GRECIAN FORMULA ’80
“Young man, put your pride on the shelf,” bellow the Village People in “YMCA,” the disco trash classic that opens Bailiwick Repertory’s world premiere production of Grecian Formula ’80. Rick Bromley, the hero of Fred Gormley’s comedy, is a young man who puts his pride on the shelf to work in a gay porn film. Attracted by the money and by the notion of starring in a sex epic, Rick accepts the role of a Greek king in a little something called Slave Boys of Athens. The job is his, the director explains, because he can actually pronounce fancy words like “pomegranate” and “Dionysus” (though he, or the actor playing him, does mispronounce “coprophagy”). It helps that Rick says he’s “pretty open” about sex acts such as fist fucking and water sports as well as more standard fare. But once shooting begins, Rick’s elaborate and rather witty onscreen speeches are trimmed in favor of blunter dialogue by the egomaniacal director, whose notion of a good joke is a pun on “vassal” and “Vaseline,” while Rick’s openness is tested quite literally to the hilt.
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Rick–a surrogate for playwright Gormley, who claims this story is based on his own experience–is no sexual superstar; he’s an average, reasonably nice-looking, middle-class gay yuppie caught up in the 1970s trend to glamorize pornography, even elevate it as a cinematic art form. This was the era of The Devil in Miss Jones, the time when gay filmmakers like Fred Halsted and Peter Berlin were proclaimed as sex-cinema auteurs and well-established novelist Gore Vidal was hired to write the screenplay for the Penthouse-produced 1980 film Caligula. (Gormley seems to parody that famous fiasco in his depiction of the director’s whimsical disregard for the script–Vidal eventually disowned Caligula, and the author of Slave Boys of Athens quickly vanishes from sight after delivering his screenplay.)
Though not the only writer devoting himself to expressing a black gay vision, Hemphill is certainly a leading figure in his field; So Many Dreams could generate much more emotional power if Hemphill broke through his artful alienation earlier, but as it stands it’s a provocative piece that certainly needs to be heard.
