The Shooting Stage

Poor Elliot (Hunter Gilmore): He just wants to dress up in his late mother’s clothes and exercise his fantasy of being a diva, but he’s mercilessly bullied by schoolmate Derrick (Robin Lord Taylor) and is only half-heartedly defended by his pal Ivan (Noah Porter). Poor Malcolm (Christopher Durham), Elliot’s father: He’s lost his wife and is plagued by sexual urges that bring him into sinister contact with the same Derrick. Poor Len (Ben Masur): He wants to build a serious career as a photographer but is on trial for an allegedly pornographic snapshot he took of none other than Malcolm when the two of them were, respectively, 14- and 16-year-olds acting on a long-defunct television series.

Having included in a gallery show the image of young Malcolm wearing a dress and visibly erect, poor Len is visited by his erstwhile chum, who promises to provide jury-impressing tips in exchange for the old negatives. Poor Derrick, like every bully, turns out to be a coward when push comes to shove. Poor Ivan has got a yen for poor Elliot but freaks out when, after acting on his impulses, he realizes that his secret may not remain safe.

Poor audience! Pity those who must try to keep track of what’s going on in yet another of this season’s many plays featuring an all-male cast. This one is called The Shooting Stage and is by Michael Lewis Maclennan, currently supervising producer of Showtime/Showcase’s Queer as Folk. (Without too much effort and were the dramatist of such a mind, this piece could be worked in as a digression on that show.)

Perhaps Maclennan hasn’t chosen to make The Shooting Stage into a Queer as Folk storyline because, to him, that would mean wasting issues more portentous than series drama is credited with accommodating. Since he begins the play with Len responding to a prosecutor’s probes about the potentially erotic portrait of Malcolm, Maclennan is obviously concerned with what constitutes art and how it jibes with community values. He compounds his art-versus-porn scrutiny by introducing into the proceedings another roll of film, courtesy of devious Derrick. He twists things even further when Ivan, an aspiring model, comes to Len for a photography session that almost gets out of hand.

Rarely, if ever, has the study of a shutterbug’s activities taken on such potential for shutterbuggery. To up the ante even further, Maclennan brings on not only a rifle but also a knife. (We’re all familiar with Anton Chekhov’s observation about a gun on stage: It must go off.) To be sure, the rifle is here — along with a couple of cameras — for another obvious reason: It makes the “shooting” in the play’s title a pun. (Notice that Queer as Folk also revels in a cute titular pun.) Raising the literary stakes even more than they’ve already been raised, Elliot — who’s seen early in the play wearing a white feather boa — has developed a fascination with a swan who frequents a nearby body of water and returns just in time for an act-two sighting by Elliot, Derrick, and Ivan. They’re out hunting with that rifle, don’t you know. It was Ibsen, of course, who taught us in The Wild Duck that birds are symbols, and symbols in plays must be shot at or otherwise done some sort of harm. Does Maclennan stick to the formula? Guess!

In The Shooting Stage Maclennan is dealing with a handful of time-tested themes: fathers and sons, secrets and lies, the true nature of maturity, friends’ betrayals, homophobia and its deleterious effects on those practicing it and victimized by it. But he’s unreasonable in asking audiences to buy the coincidences that occur here. For example, how small is the “Canadian city and its outlying rural areas” where the play takes place that Elliot and Malcolm are both being menaced by the same sneering youth? There’s a stale dramatic tactic in Maclennan’s use of a camera as a device by which a man cuts himself off from a fully satisfying life, and throwing in a swan with its connotations of innocence and flight doesn’t break new ground either.

The Shooting Stage has some low-key assets in Jason Lajka’s economical and impressionistic set, Alexis Hadsall’s costumes (including the boa and a practically matching pair of swan’s wings), Robert W. Henderson Jr.’s sensitive lighting, Julie Pittman’s sound design, and Brian J. Nash’s brooding original music. The actors, directed with more than due diligence by John Pinckard, contribute distinguished work. Both Elliot and Len are men confused by the obstacles put in the way of their achieving their goals, and both Hunter Gilmore and Ben Masur bring subtleties to their portrayals. Robin Lord Taylor, with his punky hair, has such a complete understanding of Derrick’s narrow-eyed cruelty that you wonder if the actor was actually a juvenile offender. Noah Peters owns Ivan’s weaknesses and strengths, and his seductive behavior during Len’s photo shoot is a highlight of the production. Christopher Durham handles Malcolm’s overwritten torment with commendable aplomb.

Defending his artistic interest in photographing adolescents, Len insists that he’s recording “the last primitives among us.” Defending his infatuation with Derrick, Malcolm waxes poetic about “the beauty of his unkempt perfection.” It’s lines like these that give away the playwright’s pretensions and turn The Shooting Stage into a sitting duck.