The Temperamentals

Blank Theatre Company

Los Angeles

(323) 661-9827

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Set nearly two decades before the 1969 Stonewall riots, this reality-based play “brilliantly dramatizes a lesser-known chapter in the ongoing struggle for gay rights,” said Les Spindle in Backstage. The Mattachine Society, one of America’s first gay-rights organizations, was established in Los Angeles by a small group of men at a time when coming out of the closet could get a person jailed, fired, or institutionalized. In this inhospitable climate, Communist Party member Harry Hay and Viennese costume designer Rudi Gernreich are discreetly beginning a relationship when they form an underground legal-defense alliance with three other “temperamentals”—Hay’s code word for homosexual men. First staged in New York two years ago, Jon Marans’s “moving and richly amusing work” is being “given its full due” in its first West Coast production.

If only the script were less didactic, said Margaret Gray in the Los Angeles Times. Argument after argument ends with a new character coming around to Hay’s point of view. “We’re basically watching a history lesson,” not a drama. To the cast’s credit, the performances are “fun to watch.” Dennis Christopher infuses Hay with “convincing restless energy,” providing a nice contrast to the restrained erudition—and “slightly distracting accent”—of Erich Bergen’s Gernreich. You feel for all the characters: While The Temperamentals “may not be quite a play yet,” it is “a sweet, heartfelt, often charming homage to a truly brave group of guys.”