(L-R) Daniel Redmond, Donald Currie and Sal Mattos in 'Gently Down the Stream' at New Conservatory Theatre Center. I suppose the lesson is, never turn your subconscious off when crossing a street. And literally in that moment, I had my play. The pigeon's idea was an intergenerational affair. And then after about fifteen years, I was crossing a street in London one afternoon, and it was as if a pigeon was flying overhead and just dropped an idea plop onto my head, absolutely unrequested and seemingly out of nowhere. I had a title, I always had the title, Gently Down the Stream, but I had no play. I wrestled with it for seemingly forever. I tried to write it as an epic but that was frankly dire. Rose is a monologue I didn't want to repeat that. I wanted to create a companion piece about gay life in the 20th century as seen through the eyes of one man. I wrote a play in 1999 called Rose about Jewish life in the 20th century as seen through the eyes of one woman. But as what it is, it becomes part of the mosaic of past experience and past lives that have shaped our lives today, and are often unspoken or forgotten. I don't want to pass mine off as anything other than what it is. A history, it should be stated, of a gay white cisgendered man in the 20th century there are many other histories that are now finally being written. Martin Sherman: I suppose I don't think of it as memory space, but rather, as you said, a conversation with history, which is somehow different, but a history that is very personal to me, although not necessarily autobiographical.
What pulled you to the memory space of Gently Down the Stream? This new play marks the journey of a gay elder Beau and lives in that spark-filled sexy fugue terrain of how his stories, his gay histories, are communicated in intergenerational relationships. Your play Rose, which starred Olympia Dukakis on Broadway, was a fierce dive into the Holocaust and the 20th century through one Jewish women's memory and feels very connected to Gently Down the Stream. Olympia Dukakis in the 2000 Lincoln Center Theatre production of 'Rose.' (Source:Lalas Sakis)
As your character Rufus says in Gently Down the Stream, "The past is sexy!" Henderson Presents) is a conversation with history, memory and love. Tim Miller: Martin, I am struck by how much of your work ( Bent, Messiah, When She Danced and your fantastic film with Judi Dench, Mrs. I have known Martin since the mid-1980s and I had the pleasure of speaking with him about his new play, Gently Down the Stream. Sherman's work has consistently explored history even while he was making history with the audacity of his plays. In one night at the New Apollo Theatre, I was bequeathed an amazing gift of queer history, anger and the potential of gay love and sexuality that has sustained me and my work in the four decades since.
Since the late 1970s his work's embrace of the full heat of queer and Jewish identity and the larger swirl of history that his plays explore created so much new space for theatre to stretch its legs and grow into.Īs a young performance artist, newly arrived in NYC at 19, the first play I saw on Broadway in 1979 was Martin Sherman's Bent, which famously introduced the world to the hidden history of gay men sent to concentration camps by the Nazis and forced to wear the pink triangle. and all over the world in so many remarkable ways. Martin Sherman changed the direction of theatre in the U.S., the U.K.