Sean Power - Reviews & Interviews

Stuck
11 Mar 1997 - Village Voice:
"Hole Lives - Four Gay Plays: What's Lust Got To Do With It?" (by Randy Gener)

Hole Lives

Four Gay Plays: What's Lust Got To Do With It?

BY RANDY GENER

[...]

In David Rubinoff's Stuck, queerness is the launching pad from which the Canadian playwright takes off. A portrait of the gay artist as lost soul and delirious poseur, it chronicles a disaffected, unemployed actor's drug-induced odyssey through boho despair, freaky violence. addiction, and sexual alienation. Self-loathingly calling himself "Clark Kent's loser brother," Jack imagines himself a modern-day Kerouac and confronts "nuns who knit," "closeted Mormons with bilingual split personalities," and an imperious gorgon named Uta Hagen.

Betraying Rubinoff's beat-fetish way too early, this imitative one-man satire of junk-sick Burroughsiana - with borrowed parts from Corso, Kerouac, and Ginsberg - unzips its fly and whizzes fevered imagery and scabrous filth. The surprise is that Sean Power as Jack never shoots prematurely - he rivets, matching the disillusioned blasts of bop prosody with leaping exhilaration and singsong vocal dexterity. Stuck buys into everything beat except the underlying Blakean optimism; this gets withheld in the Nietzschean final inage, when Jack looks out from the miasmic void and sees his own worst enemy - and only salvation. Rubinoff looks at queer desire grittily, straight in the eye - unlike, say, Edward Albee, who squirms to avert the gay gaze, stamping it with highbrow disapproval as voyeuristic cruising.

[...]