MYLEN and Brandon Stansell (composers), Trent Atkinson (director) | Hometown / 2018

 out of control

by Douglas Messerli

 

MYLEN and Brandon Stansell (composers), Trent Atkinson (director) Hometown / 2018 [5 minutes] [music video]

 

In the first few minutes of Brandson Stansell’s music video Hometown, the singer confronts a mother packing up for her son, obviously sending him out of their home for being queer. “You brought it on yourself son.” “I didn’t have a choice, ma.” “I don’t believe that,” she summarizes, the common refusal of parents to comprehend that being gay is not a decision that one makes, but that it is made for you by your natural desires. And in fact, it carries with it a force of feelings that most young men attempt to deny, divert, alter at first before finally accepting what they gradually know is inevitable: to admit to themselves and their family that they are attracted to other boys, not to the opposite sex.

     Although Stansell is full-grown in this rendition of the event, we understand it to be a scene he experienced as a young man coming out to his conservative gay family nearly a decade earlier than this song’s release in 2018.

     Beginning as a backup dancer for Taylor Swift, Stansell quickly rose in the Country and Western charts after the release of his albums Dear John (2015), Slow Down (2016), For You (July 2018), and now Hometown. Stansell has quickly risen on the queer Country/Western charts to stand along side such notables as Steve Grand, Chris Housman, Chely Wright, Ty Herndon, and Cameron Hawthorn.

     Since he has shamed the family through his admission, as his mother puts: “You need to go.”

     We see the singer walking down a wet street, bag in hand, leaving home before he starts up his real tearjerker which begins years later as he seems to be contemplating just what his hometown, the place he was forced to leave, actually meant to him:

 

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you

With your one red light and Baptist steeple

The people hear are hard to face

The memories harder to erase.”

 

     But instead of feeling bitter and angry, the chorus of this ballad is almost a contradictory statement of forgiveness and, even more importantly, recognition that this town is what has made him who he is.

 

“But I can’t change it

That’s OK cause

I’ve learned to let it go

It’s out of my control

It might sound crazy

I should say thank you

Cause now I finally know

Who I really am

And I’m made from my hometown.”

    That last line sounds almost like a strident march, a declaration of pride, despite, as he continues, how hard to is to talk to his father and “My mom I don’t know anymore,” and the fact that “all the late-night talks turn to fight wars.” He’s been able to lay it all aside and still declare his love of town and family.

     In an interview with the Huffington Post with Curtis M. Wong, Stansell reiterates the position in takes in this song:

 

“People in the country sphere and in the South are more open than we give them credit for. …My hope is that [LGBTQ] people ― especially country music lovers who are living in the South ― will see this and realize they’re not as alone as they might feel at times and that people who have LGBTQ brothers, sisters, sons, daughters and friends realize that when those people decide to share their truths, that it’s not an easy moment. It’s an important moment, and it should be treated that way.”

    Wanting to film nearer to his Georgetown, Tennessee home, his director Travis Atkinson and he decided to on Nashville, although instead of following a narrative of small town stores and steeples, Atkinson has chosen, after the initial dramatic dialogue between mother (played by Janet Ivey) and son, to show only one long camera run down a street of lower middle class housing before focusing on the singer himself. There are only brief moments of past memories, observed primarily through windows, from the backs of individuals and odd angles, all of which reassert the outsiderness of Stansell even as an adult, with occasional nods from figures in his past who treat him almost as a passing stranger. As Stansell admits, “his relationships with many of family members remain strained.”

    As Wong’s piece underscores:

 

“It was like having a therapy session on film,” he said. “I was having to relive a lot of things that I’d blocked out.” Turns out, those on-camera tears were legit. By the time shooting wrapped, he said, “My camera crew was crying, my director was crying, and I was crying, so I was like, ‘OK, I think we got it!’”

 

     For all the tears it might still arouse, however, the anthem-like strains of this song remove almost all sentimental aspects of the narrative, as the singer/composer asserts his continued commitment to his roots.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

 

 

Brad Hammer and John Duff | Is It a Sin / 2022

sinning till the end

 by Douglas Messerli

John Duff, Anil Sebastian, Max Bergå, and Scott McFarnon (composers), Brad Hammer and John Duff (directors) Is It a Sin / 2022 [3 minutes]

 

John Duff stands in a church, wondering if it’s sin to love. Already, given the Duff has made several clearly gay albums, and despite the fact that in that past he has refused to be called gay or put in any kind sexual category of what he describes as a “box,” that he’s posing the question all religious gay boys inevitably have to.

    The original lyrics of the first three stanzas read:

 

If all’s forgiven

Then why am I imprisoned

Can I get a minute

On my knees

 

Please

If you’re wasting time

Then waste it on me

If it always ends

Then we should be free

To love

Am I free to love

 

Is it a sin

To touch you

Is it a sin

To say there’s no one above you

If it’s a sin to love you

Then I’m sinning till the end

Thank God I’m forgiven

 

      But in producer Eric Kupper’s remix of what YouTube describes as the “Official Music Video,” the last line, repeated several times, which I kept hearing as “God I’m gay then,” which I interpreted to read that if it was a sin, he was something other, a gay man outside the church. Others hear it differently, reporting back what’s written or at least something closer to it. (I took a test, without divulging what I heard or even that I heard something different, with several visitors).

     At the site @IAmJohnDuff, the singer writes the message that follows:

 

“Hi everyone! Thank you for watching my video.

     As a gay man, I have dealt with immense guilt and shame for my whole life—due to indoctrination and moral codes created by the church.

     As a lover of Christ's teachings, I have felt overwhelming forgiveness and acceptance.

     As an adult with reading comprehension skills, I struggle to see where the church picked up its bigoted and judgmental stances on love… and how exactly those views abide by Christ’s teachings.

     As a rebel, I wrote “Is It a Sin”. A song for people like me, who do not want to denounce spirituality—but rather ask why they should be denied a place in it.

     I hope you enjoy the song and video. They mean a lot to me. Much love!”

 

     My hearing or mis-hearing (the only line I hear differently from the published lyrics) is not terribly consequential, however, since this still remains a song about hopefully being forgiven for loving God even if the Church calls his loving other men a sin. Most fundamental believers, however, Might even see Duff singing such a song in a church-like setting might deem Duff’s song and actions as blasphemous.

     And there is a big different from admitting to being gay and being forgiven for it.

    But the truly important thing here is that instead of his early denials of being gay, fearful of being categorized, he seems to now accept it as fact.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Georges Feydeau | The Farce Awakens Feydeau x 2: Going to Pot and Stark Naked / 2026

farce without curtains

by Douglas Messerli

 

Georges Feydeau The Farce Awakens Feydeau x 2: Going to Pot and Stark Naked / 2026, directed by Daniel Passer at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the performance I attended was a matinee on November 8, 2026

 

The popular French boulevard writer of farces, Georges Feydeau (1862-1921), created plays beloved by the French bourgeoisie, works which featured restrained and unpermitted sex, forcing his characters, often innocent and just as often guilty, to slide under beds, stuff themselves into closets, exit and enter quickly through various doors, or just run for the nearest cover as wives and lovers act out their various roles of shock and dismay.

     A good farce is a messy affair, but enacted with near perfect ensemble timing, each leap to escape, attempt to cover up and hide the fact that the individual is not behaving to the requirements of bourgeoise society must be skillfully carried out if it is to make us laugh.

     Moreover, as these two short works make clearer than ever, there was amazingly a element in the farces by Feydeau of the Belle Époque that previewed what would later become the absurdist values of Ionesco and to a certain degree even Beckett: the twists and turns of language, the misunderstanding of behavior, the incomprehensible actions of a disobedient wife—which occurs in each of these short works—and the true ridiculousness of what is being demanded of them by their societally proper husbands, all echo absurdist works that remain with us even through Joe Orton and Edward Albee. And yes, these works are sexist, but they also make us laugh at those very pretensions.

    In the first work, the husband, Fallovoine (Barry Del Sherman) has little interest in the fact that his son hasn’t been able “to go,” his response, “Go where?” He is most distressed by the fact that his wife, Julie (Julie Mann) dares to bring in a washcan of dirty water into his study and, most importantly, that at late hours in the morning she is still indecently dressed in a house coat, with curlers in her hair, despite the fact that he has an appointment with Choullioux (Justin Blanchard), a wealthy manufacturer who just might order up his unbreakable porcelain chamber pots which he hopes might be sold to the military, making him a fortune.

     Getting his wife dressed or even out of the room with washcan in hand is nearly impossible, and the appearance of the badly-behaved child (wonderfully portrayed by little person Kody Nelson, who takes a moment out to explain to the audience that he is not really an underage child, but a full adult playing a child, ironically commenting on our present overreactions of child representation in plays and movies) makes matters even worse.

    The porcelain pots do indeed easily break, the wife refuses to dress, and the “baby,” reminding us some of the bratty babies portrayed in early filmmaking, in particular, the very clever first talkie by the great French director Jean Renoir, Baby’s Laxative (1931)—which incidentally is based on this Feydeau short work, but presents us a much more elegant rendition—manages to make the men drink his laxative for him, resulting in obviously embarrassing events, including the still-improperly dressed wife’s final revelation that Mr. Chouilloux’s wife is sleeping with his cousin.

     If I have already seemed to tell you too much of the plot here, you are missing the fact that it is not plot that is truly important in farce, it is the way the story occurs, the minutiae of events along the way that truly matter, including how well they are executed

     And this cast is superb in that execution, having timed everything down to the second so much so that at moments their language and behavior is simply dizzying. Particularly, in the far more interesting second short play, “Stark Naked,” Rachel Avery as Clarisse, who in this case is not truly stark naked but wears only a tiny negligée that fully reveals her breasts and body contours (it is a hot day and she is simply not comfortable in full clothing) to every man she meets, including the eager servant Victor (Ryan Nebreja). In this work her politician husband (Blanchard) insists that she dresses properly before the arrival of his arch-enemy merchant who ran against him in the last election, Himmelfaar’s (Del Sherman) arrival, a name Ventroux always ends with a “t.”

    Once more his demands have little effect. as his wife weaves a trail of illogical language and actions that finally ties him up in knots as he realizes, little by little, that his entire hopes to become the prime minister will go down the drain as she, stung by a wasp in the derriere demands to have it “sucked out,” first by her husband, then Himmelfaar, then Victor, and a “doctor” upstairs, who is not a real doctor but works in the Department of Medicine—reminding us, of course, of one of Trump’s nefarious appointments. Finally, when a reporter from Le Figaro arrives (played by Nelson, who again reminds the audience that he is not a real reporter but an actor portraying a reporter), he happily attempts to do what the others have resisted, and succeeds.

     Perceiving that his real arch-enemy has been watching the events from his apartment window across the way, Ventroux abandons all his career ambitions in a truly unexpected manner.

    Once more, the cast is simply excellent, proving laughter and entertainment to the audience with their expert memory and precise movement of the complex machinations of the entire work.

   I too laughed and enjoyed both works immensely, as all audiences who attend this play will. But I still felt something was missing.

    As I expounded to my accompanying friend on our drive home, perhaps Passer, who formerly acted as a clown in the Cirque du Soleil’s Zarkana performance and before that in Franco Dragone’s La Rĕve is just not the right director for farce. His brief introduction relates his understanding of farce to be related to the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, Burns and Allen, and the sketches on Saturday Night Live and Monthy Python, a real misunderstanding, I believe, of works such as Feydeau’s

     Farce is not truly vaudeville, and surely not a comic sketch. In high farce, since it still represents the epitome of middle-class aspirations, the work nearly always performed on a curtained stage with utter seriousness, even with finesse. Despite all the running, chasing, and hiding delusions, farce retains a wall around itself as if it were the most serious theater possible. Decorum is demanded even if unobserved. As Feydeau himself wrote: “You have to place ordinary people in a dramatic situation and then observe them from a comic angle, but they must never be allowed to say or do anything which is not strictly demanded, first by their character and secondly by the plot." One could never stay that of comic figures and TV sketch artists where improv is so rewarded.

     In short, Feydeau using the stage to present us with a form of decorum with which the characters on stage seldom can never bring themselves to fully engage, never asks his actors to speak to their audiences as much as to engage with their audiences. This is bourgeois theater for the common man and woman.

     Passer often does just the opposite, his actors cruising the theater before and even while the plays begin and continue and attempting to engage with nervous audience members. During the time needed between the plays for a new set-up, he forces Nebreja and Nelson to do a virtual sideshow act of climbing up and down ladders. The association of bodily movements each time when the name of a guest in their houses (Chouilloux and Himmelfaar in particular) comes up quickly becomes distracting. These routines are funny only for a few seconds.

      What is worse is that Passer provides no source of the translations of these two short plays, so we have no idea how much was actually added or subtracted to the texts; just how Feydeau-ish are these two short Feydeau plays? If Renoir is to be believed, there are a great many changes.

      These are only personal reflections, however, and I strongly encourage audiences to hurry to these two exuberant farcical works. We do need more of such comedy these days in our lives, and this is where you will certainly find it. How often do we even get a Feydeau work performed these days?

     Moreover, almost everything that the Odyssey Theatre has presented over the last several decades has represented some of the finest in world theater in a city, despite many small innovative companies, that needs more attention and audience participation. I promise you an enjoyable afternoon or evening at The Farce Awakens Feydeau x 2 with a talented cast to be reckoned with.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2026

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (November 2026).

Wil Sabin (director), Alfie Arcuri (performer) | If You Only Knew / 2017 [music video]

 rue love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alfie Arcuri, Toby Lee Cameron (aka Toby Chew Lee), and Cameron Nacson (songwriters), Wil Sabin (director) If You Only Knew / 2017 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

Australian singer/songwriter Alfie Arcuri’s 2017 music video, If You Only Knew, is closer, in its visual images, to a short gay film that a typical musical video extravaganza.

   A young man (Travis Jeffery), openly gay, falls in love with a seemingly straight boy (Bardiya McKinnon), who is in a relationship with a woman (Kirsty Marillier).

     The first verse sings of the undercurrent of their relationship:

 

“If they only knew

How to keep you safe like I kept you

How to speak the words they've never used

I wish they only knew

If they only saw

The way my lips would shake when they met yours

The way your heart was met with open doors

I wish they only saw”

 

     The two young men obviously enjoy one another’s company immensely, but as often occurs in such gay films, the beautiful young girl is there almost always demands kisses. Only when she falls to sleep while the gay boy is driving them home, does the other boy lay his head gently on the gay boy’s shoulder.

    In one of their few moments alone the gay boy finally dares all, the danger point of most buddy relationships, kissing his beloved friend, who after momentarily returning the kiss, quickly pushes him away, the gay boy apologizing and rushing off, completely heartbroken. 

    The Chorus reiterates the sorrow the gay boys feels:

 

“They've never ever had the strength

To feel the weight in what we meant

So leave, go home

Yeah leave, go home”

     Finally, after both suffer in their loneliness, the straight boy not even meeting up with his girlfriend, the two boys again meet up in an arcade, where they play a pin-ball game, the gay boy once again putting his hand gently upon the straight boy’s, who this time accepts it.

     Arcuri, an openly gay man since 2013, has reported in several places, including The Daily Telegraph, speaking with Jonathon Moran, the real source of the song:

 

     “I fell in love with this guy and it was instant love,” he explained.

    “We were together for a couple of years and half way through the relationship he came out. The song is almost like a diary entry for me telling his parents how innocent our love and relationship was because to them I was like the devil who turned their son gay. It wasn’t like that at all though, it was a beautiful love.”

      Three years since the couple split, they are still friends and the track will be used by advocacy group just.equal with a series of personal stories being released to coincide with the release

of the single.

     “I never actually wrote this song to be released because it is so personal,” said Arcuri, who was an architect before winning The Voice.

     “Even talking about it makes me emotional.”

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026).

Gertrude Stein (adapted by Marissa Chibas, Erik Ehn, and Travis Preston) | Brewsie and Willie / 2010

listening

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gertrude Stein, adapted by Marissa Chibas, Erik Ehn, and Travis Preston Brewsie and Willie / performed at the 7th Floor Penthouse (533 S. Los Angeles Street), Los Angeles / the performance I saw was on Saturday, July 24, 2010

 

Published in 1946, just weeks prior to Stein’s death, Brewsie and Willie began as a series of essays, published in The New York Times, expressing the feelings and worries of young soldiers still in Europe. Stein’s observations were based on her own conversations with American G.I.s, with whom she had spoken on the street and at dinners in her own home to which she had invited numerous of them.

     While the work is dominated by the thinking and commentary of Brewsie, egged on by the most obstinately ordinary of the group, Willie, this dialogue fiction eventually becomes filled with the voices of numerous young soldiers—Jo, Henry, Donald Paul, Ed, Jimmie, Richard, and, through Willie’s constant evocation of him, even the dead Brock—and military nurses—Janet, Pauline, and Jane.

     In Stein’s original these men and women discuss everything, although often just in passing, from issues of race, cultural identity, immigration, history, economics, politics, and, in particular, their own uncertain future. Stein’s skillful interweaving of these various subjects is both humorous and powerfully moving, as one by one—some of the soldiers clearly having never spoken of these issues before—they reveal their minds, tell stories, and share their family lives and upbringing. It is the complex matrix of these issues which allows this seemingly transparent work—a work which Stein enthusiasts and scholars might describe as too accessible in relation to her more experimental writing—to become a poetic chorus of fearful and thoughtful voices that links this to her most challenging work.

      Although I might have liked to have the adapters tackle as many of these issues as possible, Chibas, Ehn, and director-author Preston skillfully and faithfully focus on issues economic and historical while suggesting the numerous other topics the original tackles. Indeed this performance was so excellent that any qualms I might have had in the adaptation of Stein are allayed by the powerful evocation of the young soldiers on the eve of their “redeployment,” a word most of them find meaningless, if not terrifying.

      The youthful cast of the Poor Dog Group, most of whom are just two or three years out of the theatre program at CalArts, are precisely the age of Stein’s young Americans, and their fresh faces and simple beauty—as the men, sweating in the summer heat, briefly strip off their shirts to cool off, some of them having jumped in and out the windows of the top floor playhouse, literally unable to control their energy and, as we quickly discover, their worries—almost brings one to tears.

       Having all faced two world wars back to back, and having lived through part of the Great Depression, these men of what Tom Brokaw has described as “The Greatest Generation” are  terrified that upon their return there will be no jobs or, if there are jobs, the economy will be built up once more to again collapse. An early conversation between Brewise and Willie summarizes the situation as they envision it:

 

“B:  How I hate that word job.

W: You’re right to hate that word, hate it good and plenty, but can you afford to hate it Brewsie,  fellows like you dont need a job you just live, eveybody’s got to see to it you live and live you do but fellows like us, well we got have jobs, what you want us to do, nobody’s going to feed us, you just watch them not feed us dont we know, no we got to have

jobs, talk all you like and talk is good I like talk I like to listen to you Brewsie, but when we get home and dont wear this brown anymore we got to have a job, job, job. Yes job.

B:  I know, I know, I know Willie. Yes I know, you got to have a job, and it’s all right but it’s not all right, see here let me tell you about jobs. Some have to have jobs, some have got to be employed and be employees, but not so many Willie. Listen to me not so many, when everybody is employed.

W: God, if they only just could not be employed. I aint forgot that depression, no not yet.

 B:  Yes but Willie, that’s what I want to say, industrialism which produces more than anybody can buy and makes employees out of free men makes ‘em stop thinking, stop feeling, makes ‘em all feel alike. I tell you Willie it’s wrong. …”

     In a world where, for the first time, they have had to look about, to compare their lives with others, and evaluate what it all means, these young men and women have gradually begun to think, and before long, they are as active as Brewsie in observing, commenting upon, and questioning the world around them. And all, in turn, begin to fear that the new workaday world which they will soon face will not allow the time to think. Will they, like those of the past generations, forget all about the lessons they have learned? Will war break out once more? Will the nation overproduce to create a new depression? One could almost hear the sighs of the audience in their silent recognition of Stein’s soldiers' prescient concerns. This play is terribly significant even today.

     The on-stage rapport of these actors, their ability, so necessary in a production such as this, to work almost as a single breathing mass of beings, is, as another reviewer commented, “a miracle, pure and simple.”  And the interaction particularly of Brad Culver as the loveable Willie and Jonney Ahmanson as the pondering, somewhat befuddled Brewsie made this play, for me, one of the most memorable in years. So intense is their sense of camaraderie and love that, at one moment, the director sends the entire male cast to the floor in a mass wrestling match that momentarily releases both their tensions and sublimated desires.

     As Stein reiterated upon her deathbed, there is, obviously, no answer to the questions the soldiers pose. Donald Paul’s Thoreau-like logic to go back to the simple ways of living and surviving by oneself, as Brewsie realizes, will not work for most of these men. One very young soldier is determined to stay in France, but the others, despite their fears, want to return home. One or two suggest that they might embrace Socialism or even Communism, but Brewsie and most of the others realize that these are not true solutions for a country in which these ideas are so foreign.

      With the help of the women, the men gradually begin to embrace another kind of possibility for their futures. Some of them, at least, come to see that it isn’t just a matter of finding a job, but of finding something meaningful to work toward. One of them suggests that their goal should be to “pioneer.” But where is the wilderness? Willie scoffs. Clearly Stein is using the word here not as a noun, “a pioneer,” but as a verb defining action as a process of pioneering, of discovering the world all over again. But this concept, as brilliant as it is, seems to emanate from the voice of author, not from the characters and, as such, brings a halt to their startlingly real interchanges.

     The last speech, spoken by one of the women characters, in the book is pure Gertrude Stein crying out to her “G.I.s and G.I.s and G.I.s,” like Susan B. Anthony or others of her women heroes, with a patriotic, rhetorical flourish. Perhaps this ending was the only way to have successfully closed the work, for the soldiers have been called home and are on the move, already missing the voice of their thoughtful friend Brewsie, who has challenged them all, again and again, to “listen”

 

“Janet: And tell me, wont you miss talking when you go home, you do know dont you all of you nobody talks like you boys were always talking, not back home.

Jo: Yes we know.

Jimmie: Yes we know.

Willie : Not Brewsie, he’ll talk but, Brewsie will talk but we wont be there to listen, we kind of will remember that he’s talking somewhere but we wont be there to listen, there wont be anybody talking were we will be.”

 

     Perhaps, as Jo suggests, “they will talk now, why you all so sure they wont talk over there, perhaps they will talk over there.” But the stubborn realist, Willie, is convincing: “Not those on the job they wont, not those on the job.”

     Thank heaven for a production such as this that helps its audience to listen, to listen attentively while loving nearly every word, if only for a couple of hours.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2010).