Best. Gay. Week. Ever. (May 16, 2008)

Two new gay plays Off-Broadway

If you're going to be in New York anytime soon, there are two new Off-Broadway plays which might be of interest. The first is based on the 2004 film Saved! and tells the story of a devout girl in a Christian high school who must re-examine her faith after discovering she is pregnant and that her boyfriend might be gay. It was a good-natured and amusing movie and seems like excellent source material for a stage musical.

Van Hughes (right) appears in Saved: The Musical

The second offering is a bit more serious. The Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa play, Good Boys and True, will be at Off-Broadway's Second Stage Theatre through June 3rd.

The show is set at an all-boys prep school and begins with the discovery of a graphic sex tape of an unidentifiable boy assaulting a girl. Brandon, the school's top student and star athlete, is implicated as the attacker. Brandon protests his innocence, but as the mystery unravels what comes to light is Brandon's secret gay relationship with a fellow student.

Brian J. Smith (right) is "Brandon" in Good Boys and True

Also in the cast is Lee Tergesen, who is best known as "Tobias Beecher" from Oz.

Side note: If you are a fan of Tergesen, worth checking out is his personal website where he answers fan questions, most of which revolve around his role on Oz . I espcially liked his response to what it was like kissing another man:

Chris [Meloni] and I got together before the first time we kissed, and definitely with something like this there’s a tendency to shy away from it, to skirt it. But what we decided was to really be there, make it sexy – well, not really make it sexy, but we always really treat each other tenderly. So you know, we’re present when we’re in those scenes. Whatever mental contortions we have to do, we’re present in the scene. There was the one scene, after Chris got shot and he came back wearing a bandage and I’m pulling the bandage off and kissing his chest, you know? And when I’m acting, all this stuff is running through my head: the dialogue, and I’m watching what’s happening in front of me and I’m reacting to it, and there’s history running through your brain, all these images flowing… and that scene, it was so interesting where my head went. I felt sort of feminine. Like it was a man and a woman in that scene. And that, those are feelings that I'm not unfamiliar with. I don’t go, “F*ck, I gotta kiss a guy!” But doing that, being present in it, kissing another man – it screws with your head a little bit.