by Carolyn Hayes Harmer

Article:9876; Posted: June 22, 2015 at 10:00 a.m.

The LGBTQ experience is impossible to summarize or represent singly; consequently, The Ringwald Theatre’s annual Gay Play Series (GPS) packs a lot of programming spanning different perspectives and tastes. Although this year’s festival has some notable changes, its variety holds strong.

For a critic, this makes it equally impossible to inform readers what to expect on any given night of GPS’s two-weekend run. Instead, here’s a sampling of what you could very well encounter.

You might catch up with Wilde Award winner Julia Lynn Marsh, whose one-woman Ringwald show, “Please Give Me Your Money So I Can Buy a Vagina,” took viewers on an autobiographical journey into her empowering transition. At this year’s festival, local actors will perform a reading of the pilot episode of Marsh’s new web series, “Alphabet Soup” (Monday, June 22).

You might swing by on Friday, June 26, for a world-premiere reading of the latest by the playwright of past Ringwald productions “10 Naked Men” and “Making Porn.” Ronnie Larsen’s “Two Dead Clowns” will feature the luminous Joe Bailey in dual roles as Divine, notorious muse of filmmaker John Waters, and John Wayne Gacy, notorious serial killer.

Or you might whet your curiosity about the new main event, the “Big Gay Mash-Up Competition” (Saturdays and Sundays), which this year has replaced the staged readings of one-act LGBTQ-themed plays. In a nutshell: performers signed up in teams, received an imaginative mash-up title combining a play or movie and a musician (a la “My Fair Lady Gaga”) and a thumb drive with assorted songs, and were given less than two weeks to script, choreograph, and perform a short jukebox-style musical artfully combining the two properties. This reviewer attended the performance of the first two Big Gay Mash-Ups, a night with a loose thrown-together quality that comes part and parcel with this kind of scramble.

The approach is fresh and fun, but it’s certainly a departure from the more curated festivals of yore. Whereas the one-act plays of past years were handpicked from a multitude of submitted scripts, here there is no such quality control over content or interpretation. Troupes were sent out with raw material and simple instructions, and whatever comes back gets on stage.

For example, you could worship at the altar of a diva in the mash-up “50 Chers of Grey” (written by Alan Madlane), a biopic-type musical that’s short on imagination and long on baseless venom. It’s the Cliff’s Notes life story of Cher (John DeMerell, in a competent skew on the persona) set to her music, with raunchier lyrics and a shoehorned appearance by the screwed-up fetishist central to the “50 Shades” book and film series (a furrowed Bob Hotchkiss). Come for costumer Barbie Weisserman’s salute to Bob Mackie; stay for the fisting jokes. (Grit your teeth for the inexcusable transphobic material planted throughout, largely at Chaz Bono’s expense.)

You might also be treated to a mini-mash-up by Brandy Joe Plambeck, who gleefully intones a quick scene and song verse and then lets the audience guess the title — it’s clear that the concept is his brainchild.

You could be tickled at the campy cleverness of “Madonna the Dead” (written and directed by Ben-Ra Wright, who also stars). This allegorical send-up of zombie horror comically pits nature versus nurture when a teen’s organically budding homosexuality is challenged by literal gay panic, as gay zombie fairies arrive and begin “turning” hordes of heteros. The script is razor-sharp and overflows with outlandish moral commentary, the cast slays (especially Tyler Calhoun and James E. Lee III as Barry Fairy and Gary Fairy), and the overall quality forgives the tiny oversight of forgetting to make the piece a musical — Madonna is referenced and played and danced to, but not one note is sung.

You can check out two other Big Gay Mash-Ups on a separate night, and cast ballots for your favorites, all of which will be tallied and announced at the festival grand finale (Monday, June 29). Ending with awards and an encore performance of the winning mash-up, the evening’s major theme is a star-studded musical treat, “David Moan’s Big Gay Duets!” Moan, the Wilde Award-nominated star of Ringwald musicals “Evil Dead: The Musical” and “Into the Woods,” will emcee a collection of songs, in the vein of the “Miscast Cabaret” from past festivals.

You might learn something; you might sing along in spite of yourself; you might have a glow bracelet lobbed at you from the stage. This reviewer can’t say for sure. The only guarantee for a GPS audience is never-before-seen material and a celebratory festival ambiance, embracing and acclaiming the inciting theme.

Running times vary.

SHOW DETAILS:
Gay Play Series
The Ringwald Theatre
22742 Woodward Ave., Ferndale
June 19-29, 2015 Friday, Saturday and Monday evenings at 8:00 p.m., Sunday matinees at 3:00 p.m.
$10.00-$30.00
248.545.5545
www.TheRingwald.com