A play called “Pride House,” set in Cherry Grove on Fire Island, and produced by a gay theater company? It’s reasonable to presume it the kind of formulaic gay play that has proliferated since Mart Crowley set the mold in “The Boys in the Band,” teeming with campy scenes, witty queens and beefcake.

But if playwright Chris Weikel does borrow from the Crowley playbook, he does so more sparingly than usual – just a couple of campy scenes; some brief beefcake. He seems just as influenced by Anton Chekhov.  

“Pride House”  frames the somewhat fictionalized story of how Cherry Grove became the gayest summer colony in the world as a kind of American Cherry Orchard.  The central character, Beatrice Farrar, explicitly compares herself to Chekhov’s character Lopakhin,  the son of a former serf who buys the famed cherry orchard out from under the flighty aristocratic Lyuba Ranevsky, and chops it down in order to build summer cottages for vacationing city folk. In “The Cherry Orchard,” though, Lopakhin’s action is seen as a tragedy. In “Pride House,” when Beatrice makes a similar move, it is understood as….the birth of a community.

We first meet Beatrice (Jamie Heinlein) in her summer home, which she calls Pride House in homage to Jane Austen, speaking French with two children. It is 1938, and the boy and girl are the offspring of European royalty who have sought refuge from the gathering storm overseas. This is our introduction to Beatrice’s social circle – sophisticates, celebrated writers, Broadway performers and designers — whom Beatrice, an heiress, shares with her ex-husband Thomas (Patrick Porter), himself a well-known Broadway designer.  Theirs was a marriage of convenience, as we soon learn, and many of their guests at Pride House find the isolated Cherry Grove beach community a refuge from a different sort of oppression. As Thomas puts it bluntly, “there are no police round-ups on the dunes.” There are, however, the less than tolerant locals,  represented by a nearby property owner Irene Gerard (Gail Dennison, a standout in what in lesser hands would be a thankless role) and her even more narrow-minded husband George (Desmond Dutcher.)

 
It’s far into the play before a hurricane hits the Grove, destroying much of it (although not Pride House) and Beatrice comes up with the idea of buying up the land, rebuilding it with cottages, and selling these to her friends.

 “Pride House is a real place that still exists (you can rent it for a summer if you like),” the playwright writes in a note in the program, “and many of the characters in the play are inspired by and named after some real people who were part of the Cherry Grove community at the time.” The playwright admits to taking liberties: “A lot in this play is historically inaccurate.”  Beatrice Farrar did not in real life turn into a real estate mogul. But the hurricane of 1938 was indeed a pivotal moment in the transformation of the area into a gay mecca, and Beatrice Farrar was a famed hostess who introduced many of her New York theater friends to Cherry Grove.

“Pride House” is the first production in the fiftieth anniversary year of TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), which bills itself as “NYC’s oldest and longest-producing LGBTQIA+ theater company.” For much of the running time of the play (150 minutes, including an intermission), the Q in “LGBTQ…” could stand for quaint.   It’s an old-fashioned three-act play, leisurely paced with a large cast – resembling for long stretches the sort of sturdy, talky old drama that the Mint Theater Company heroically rescues from long obscurity. “Prime House,” however, is newly written,  which somehow made me less patient with it. It took fifty minutes before we got the first campy scene – a group of chorus boys dressed up in togas and jeweled headdresses re-creating a scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 extravaganza “Cleopatra”, complete with verbatim dialogue from the film.

 In the play’s defense, I suppose the wait made me appreciate that scene more. It was one of many in the production enhanced by some fine acting, under the direction of  Igor Goldin. 

Tom Souhrada showed great comic verve as the flamboyant Arthur portraying Cleopatra,  and Alex Herrera was spot-on as Brad, a (chest-baring) hunk doing MarK Antony’s lines. Unlike the hunk in many such plays, this one is given some wit and some dignity; among the threads woven through the play is the low-key courtship between Brad and John Mosher (Aaron Kaplan), a writer for the New Yorker magazine.

Souhrada’s Arthur gets the most resonant line in “Pride House,” when, shortly after the hurricane, Beatrice despairs that Cherry Grove will ever be able to recover from the damage, and Arthur tells her she has enough money to make it happen.

“Don’t be vulgar,” Beatrice tells him.
Arthur replies: “Why is everything I enjoy invariably vulgar to talk about?”

When a trio of gay theater artists, including Off-Off Broadway playwright Doric Wilson, created The Other Side of Silence in 1974 (the title derived from a line by George Eliot*), I have little doubt that everything they staged was widely viewed as vulgar. That that is no longer the case – that one can talk about a hunk on stage as being dignified — is a mark of changing times, but also a result of the efforts by companies like this one.

Pride House
TOSOS at The Flea through February 10
Running time: Two hours and 30 minutes (including one intermission)
Tickets: $40
Written by Chris Weikel
Directed by Igor Goldin
Set Design by Evan Frank, costume design by Ben Philipp, lighting design by David Castaneda, sound design by Morry Campbell, stage manager: Jesica Terry
Cast: London Carlisle as Edwin, Gail Dennison as Irene, Dontonio DeMarco as Poppy, Desmond Dutcher as George, Jessica DiSalvo as Natalia , Jamie Heinlein as Beatrice, Alex Herrera as Brad, Aaron Kaplan as John Mosher, Calvin Knegten as Hugo, Jake Mendes as Stephen, Patrick Porter as Thomas, Raquel Sciacca as Maxine, and Tom Souhrada as Arthur.

* If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.