Patrick Heusinger, left, as Luke, and Patrick Breen as his partner, Adam, in the play “Next Fall” by Geoffrey Nauffts.
Personally I see this as a very important discussion for the LGBT community world-wide for folks of all faiths and those who profess none, especially with same-sex marriage fast becoming more acceptable in the United States and elsewhere in the world.}
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Early in Geoffrey Nauffts’s acclaimed new play “Next Fall,” two gay men linger at the breakfast table after their first night of making love. Before tucking into his eggs, the one named Luke closes his eyes to pray. His new boyfriend, Adam, looks on aghast. As Mr. Nauffts’s stage directions specify, “The honeymoon has just ended.”
Whatever the state of the honeymoon, the relationship between Luke and Adam has, in fact, just begun. As the play charts their four years together as partners — de facto spouses, really — the issue of religion hovers over their relationship, threatening to tear them apart.
With this drama, then, Mr. Nauffts has delivered what may well be the first artistic exploration of interfaith marriage within a same-sex context. While heterosexuals of various faiths or none at all have long struggled to reconcile religious identity with personal fulfillment, the advent of same-sex marriage is now bringing this kind of tension to gay men and lesbians.
“Next Fall” embodies the polarities in the form of an evangelical Christian and a fervent atheist. But the tensions between Adam and Luke could easily be translated to those between adherents of any two religions. It is no coincidence, Mr. Nauffts acknowledged in an interview, that he chose the names for his loving antagonists from the Old Testament’s Genesis and one of the New Testament’s Gospels.
“My original exploration was going to be about two worlds colliding — believer and nonbeliever,” said Mr. Nauffts, 48. “Then, in giving it a plot, all of these other contemporary issues started to come up and arise. Gay marriage, Prop 8 — suddenly I had to explore all that. Marriage is a hot-button issue, and religion fits into it in a huge way for us.”
Eric Marcus, the author of two books on gay relationships, praised “Next Fall” in an e-mail message as “the single best play I’ve seen in years” in part by noting that the subject matter did not surprise him. Rather, what he saw onstage reflected the lived realities of himself and other gay and lesbian friends, whether in formal marriages, civil unions or life partnerships.
“Absent legal marriage and children,” wrote Mr. Marcus, author of “The Male Couple’s Guide” (Harper Paperbacks, 1999) and “Together Forever” (Diane Publishing Company, 1998), “we’ve for the most part been spared some of the more challenging — and potentially painful — discussions and decisions that heterosexual believers of differing faiths have faced when planning a religious marriage ceremony or the religious education of their offspring. Now that gay couples are getting married and many are choosing to have children, they’re facing the same issues.”
Mr. Nauffts limns the issues in a way that is both unyieldingly specific and more broadly applicable. (For readers concerned about spoilers, be forewarned now.) Because Luke is a devout evangelical Christian, he must reckon with a religion that condemns homosexuality (or homosexual behavior) as a sin and, in terms of public policy, vigorously opposes same-sex marriage.
Tested and taunted by Adam to explain how he can rationalize his body’s desires with his spirit’s yearnings, Luke depicts having gay sex as simply one way of sinning. “It’s human nature,” he says of sin. “We can’t escape it. But as long as you’ve accepted Christ ...” For most of the play, Adam buys none of it. Like a litigator with a shaky witness, he forces Luke to admit that his God would allow the murderers of Matthew Shepard — the young gay man tortured to death in Wyoming — into heaven if they repented. Yet Adam also exults in his intolerance, ridiculing God as Voldemort or Mel Gibson, declaring that he would gladly use a Bible instead of toilet paper.
Though heightened for dramatic purposes, Adam bears some resemblance to his creator.
Like Adam, the playwright grew up essentially without religion, the child of a secular Episcopalian father and a half-Jewish-half-Lutheran mother unobservant in either faith. Only gradually, through both romantic and professional relationships, did Mr. Nauffts come to know and respect some deeply religious people, particularly a Roman Catholic girlfriend, before he came out as a gay man, and several evangelical Christian actors he befriended in more recent years.
“It’s an eye-opening experience,” he said, “to be in and among people one normally wouldn’t be in and among. To sort of see individuals as human beings, not as monsters. It’s really easy to write off people with any kind of religious belief, especially if they’re fervent. But what I saw was a struggle, internal turmoil, to exist in the world and hold on to your beliefs, the things you grew up with.”
Mr. Nauffts began putting these perceptions into dramatic form in 2006. Over the next three years, as the political climate around same-sex marriage evolved — being enacted in a few states but also being struck down by constitutional amendment in California by Proposition 8 — so did his script. Produced by the theater troupe Naked Angels, “Next Fall” opened Off Broadway last spring to luminous reviews; though the current run closes Saturday, there is a strong possibility the play will reopen in the coming theater season.
In the process, Mr. Nauffts, again like Adam, has gone from cynic to skeptic to someone with his nose pressed to the glass of faith, enticed by the other side.
Near the end of the play, when Luke dies from injuries in a car accident, his pious father collapses in a kind of literal fall from grace. In a hospital waiting room, it is Adam who catches him, striking a tableau the stage directions describe as “some sort of strange Pietà.” It is Adam who reassures the father that Luke didn’t fear death because he “was certain” of going to heaven, to be joined eventually “by everyone he loved.”
As for the playwright himself, Mr. Nauffts said, “One of the things I learned writing this play is that my lack of faith, which I’ve always embraced, is something I suffer greatly for. Do I suffer enough to find an organized religion? Maybe I’m just old; you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But I recognize and kind of envy a sense of peace or belonging or guidance.”
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