At the Minetta Lane Theare, you can experience the joy of weddings in 10 minute increments and you don't have to worry about buying a gift or getting stuck at a bad table. Standing On Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays features a rotating cast of six performing nine short plays about gay marriage by well-known playwrights. The staged reading format worked for Love, Loss, and What I Wore and Standing on Ceremony should also be able to run for years.*Harriet Harris, Craig Bierko, Mark Consuelos, Polly Draper, Beth Leavel, and Richard Thomas are all able to create convincing characters in these short snapshots. Most of the plays are comedic and the funniest is Paul Rudnick's My Husband, in which Harris plays an overbearing Jewish mother who just wants her son (Mark Consuelos) to get married already (I'm sure most singles, gay or straight, can relate). Another highlight is Neil LaBute's Strange Fruit featuring Consuelos and Bierko, which starts off with some raunchy humor and ends with a horrifying twist. The most moving is Moises Kaufman's "London Mosquitos" about a man (Thomas) giving a eulogy for his partner.
The only problem with a show like this is that it feels one-sided (a few of the plays feature crazy conservatives) and preaching to the choir. The people who are going to see it already support gay marriage, when the goal is presumably not just to entertain, but to inform. But the shows might help educate the public through other methods as a portion of all ticket sales go to Freedom to Marry and other organizations promoting marriage equality.
Standing on Ceremony is hosting a contest on their Facebook page to win tickets for a party of 20 which includes a free drink.
*The producers announced on November 29 that Standing On Ceremony will close on December 18.
Photo credit: Joan Marcus
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