David and happy endings...

When you have loved someone, lived with them, shared their bed and their dreams, you can only see them apart from other people. So, even though I have already blogged about Happy Endings now at the Access Theater (see below), David Johnston can only be viewed on his own.

David both acts in and wrote for the anthology evening about sex workers. First the actor. David is effortlessly funny. It is one of my favorite things about him. In Blair Fell’s short play, Beauty, He portrays a lonely man enamored of an abdominally chiseled go-go boy (an excellent Joe Curnutte). He is vulnerable, silly, touching and understandable. The strangest thing about Beauty, though, lies in the fact that the piece oddly echoes David’s own wonderful yet unproduced Why Is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?. The similarities are weird. All the same, David is great.

Then, David the playwright. I know David’s writing well. Perhaps not as well as his mentor, Chuck Maryan, but well. I have seen David’s plays, read them and reread them. With the short piece Yes Yes Yes he has broken through a wall.

David is clever clever clever when he writes, but he often uses that to hide himself rather than reveal himself. Generally he is uncomfortable with people knowing what he is feeling. He is well read and has used his knowledge of literature sublimely in his dramatic endeavors. Cow romps freely though Greek mythology. Bush Carol: Xmas of Evil casts Scrooge as Dubya with Carl Rove as Henry Higgins and Laura as Lady MacBeth. His conversance in Turgenev serves him well in Conversations on Russian Literature. But David’s dependence on what other people have written has been something of a hindrance thus far to his own voice.

Whether he means to or not, Yes Yes Yes reveals David tellingly. In it a beautiful go-go boy comes on to a shy john because he knows the difference between “Ulysses’ and “Finnegan’s Wake”. David is a man who longs to be found beautiful because he can quote freely from “The Master and Margarita”. In Yes Yes Yes he achieves his dream: that someone he finds physically beautiful will find him intellectually beautiful.

The personalization of artist and material has not been David's strong suit before. He is working on something new called, I think, The Rapture Project. I hope he uses what he accomplished with Yes Yes Yes to make it the marvelous opportunity it could become.