Love of Last Resort
Submitted by Richard Tar
“You can be anything you want if you’re alone,” says Josh about the possibilities of life on a desert island. He stranded himself (on purpose, it seems) a few years back when the gay vacation resort occupying the island was deserted. He hasn’t talked to anyone in years and now he’s half-crazy and more than a little dirty—in every sense of the word.
The problem is, Josh isn’t alone anymore. Matt has washed up on the beach (you know, the way people are always washing up on desert islands; like the rock band on “Gilligan’s Island”). Matt was on a gay cruise to try to forget a bad relationship and couldn’t take the trolling anymore, so he lowered himself into a lifeboat. And into Josh’s life.
It’s the gay part of the Pacific.
Ok, ok. If we’re going to suspend our disbelief this far, we might as well have multiple personality disorder and sadomasochism. And a musical interlude. Jerry Rabushka’s “Love of Last Resort” is a balancing act in tone and content: silly clichés exist alongside genuine originality and the play is as dedicated to the realization of its characters as it is to the playful unsettling of its audience’s expectations. At times I felt like I was a castaway on a makeshift boat, wondering if the leaks were eventually going to do the vessel in. But writer/director Rabushka holds the play’s many different parts together—loosely, at times—with a binding theme: the vulnerability inherent in the process of falling in love. Honesty and insight on this matter will get an audience to believe a lot, and honest Rabushka is. And believe we do.
Having seen no one in three years, Josh is ready to get to the good part. He’s the not-so-noble savage, freed by his imprisonment but still looking for a good time, and played by Rabushka as a blatant, semi-fuddled slob with a disarming stutter. Matt is having no part of his lascivious advances, insisting for a long time he is straight. Josh doesn’t buy it for a second, and neither do we: Matt’s reaction to Josh is not the revulsion of a heterosexual, but more like offense at the impropriety. He’s like a 1940’s screwball comedy heroine trying to convince Cary Grant he’s just…oh…not…at all…interested. Actor and co-writer Jeff Schoenfeld understands perfectly the seductive possibilities of coquettish indignation, and remains entirely appealing even when (occasionally) you want to strangle Matt. Schoenfeld is just as good in the serious moments, especially when the play pauses for what turns out to be an entirely straight-faced (if quasi-surreal) musical number. The scene takes a real chance with everyone involved, and I admit when I realized the song was not humorous, I started to squirm. It works though—surprisingly—in large part because Schoenfeld is such a winning stage presence, and also because the song itself (written by Rabushka and Schoenfeld) is genuinely touching.
So recreational sodomy is out at first, and it is up to Josh to show Matt what there is to do around here. Josh first introduces Matt to the basics of survival on the island in the form of the stacks of ‘Martha Stewart Living’ left behind by the retreating homosexuals. Martha has advice on everything, even, when push comes to shove, how to fasten trees and leaves into a boat. Martha’s more helpful than the Professor.
The two play act a lot, adopting different personas to entertain themselves, staging talk shows and guest interviews; they have hilarious arguments over aardvarks and cloud formations, and eventually get to the truth of why Matt is ready to give up on civilization, and why Josh already has. Wouldn’t panic over the dire situation of being trapped on a deserted island be much more vivid than the sting of your last bad relationship? Well, sure it would, but that’s not the point. The point is less concrete and a bit truer, as found in Josh’s speech (brief, but the best in the play) about the island representing freedom from the prying eyes of ‘they.’ Without the ideas of anyone else impinging on his idea of himself, Josh is free to change everything about himself--his whole personal history even--at will. Later, this whimsical shape-shifting becomes a burden when the men fall for each other and Matt wants to know the real Josh.
The play slows down in the second half when the storyline about Josh’s struggle to give up his solipsistic freedom for love circles for a long, long time before landing just where we figured it would (they are on a desert island, after all); it also takes a sudden turn towards fetishism that doesn’t seem quite as natural a character development to me as it does to the playwrights. The quality of Rabushka and Schoenfeld’s performances persists, though, and the writers’ keen understanding of human vulnerabilities peers through the cracks in even the most alienating moments. As strained as the “alone on a desert island” device is, “Love of Last Resort” uses the metaphor to its full advantage and comes away having asked some big questions about the anxiety over taking what is available, the loss of personal freedom to human interaction, and the need for courage in the face of love.
And I’m telling you, the song is pretty darn good.
