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I approached Apartment 213 aggressively, I confess. I went to the show ready to bend it to my own purposes, an opportunity to showcase my own ideas. I often use the analogy of dating and sexual relationships to describe other relationships. Keeping your boss happy, for example, is like smoothing a lover’s ego, and job-hunting is a lot like dating. Let me draw again from my experiences in love to talk about my relationship with Joseph Ritsch, director of Apartment 213.

There is no shortage of love advice, but the ones that haunt me most are those that sound like riddles– “you lose your love when you say the word mine”– these sage pieces of Zen-like wisdom that seem to doom me to a lifetime of never fully satisfied desire.

I’m too demanding of men. Not only do I have rigid standards for how my man should be in bed, in conversation, in his professional life, in his dress, his taste in music and movies, but I also want complete control. I want his attention on-demand, and I don’t want his other obligations, interests or relationships to get in the way of my needs. And when he can’t meet my expectations or sufficiently flatter my ego (because I’ll forgive so much if you take care of my ego), the relationship usually ends rudely, and then follows about a month or so of smoldering resentment.

Artistic collaborations can be a lot like dating, too. I was really excited when I heard about Ritsch’s play. I felt like I would have so much to say about it, and I was desperate to get my pen in there somewhere. I wanted to engage Ritsch in a conversation about theater’s approach to a topic versus a visual arts approach to that same subject matter– while Mr. Ritsch apparently just wanted to do his thing, unmolested by some nut out showcase his intelligence. I wanted to talk about something which, according to him, was simply not within the scope of his work. It seemed to frustrate him, and the tone of the correspondence took on an almost nasty tone. Ultimately, Ritsch and I couldn’t get anything off the ground.

Of course I do still intend to showcase my intelligence, but not without first acknowledging that it might not have made sense for me, in this instance, to walk into a play, so preoccupied with my own ideas on what it could or should be that I couldn’t meet the work on its own terms. But maybe it’s not all my fault. Maybe theater– or at least certain types of theater– aren’t meant to be subjected to the same set of concerns to which we might subject other types of art. Last summer, DUOX created a show of painting and sculpture, loosely riffing off the Jeffrey Dahmer story. In that arena, working with artists who studied at the same school I did, I felt completely comfortable. I walked into the exhibit with the set of concerns I’d been trained to bring, and the exhibit in turn met my expectations. Mostly likely, this sympathy of ideas has more to do with the cultural capital that Dan Wickerham, Malcolm Lomax and I share, having invested time and money in the Maryland Institute College of Art, rather than any privileged access we have to higher truths about art and expression (though ideas that are better financially supported may actually end up to be truer than those funded by tax payers’ money, but that’s another conversation).

In the case of Apartment 213, on the other hand, I couldn’t get a foothold using my MICA repertoire. I was not able, for example, to ask questions about the sexuality of Will Manning, the actor who played the part of a couple of Dahmer’s victims. As I wrote to Joseph Ritsch in a facebook message:

“Leaving the play, I remarked to my friend that I thought the actor who played the victims was hot. He quickly retorted: “He has a girlfriend.” It felt like a little bit of a disciplinary hand slap, and I was mildly annoyed. Anyhow, in the light of that knowledge, that Will Manning isn’t gay, I realized there might be an opportunity to develop that blind spot in your story, the experience of the victim. I’m not criticizing Manning’s skill as an actor, necessarily. He seemed credible as a drunk trick– he was coy, fey, stumbling, vulgar– but I wonder what a gay or a minority actor (most of Dahmer’s victims were not white) could have brought to the role.

It became clear that not only was Will Manning’s sexuality off limits (Mr. Ritsch refused to confirm or deny the gossip I’d picked up about Manning’s private life), but that in the case of theater, there doesn’t actually need to be any type of connection between the actor and the role he or she plays. Now that I think about it, this is not new information. Take Ben Kingsley, for instance. He can play Ghandi and then go star in a movie like Sexy Beast, and apparently there’s no conflict. But I must say, I watched the first 15 minutes of Ghandi the other night, and although I sobbed like a wretch for the quarter of an hour it was on, I finally decided I didn’t want sexy Hollywood stars teaching me about such an amazing historical figure– it felt wrong.

In the case of art, like it or not, the personal biography of the artist is indeed up for discussion. The discourse that has grown up along side art in the last century demands that the creator and the viewer both be scrutinized. I recently went to see the exhibition Africans in Black and White: Images of Blacks in 16th- and 17th-Century Prints, at the Rudenstine Gallery, at Harvard. The curator seemed to suggest, among other things, that Western image making was an arena where, as Western empires grew to appropriate the natural and human resources of the darker portions of the globe, the Black, as a cultural phenomenon, with his exotic differences, was slowly made intelligible, politically, socially and sexually. In this instance, creator and audience are both complicit in a cultural dialectic.

On the other hand, visual art is not theater. A lot of contemporary visual art doesn’t aim to produce the suspension of disbelief and a zone of escape that theater like Apartment 213 tries to achieve. The director and the actors bring us into another world, and we run the risk of ruining our experience and everyone else’s if we extend a critical analysis beyond the limits set by the director and start asking perhaps irrelevant questions about, say, the history of the building where the show is staged, the socio-economic status of the audience members, or the sexual predilections of the players.

At the same time, I wanted to see more of myself and perhaps more of Mr. Ritsch and Mr. Manning in Apartment 213. As I wrote to Mr. Ritsch:

“Identify as I might with [Jeffrey Dahmer] (yes, I’d love the object of my affection to stay forever, even if I have to do some pretty fucked up shit to make him stay put), I bet I could identify with the victims, too. I started sleeping with men in the decade following Jeffrey Dahmer’s murders. I used to feel afraid that I’d end up hacked to bits. I think that fear was largely irrational and was due partly to what I knew of killers like Dahmer, but it was also partly because I felt like what I was doing- having sex with men- was scary. I was a lot less comfortable with my sexuality then, and I was freaked out by my own behavior.”

Thankfully, I haven’t ended up in some guy’s freezer (knock on wood!). And my desire to see more of myself in Dahmer’s victims (the representation of Dahmer’s victims, rather) is not a desire to talk about myself as a type of victim. But as I wrote to Mr. Ritsch, I’m not sure if Mr. Manning’s personal sexuality should be off limits. Of course it will be off limits; I can’t with decency demand otherwise. But the way I think about sexuality is that it is always visible, and that if it isn’t, society forces it to declare itself. As a society, we aren’t tolerant of the sexually ambiguous. What is sexually unintelligible is useless, and whether we’re gay or straight or bi, I believe we use people according to their sexuality, to validate or confirm our own. I believe that it works similarly with race and gender. The idea of this compulsory sexuality and the power dynamics that come with it might make for an interesting perspective on the Dahmer murders.

Much like my approach to dating, my approach to Apartment 213 seems untenable. I do believe that when someone gets up on stage to tell me a story, that someone is telling me a story about me, interpreting my world for me, and I want to be able to ask questions about that interpretation. But I’ve also learned from this experience that there is perhaps a space within which challenging the artist is reasonable, and that once I start asking questions outside the limits of that space, I run the risk of ruining my chances for a productive dialog.

Apartment 213 was a special co-production between Iron Crow Theatre the Towson University MFA Theatre Program ran November 4th through the 13th at Emmanuel Episcopal Church.
Iron Crow Theater

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