Queer Eye for the Queer Guy: Good Time Charlie

From Good Time Charlie, at the Public.
Photo: Joan Marcus

Fittingly, for a play that opens with a reenactment of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Ryan J. Haddad’s Good Time Charlie is all about the valuable generational guide that is a fairy godparent. In this case, that’s Haddad’s uncle Charlie (played by a bubbling Jonathan Raviv), who is technically his father’s first cousin, but is also — crucially and non-derogatorily — very much a fairy. For many young gay men, the basic skills of life may come from immediate family, but along the way, someone has to swoop in to explain things that make it really worth living, teach you about Judy and Barbra and Little Edie and explain how to get into a sold-out Broadway show through the cancellation line. Given the facts of reproduction, most queer children aren’t born to queer parents, and so the intangible lessons hopscotch across generations like knights on a chessboard. Haddad, growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, needed someone to barge into his life like Auntie Mame. And if that Mame comparison sounds like a metaphor, it’s not. Under Danny Sharron’s happily indulgent direction, Raviv’s Charlie enters via staircase in a shiny vest early in the play singing half a verse of “It’s Today” before Haddad cuts him off. “We didn’t get the rights,” he announces.

As that scene suggests, Good Time Charlie develops into a warm, winking, sometimes sprawling tale of queer inheritance, a portrait of, by, and as an artist as a young gay man, by way of a portrait of another man who did not become an artist. The play’s tension, gently but poignantly unspooled, develops from the fact that while Ryan has pursued a career onstage, Charlie never did. In college, when Charlie suggested to his parents that he might switch majors to theater, they pushed him toward dentistry. When they discovered his sexuality, they tried to keep him in the closet. A generation later, Ryan has an easier — though not uncomplicated — experience coming out to the same family members, who are now more welcoming. The actors Nael Nacer and Artemis Pebdani double as Haddad’s great-aunt and -uncle and parents, playing across a spectrum of discomfort and cautious support. Nacer is quite good at variations of patriarchal obliviousness, and Pebdani suffuses her women with streaks of guilt. The casting gives the play’s repetitions a prismatic quality: pairs of parents fumbling to understand their sons, figures who appear cuddly from one angle revealed as sharp from another.

Along the way, Haddad also traces a lineage of lessons in the ephemeral aspects of queer culture, like what it means to choose your favorite actress and how much lube you might need during your freshman year in college. (Charlie sends Ryan six bottles, his parents are shocked to discover.) The play takes place in the Japanese-inspired garden, rendered in full bloom by set designer Afsoon Pajoufar, complete with a just-cheesy-enough big vermilion torii that’s tended by Charlie’s partner, Lou (Tim Bagley, emanating the same gentle warmth you might’ve seen him emit on Somebody Somewhere). Lou is himself 21 years older than Charlie and taught him, in turn, about gay culture after they met at a bar in Cleveland, where Charlie has been obliviously accepting drinks from men he didn’t intend to go out with. Lou’s close friend Sheldon (Michael Cristofer, occupying a lane somewhere between TCM host and Old Deuteronomy), a strongly opinionated classic-film buff, becomes a crucial part of the equation, too, as he and Charlie embark on cultural outings to New York while Sheldon stays in the garden. And because she herself would be slighted to be left out in the equation, let’s not forget Haddad’s “fabulous lesbian aunt,” Janice, who regularly reminds us that gay men take women like her for granted. (That she’s played by Fun Home’s Beth Malone adds a meta-layer to any of her lines about lesbians in musicals.)

In his work preceding Good Time Charlie, Haddad has dealt in similar forms of autobiography, often as a solo performer. He has cerebral palsy and uses a walker, and his work has focused on dating and disability, as in his breakout play, Hi, Are You Single?, a work of emotional and literal exhibitionism that is referenced in Charlie (he’d prefer some of his relatives not come see him strip down in it), as well as the more recent Hold Me in the Water and Dark Disabled Stories, which included stories from its other cast members. Good Time Charlie has Haddad shifting into a study of many characters at once and expanding in scale. The play, like a sturdy classic that Sheldon might love, runs over two hours with an intermission, not without dragging. Haddad has a showman’s sense of a good punch line — playing to his base here, he knows that an A Star Is Born or Grey Gardens: The Musical reference will kill — though his dialogue can be flatly presentational, and he is still feeling out what can be best expressed in action versus what can be summarized in narration. Caution is inevitable when presenting work about your own family. (The real Charlie is very much alive and saw the play in previews.) But Haddad and Sharron can verge toward the too gentle, adding caveats to painful moments with eddying bits of self-awareness, in which characters interrupt Haddad, insisting they don’t want to relive their own trauma, have rewrites. That’s a playwright’s wrestling match that, as my colleague Sara Holdren noted recently, doesn’t need an audience. Either give us that unflattering scene or don’t. You have to be willing to light the fuse of your Buddenbrooks or Long Day’s Journey Into Night, walk away, and live with the ensuing Thanksgiving-table explosions.

Not that Good Time Charlie is ever as brutal as Mann or O’Neill, and not that it needs to be. The Haddads are much lovelier people, it seems. The play is largely a study in kindness, in both form and subject — even while facing the tough inevitabilities of any life. A moving plotline, treated delicately in the second act, comes as Sheldon has a stroke and must start using a walker like Ryan, and as Ryan discovers his own hesitation and discomfort with another’s disability. This is a play full of people trying very hard to be there for each other and discovering what makes that difficult. Not everyone gets a godparent like Charlie, Lou, Sheldon, or Janice. A gay friend, after seeing the play, joked to me that it made him jealous — that he’d wished he’d had a flamboyant uncle or a cool butch aunt. I found myself tracing a pang around my own heart, too. I’ve had a very supportive family (a grandmother, for instance, who thought I was old enough at 9 to see Bernadette in Gypsy), but never such a close familial guide. Some people have all the luck, if not the rights to Mame.

Good Time Charlie is at the Public Theater through October 25.