Harvard is one of America’s most prestigious institutions, so a story set there, especially a dark one, especially a scandal, can uniquely capture our attention. On Wednesday, Classic Stage Company rounds out its season with Unnatural Acts, a world premiere that portrays a group of gay Harvard students who were interrogated in 1920 because of their sexuality.
Based on true events, the play begins with the suicide of a Harvard sophomore, Cyril Wilcox. When word leaks that Cyril has been involved in an underground gay community on campus, Harvard’s administrators decide to rid the university of its problem with “homosexualism” and expose the other members of this social sphere. They establish a Secret Court, whose interrogations unleash a floodgate of new nightmares for unsuspecting students.
Director Tony Speciale conceived of the production in 2006 while studying in Columbia University’s MFA theatre program. After reading an article about the Harvard interrogations, he tracked down the 500-page transcript that the Secret Court had kept hidden for decades. These documents, which identify students believed to be of questionable sexuality and detail their supposed “acts of depravity,” only surfaced in 2002, and their disclosure prompted Harvard’s then-president Lawrence Summers to issue a public apology for the acts of his predecessors.
To turn this history into theatre, Speciale wrote collaboratively with his cast and creative team
For Speciale and his cast, the recent string of suicides among gay college students in 2010 made the development of this work and its exposure to audiences increasingly poignant.
“We’re still in a crisis of basic human rights,” the director says. “When a young person still takes his life because he’s told that what he is isn’t natural, then we still have a long way to go. These boys were just figuring out who they were, just as the recent college students were also first figuring out who they were. Ultimately, we tried to create a world that is as much a celebration of their lives as a portrayal of their tragedy.”
Source: http://wp.tdf.org/index.php/2011/06/uncovering-unnatural-acts/
