Being Gay in 1958 and 2008, The Pride at The Wallis Beverly Hills Explores Love, Sexuality and Fidelity in Different Eras

Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, now playing at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, focuses on the changes in attitudes about homosexuality over a twenty-year period.

The play is composed of two interlaced stories, one set in 1958 and the other in 2008 in London. Each story features characters of the same names but with different relationships and expectations of love and romantic fulfillment.

The Pride’s opening scene introduces us to book illustrator Sylvia (Jessica Collins), her estate agent and ostensibly straight husband Philip (Neal Bledsoe) and Oliver (Augustus Pres), Sylvia’s well-travelled children’s author whose book she is illustrating. Small talk abounds between the two men as they wait for Sylvia to get ready, with plenty of awkward glances and body language indicating a strong attraction between them.

A flash forward to 2008 puts us in another London apartment with another Oliver, who is now a freelance journalist who is bailing out of a paid sado-masochistic sex session with The Man (Matthew Wilkas as several characters throughout the play), due to his depression caused by his boyfriend, another Philip, leaving him because of Oliver’s addiction to anonymous casual sex. He soon leans on the second Sylvia, friends of the estranged couple, for support.

Though the years and circumstances are different, the characters in both stories are connected. Both Olivers feel loneliness, in 1958 due to an idealistic longing for a life rooted in love and honesty and in 2008 due to his loss of a boyfriend due to his sexual addiction. Both Philips make decisions as results of relationships built on lies, in 1958 to stay in a marriage to a woman and masquerade as a straight man and in 2008 to leave a relationship filled with lies and infidelities.

Depicting gay life in two eras, The Pride examines questions of fidelity, sexual liberation, the pursuit of happiness, honesty and love.

Configured in the round for The Pride, the small Lovelace Theater at The Wallis feels bigger thanks to director Michael Arden’s plexiglass set and fractured lighting. The play is a bit long at two and a half hours.

The Pride, $40 - $70, now through July 9, 2017 at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, visit TheWallis.org for tickets.

Photos courtesy of Kevin Parry for The Wallis.