yeeeeeah . . . I definitely did that. I like sparkles.” Azuka’s production, under Henderson’s direction, hit every beat of this scene in the script, bringing to life the many affective stage directions that Ijames weaves into his plays. Mitchell’s Lucas was very playful in this moment, taking joy in helping to create what should have been the truth instead of what literally existed. Mitchell was charming, but his performance lacked a degree of confidence and ease that was outshined by the magnetic performances of Bazemore and Wallace. In the end, Lucas must leave Jordan, but the glitter remains, proof of the power of (the) Reverie. And although the audience was not showered in glitter, we were intangibly touched by the emotional realities of a nuanced and beautiful story that revolved around Black gay men and a Black bisexual pastor who loves them. The structure of Reverie as a play, and this production in particular, acted on an audience to create a world that still does not exist on a large scale: one where Black, queer, Christian men need only worry about problems outside of those identity markers. It was a pleasure to be able to spend some time in such a world, and I hope that it does not remain only a product of reverie for long.