There’s no denying that the LGBT community is a prominent one on Northwestern’s campus. From Rainbow Week to last spring’s blood drive protests, LGBT individuals and their allies have frequently made themselves visible throughout many elements of campus life.
Now, Spectrum Theatre, a student theatre company, is putting on an originally produced play called “Where the Grass Isn’t Greener,” which seeks to bring that visibility to the stage.
The free, hour-long show will debut Thursday at 8 p.m. in Shanley Pavilion. It will also take place Friday at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.
The point of the production is to show NU students the challenges facing gay and lesbian students, said Steven Monacelli, the director of the show. The actors are hoping to put homosexuality “into a lens that NU students can tap into,” he added.
“Cooked up from scratch, this devised show on the current state of LGBTQ affairs at Northwestern, America and the whole cosmos is sure to be just the thing to kick your weekend into overdrive and razmatazz social change mode,” according to the play’s Facebook event.
Kendra Vaculin said the goal of the show is “to get this message out without being preachy.”
“It’s not a yelling play,” said the Communication sophomore, who called the script “brilliant.” “It’s not a screaming in your face.”
Vaculin said she has not seen much discrimination based on sexual orientation because she is from the Bay Area in California. But she said she has had many gay students who have faced serious discrimination.
“(I know) how unfair that is, how incorrect it is,” she said.
NU has typically supported LGBT students. In October, after a high-profile suicide by a gay student at Rutgers University who had been the repeated victim of bullying, University President Morton Schapiro and Vice President for Student Affairs Bill Banis sent an e-mail to the NU students asking them to “join us in supporting the LGBT members of the Northwestern University community.”
Monacelli said his inspiration for the show was a story he heard that happened in Caifornia: two men, Harold Scull and Clay Greene, had their “rights violated,” according to Monacelli.
In that 2008 incident, Scull fell down the stairs in front of his house. After he was taken to the hospital, doctors refused to allow Greene, Scull’s partner of 20 years, to see him. Greene was ultimately placed in a separate nursing home and denied from seeing his partner’s final months. After Scull died, the county auctioned off the couple’s shared property without consulting Greene.
“Where the Grass Isn’t Greener” emerged through an 8-week rehearsal process in the fall, Monacelli said.
The Communication sophomore is working on the production in collaboration with nine actors.
“It is driven largely by personal stories,” said Monacelli, who is also a senator in Associated Student Government. “All of the actors play version of themselves in the show.”
While only two of the actors self-identify as gay, they all have a personal connection to the issue of homosexuality. For example, one of them has two mothers, Monacelli said.
Many are “people who aren’t a part of the community wanting to show support and try to find ways to get other people to connect in and realize that they also need to help out,” he said.
Ultimately, the cast is hoping to leave its audience thinking about the state of LGBTQ issues at NU.
“(The point is) just to give them something to walk away with. (They should ask,) ‘Should we be more concerned about this?'” Moncaelli said. “Hopefully this will give them some incentive to at least talk about the state of these issues.”
