This Boy's (Gay) Life
Coming out is hard to do in ‘Somebody Else's Life'
By JAMIE KELLY of the Missoulian
Jerry Rabushka wears a lot of hats in his one-man play, “Somebody Else's Life,” but it's the one you're looking at right here that may seem the oddest.
The gay “wanna-be cowboy” in the form of a guy named Chuck best exemplifies the strange brew of characters Rabushka steps into in the 50-minute production showing Saturday night at the Raven Café.
Drawn on his experiences as a gay man, and sorted from his 45 years, Rabushka calls his play sometimes funny, occasionally dead serious, and even a bit touching - all the experiences he had while coming to terms with his sexual identity while growing up in the Midwest.
“A lot of it is just, on a personal basis, things that have affected me over my life,” says Rabushka, a native of St. Louis. “The whole Ryan story is based on two guys that I've known, and I knew a guy who wanted to kiss his best friend and things didn't work out too well for him.”
Ryan is a 16-year-old bagboy who gets involved with Chuck, a very controlling “my way or the highway” sort of man. Both are the central characters in the first scene of this one-act play.
In the third scene, Ryan is looking back at an awkward and painful teenage memory, where he tries to kiss his best (male) friend and is rejected, marked as out of the closet and subsequently harassed.
The painful parts of the play - themes of rejection and isolation - make an especially marked impression on his audiences, says Rabushka, during his tours on the gay theater circuit.
“In San Francisco, they've forgotten how much the reaction of middle America will drive you nuts,” says Rabushka.
However, lighter moments prevail in Scene II, where Rabushka takes a shot at the belief that gay marriage undermines the sanctity of the institution as a whole.
Set in Oklahoma, in an obviously fictional scenario where gay marriage is legal, the scene tells the story of a man whose wife will no longer have sex with him because she believes the gay couple next door has undermined the sanctity of their marriage.
The husband ends up trying to talk his gay neighbors out of marriage so that he can sleep with his wife again.
Rabushka arranged Saturday's performance through the Western Montana Gay and Lesbian Community Center.
