KRJY Announcer  0:04  
K-R-J-Y St. Louis.

Deb Law  0:20  
Good morning, and welcome to this morning's edition of Lambda Reports. This is Deborah Law, and I'm here to talk with you again, a program that's brought to you by and for the lesbian and gay community of St. Louis. This morning, I'm here with Joan Lipkin, welcome and thank you for joining. 

Joan Lipkin  0:40  
Good morning. Deb 

Deb Law  0:41  
Joan is writer and director of St. Louis's first gay and lesbian review, Some of My Best Friends Are, which is currently enjoying a very successful run at the Other Fox. The Other Fox is at 2102 Russell, which is at Russell and McNair in the St. Marcus church. And very quickly, I'll give you the box office number, but we'll be repeating it throughout this morning's show. So if you need to get a pen and pencil and paper, please do 361-1505 is the box office number. Let me tell you a little bit about Joan. Most recently, she was the subject of a story for the Associated Press for writing and directing a touring production about foster care. This featured an all foster care cast that spanned three quarters of a century. She also has a piece called the 1960s, the Times They Were Achanging, commissioned by the young audiences that's touring the bi-state area. Joan is a former theater columnist for The Riverfront Times, a critic for KDHX, a two time winner of the St Louis Playwrights Festival and its current director. She's also a member of the Dramatist Guild, Whew! Amazing, busy, busy woman, I have to say, with the show that is now playing to packed houses and rave reviews, you must feel great.

Joan Lipkin  1:55  
I feel real good. I really do. We are just so delighted that we've had this kind of response from the community

Deb Law  2:01  
Super. I have to ask, what was your inspiration for Some of My Best Friends Are 

Joan Lipkin  2:07  
Right. Well, Deb, after the tremendous critical and popular success of last year's political satirical review, See How They Run, which was a piece that I co-wrote, directed and produced about national the national election and some local political issues as well. I knew that I wanted to work with Tom Clear who is my lyricist and composer for this show. And when I became aware of the Missouri's sexual misconduct law, that sort of spurred me on. I thought that this was a blatant dismissal of civil rights in 1989 to think that the government is telling us, yet again, what we can do with our bodies. And so that spurred me on a sort of look at what is going on in gay and lesbian life right now. And also I thought that it was very interesting that it's the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which was, of course, the popular beginnings of the gay liberation movement. So I thought it was a very timely piece.

Deb Law  3:06  
Well, I have to say, I will have to let our audience know I had the opportunity to view the show last Sunday, which was also a fundraiser for the Lesbian and Gay News Telegraph. And I had a marvelous time. I mean, the underlying thing, it was wonderful. It was great fun. And very, very funny.

Joan Lipkin  3:23  
Can we be political and have and have a good time at the same time?  Right?

Deb Law  3:28  
Right. Which was one of the things I wanted to do today, was stress how much fun it was. It was really great fun. And actually, I have long thought that satire was a very effective means of conveying information and enlightenment, and that also what we laughed at was very indicative of where we were and what we were learning. And I have to say, from both the satire that I saw Sunday night and also the belly laughing, not the nervous laughing, I didn't hear any nervous laughter. I heard a lot of belly laughter that all of us in the audience, whether we were lesbian and gay or I did see some people that I figured had some heterosexual tendencies in the audience, that people were also, I mean, really responding to it from a real gut level. That's marvelous.

Joan Lipkin  4:10  
Yeah. Well, thank you. That's very nice to hear speaking of gays and lesbians and other sorts of people. It's real interesting to see what different people laugh at because we have been playing to mixed houses. And by mixed I mean gay and straight, or shall I say gay and non-gay, and people laugh at different things. Men and women laugh at different things. Heterosexuals and homosexuals laugh at different things. And then, of course, there are those things that seem to touch a universal chord, but it's always very interesting for me, night after night, performance after performance, to sort of be a barometer for the audience and see what what seems to move them. 

Deb Law  4:47  
Are you finding a lot of consistency in the audience in terms of what the audience in general response to?

Joan Lipkin  4:55  
Some of the universal stuff, right? But some of the stuff that's more specific that you sort of have to. Be in the in crowd to get. They don't always get if they're not, if they're not gay.

Deb Law  5:04  
But the in crowd gets at every show. I would. 

Joan Lipkin  5:08  
But you know, the important thing, Deborah, is that I was not interested in doing something exclusively for the gay community, nor was I interested in doing something exclusively for the straight community. And that's why it's important that the title of this is for people of all preferences. So somebody doesn't get all the jokes they get a lot of them. It was very important to me to design a piece that would be inclusive and that would bring people together, particularly at this time, historically, politically, socially. I thought it was important.

Deb Law  5:38  
And I think that was very true in terms of the peace. So I think what was so fundamental and so very exciting for members of our community is that it was a piece about us and about us in a very positive and delightful way. We could laugh at ourselves, certainly, but we could laugh at how ludicrous our life is in a in a very pleasant way, you know, and mirroring that pain that we may feel at other times, that being shared with people who, in fact, may not be aware at all of the kind of issues that we have to deal with. 

Joan Lipkin  6:10  
Speaking, I mean, when you talk about pain, it's interesting, you know, I really did want to have a pretty much of an upbeat piece, although there were a number of places that are poignant and that really are, you know, should be moving people. And I wanted to talk about that a little bit. A friend of mine said to me, you know, you really don't deal with AIDS at all in this, in this piece, except for a few thinly veiled metaphorical kinds of references. And I thought about that a lot when I was, when I was writing the show with Tom, and we talked about it. And the fact is that, you know, there are a lot of other issues confronting the gay community, and there are a lot of things that make up people's lives. And I felt that it was real important to try and put together something that was celebratory and upbeat and that to be positive and upbeat in a time when there is this, this dark specter that has, you know, cast this shadow over the entire gay community, and of course, across the community in general, would be, in itself, a political act. It would be a very assertive, positive, life affirming kind of a thing. So people have said to me, ah, Joan, you don't really deal with AIDS. And I say, but ah, yes, we do. We do. We deal with the other side, which is, you know, the side that embraces life. I think we do.

Deb Law  6:14  
It does very much deals with living. I think one of the things that I walked out feeling is how much more material there is. You see this review, and you can see 10 reviews after, in terms of all of the things about our lives that could be so well put on the stage in that kind of satirical setting.

Joan Lipkin  7:45  
That is so true. You know, I have, I have straight friends who have said to me, oh, what can you when I told him I was working on this? Oh, you think you can get an hour and a house for the material? And I said, Well, once I got started, it wasn't a question of coming up with how much, but where would I draw the line, and I have a great drag queen scene that is sitting in my drawer that I would love to put into the show. It's just a question of the proper space.

Deb Law  8:09  
I think it's all those things that you sit around and you're watching television, are at the movies, and you think for the great lesbian commercial. Or, you know, when we have our own television shows and our own soap operas. This is what we'll do anyways. Super I must ask you, what has this meant? You're obviously sharing some of it as you talk now. What has this meant for you personally, in terms of,

Joan Lipkin  8:29  
it's just, I mean, you know, you think now, because we've been selling out every performance, because we've been running now for six weeks, that I would have become complacent and that it would all be normal for me at this point. But it's not. It continues to be fresh. I continue to be excited by the ensemble that the cast has formed. That's an interesting thing in itself, you know, Deb, because the cast is really a microcosm for the world, perhaps more tolerant than than the general world is we have people who are gay and straight and come from very different backgrounds, black and white and working class and academic, and, you know, a real range of people, and the way they have learned to enjoy each other and and appreciate each other's differences. For me, sort of like as the grant you know, the mother hen who stands back and watches it all. That's very gratifying. Of course, the work itself is gratifying. Just the writing and seeing the work realized on stage is very exciting as a writer and a director. But I think that probably what is most gratifying for me has been the audience response and the cards and the notes and the phone calls I get from people that I don't know, expressing their appreciation for seeing their lives somehow reflected back to them, is very wonderful, and it gives me the energy when I'm feeling frazzled by all of this to really feel motivated. And I had an interesting thing happen when we did our first benefit for St. Louis Effort for AIDS. We're now working on our second and that was that that there were all these older gay men in the audience, and they must have been, a number of them felt to me like they were in their 70s. So to see a number of men who had been together for a long time, and to watch them sitting in the theater holding hands and laughing at the show, I found this to be an incredibly moving experience, the longevity of their lives together, the commitment that they've managed to weather despite this terrible, homophobic world that we live in, the fact that in my theater, that we had created a space where they felt comfortable enough to be open, not in a bar, not in their living room, but in the theater, to be physically demonstrative and tender with each other. And to watch them feel embraced by the material and by the space was was very moving for me, and I was kind of choked up. 

Deb Law  11:08  
That's neat. Yeah, touching, I have to ask. And unfortunately, probably the timing of this question may not be the best. I know that there have been difficulties in putting this production together. I know there are difficulties in putting any production together, but this one seemed to have some special ones that, in fact, I think, mirrored some of the issues and the prejudice that were being addressed in the play. 

Joan Lipkin  11:32  
Absolutely. And you know, now that we're a success and everybody's all excited about us, you know, we look back on it and people say, Oh, you've gotten a lot of coverage. Well, we have gotten a lot of coverage because, frankly, we insisted on it. We refused to be invisible. We refused to let the media stamp out an entire segment of the population due to their own prejudices and discomfort. But the fact is that we had a terrible time getting coverage. People would say, Oh, well, I don't think our audience would be interested. We're talking about mainstream media sources. And these are people that I that I deal with all the time, because you as you know, I'm a fairly well-established playwright and director working in the St. Louis area, and it's not as if I could read them the riot act, because I need to have an ongoing relationship with them. I was naive, because I thought that the production was a wonderful idea, and because I have a solid reputation, and because I have had so much coverage of my work before, I assumed that we would have no problem, that people would be excited. And I was really shocked, stunned and depressed to see that it was otherwise. 

Deb Law  12:42  
Do you? Do you think that it will be easier next time, not just for you, but for the next playwright in St. Louis who chooses to take on the issues of our lesbian and gay lifestyles in a play or review or a satire.

Joan Lipkin  13:04  
Yeah, do you I think it will be? I mean, I don't. I see progress as very, very slow Mother, may I, you know, two steps forward and one step back. Maybe. 

Deb Law  13:17  
What I'm wondering is, do you think the media from this has learned something where they said to you six weeks ago, most of our audience is not going to be interested in this, and they've had to, kind of like, eat their words a little. 

Joan Lipkin  13:28  
Oh, isn't it wonderful. It's so wonderful that they're wrong and that we've proved them wrong, although that's not what my real satisfaction is. I mean, my real satisfaction is, is knowing that that we are really serving the community, and that clearly the audiences are there, not because of the reviews, but because of the word of mouth, and because that we seem to have touched a need, answered a need. Yeah, it's kind of nice. I've actually had some people say to me, oh, one you know, I talk about it, right? I can't, I can't divulge the names, right? But somebody called me up and said, you know, Joan, I'm sorry; I was wrong. And that felt good, but, you know, that felt good. But it for me, it's not about who's right or wrong. I mean, that felt good, and I think of all the hours of anguish that I felt so it's very nice, and I thought it was a generous admission to make, but my confronting this homophobia head on, and worrying about the life of my production, and you know, it's a struggle enough as an as an artist, to try and and and find your voice and maintain, be true to the voice that you hear In your head, to try and to have the courage to be expressive in the first place. So, so any artist is already dealing with that, and then to deal with with some sort of a giant censoring bell over your head is, is really it's just too much .

Transcribed by https://otter.ai