SOCIAL STUDIES
It’s fun to watch Jeff Abell diagram gay-male relationships. Using a black mat board, yellow chalk, and a professorial persona, Abell gets off some good lines. “I realize an argument could be made that the universe is divided into male and female halves,” he says as he begins his elaborate design. “But I’ll stick with the traditional Western approach and just deal with the universe of men.” Then he draws a complex series of bubbles with wild arrows connecting them. The bubbles are cleverly divided into two categories: “splash” (potential boyfriends) and “nonsplash” (buddies–or sisters, as Abell says). The laughter was easy, but curiously there was something lacking.
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Abell, a fixture on the local performance scene, is known for work that evokes gay sensibilities, issues, and anger with unusual depth and sensitivity. His material often includes text, movement, music, and references to a variety of sources. So when he put together Social Studies, a retrospective, there was reason to expect good things of his considerable imagination.
The last piece, “A Litany of Saints,” comes close to doing that. Performed naked (a kind of performance requirement, I suppose, although Abell really made it work this time), the piece features Abell center stage reciting names as he puts on scapulars that represent the individuals or couples whose names he’s just called. But this is no mere list. What Abell is doing is placing himself in a historical and personal context that is both courageous and terrifying. His saints include such gay icons as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas but also his friends–dead ones like Peter Tumbelston and very lively ones like Suzi Silver. With each name he also lists a quality or lesson he associates with that person, varying from the profound, such as accepting himself, to the more mundane, such as focusing a camera.
