Thu. February 1, 2007
By John Olson
It's hard to fathom that a city whose mayor challenged state law by granting some 4000 marriage licenses to gay and Lesbian couples was not always a bastion of gay acceptance and visibility. As Emily Mann's Execution of Justice tells us, San Francisco in the late 1970s was in the late stages of transition to its current political and social climate from a much more conservative one. It was a transition the old guard apparently had much trouble accepting. When a former member of the city's Board of Supervisors, who had been a swing vote for its more conservative element, assassinated the city's liberal Mayor George Moscone and its openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk, Moscone and Milk became tragic heroes and the assassin Dan White a notorious murderer.
Griffin keeps the action at a brisk pace, and stages it with the efficiency of cinematic editing when not held back by some of Mann's long monologues. Brian Sidney Bembridge's set is a neutral and cold-looking grid of brushed steel. At its center is a matrix of video monitors which in Logan Kibens' video design present scenes performed by the cast as well as documentary footage from the film The Times of Harvey Milk. The supporting cast members who play a multitude of smaller parts are accurately wardrobed in a multitude of costumes designed by Janice Pytel, and the atmospheric sound design by Andre Pluess helps to set a mood of time travel that allows us to not only return to 1978, but jump around in time nonlinearly within that general era.
California has long been a bellwether for the U.S., and this decisive 1978 battle in San Francisco's culture war between the gay community and those who opposed it may foretell a similar battle on a national scale yet to occur. The culture wars are still with us in 2007. For that matter, in 2007 even the theme from Rocky is still with us.
Execution of Justice will be performed Wednesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 5 & 8:30 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. through February 18th, at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse Theatre, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago. Tickets ($20-$40) can be purchased by calling 773.871.3000 or visiting www.aboutfacetheatre.com.
Photo: Steve Key
Photo by: Michael Brosilow
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