History Lessons

It feels weird to call the forty-four-year-old playwright and director Robert O'Hara a major figure in the American theatre, because the phrase sounds oddly ossifying-like an honor one is bestowed at the end of a long, satisfying career. But I do think he's a virtuoso, and has been since his first play, 'Insurrection: Holding History,' was produced in New York, at the Public Theatre, in 1996. The Cincinnati-born author, who directed the show himself, was mentored by the institution's artistic director at the time, George C. Wolfe. It was inevitable that Wolfe's influence-particularly when it came to sending up blackness as it was portrayed in the American theatre-showed in 'Insurrection.' Its protagonist was a black gay man who, during a stay in a Virginia motel, travels back in time to the eighteen-thirties; there, he falls for one of the guys in Nat Turner's posse.

O'Hara's early work drew from other great sources. His interest in time travel is reminiscent of the novelist Octavia Butler's forays into America's slave-owning past. His sometimes dense, humorous speech owed a bit to Suzan-Lori Parks's plays, in which history would not leave her characters alone. During the past fifteen or so years, though, O'Hara has worked hard to become himself. The hallmark of his comedic dramas is the way he examines the deeply complex relationship that blacks have with homosexuality, and what gay people themselves feel about homosexuality.

O'Hara's latest full-length play, 'Bootycandy,' which begins previews at Playwrights Horizons on Aug. 22, is somewhat autobiographical. In it, we first meet a little boy named Sutter, whose mother criticizes not only the way he describes his penis but its uses. From there, O'Hara takes us through a number of very funny and often scathing scenes depicting Sutter's coming of age and beyond. Gays dismantle gayness, and a lesbian couple reverse their commitment-ceremony vows by saying things like 'Wherever you go, I will not be there.' The punch line in O'Hara's work? His recognition and dissection of that ill-fitting straitjacket called political correctness. ♦