This year, GayFest! teams up with Equality PA to offer STANDING ON CEREMONY: THE GAY MARRIAGE PLAYS. These nine short plays will be performed in reading style, true to the work’s original production, featuring twelve performers, some of whom will be performing multiple roles throughout the evening. This challenge for the actors parallels one theme of the work: offering several different points of view on marriage within the LGBTQ community in the United States. With marriage being navigated in a range of perspectives from the mind of a haunted bigot to the pages of Facebook, this is a series of diverse works brought together by the connection of “I do.”
Rich Rubin, the artistic director of Quince Productions, will be acting in the work and took some time to offer his thoughts on its presentation for this year’s festival:
“What’s really interesting to me is that in just a few years since “Standing on Ceremony” came out, some of the pieces are already ‘period pieces.’ There is, for instance, one piece about two women flying from California to Iowa because marriage is legal in Iowa but not California (it was while Proposition 8 was still making its way through the courts). And the two women are saying things like, ‘Can you believe we live in California and have to fly to Iowa to get married?’ Well that, of course, is no longer the case. So in a way it’s a primer on recent history and an indication of how quickly things change!”
Standing on ceremony, a term itself for following tradition, is turned on its head as stories weave in and out of the topic of marriage within the LGBTQ community. “There’s such a variety of takes on the experience of fighting for and achieving marriage equality (and dealing with the fact that we now CAN get married)” Rubin comments. ”It’s going to be a really diverse and amazing evening.”
STANDING ON CEREMONY: THE GAY MARRIAGE PLAYS includes plays written by Paul Rudnick, Neil LaBute, Moisés Kaufman, José Rivera, Mo Gaffney, Wendy MacLeod, Jordan Harrison, and Doug Wright and is presented as a benefit for GayFest! 2014 and Equality PA. [Skybox at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St.] Aug. 10, 2014. Quinceproductions.com.