Irish actor and musician Brian Fleming — a heterosexual man — became an accidental activist for LGBT rights several years ago after a photograph of him at a gay gathering happened to be printed in the now-defunct News of the World. A Sacrilegious Lesbian and Homosexual Parade, Fleming’s one-man show at this year’s Frigid Festival in Manhattan, describes the playwright’s subsequent involvement with the annual “St. Pat’s for All” parade in Queens, New York — a gay-friendly alternative to Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. (The Manhattan Parade has allowed gay participants only if they refrain from marching under an LGBT banner. In Ireland, meanwhile, LGBT contingents have long participated in St. Patrick’s Day parades with little fuss.) For the last decade and a half, Fleming has traveled yearly from Ireland to New York to participate in the Queens event.
Fleming and director Raymond Keane tell their story with the help of projections (both slides and film clips), a fairly ambitious soundscape, a few props, and one (unthreatening) bit of audience participation. Parade is a bit of a shaggy-dog tale that jumps around in time and space. Though the show has a running time considerably less than an hour, it manages to include a number of mini-digressions, including riffs on Tiger Woods and Frederick Douglass (who, Fleming notes, first appeared to him to be a black Karl Marx).
Fleming comes off as an earnest, amiable fellow. Distractingly, however, it’s not always particularly easy to fathom what points he’s making with his storytelling. Compounding the problem: he’s a bit tentative in his presentation. The recorded sound cues are sometimes too loud, smothering his soft-spoken delivery.
More significantly, I didn’t get a real sense from the play of Fleming’s personal journey. My hunch is that this is because he wanted to focus not on himself but on the organizers who’ve created and fine-tuned “St. Pat’s for All” over the years. (At the performance I saw, several such people were on hand and were acknowledged in Fleming’s curtain speech).
An autobiographical solo show, however, needs — at least to some degree — to foreground the perspective of the soloist. Fleming introduces material in the play that might be further developed to make this happen. For instance, late in the show, he has a sort of epiphany involving St. Brendan, the early Irish navigator who, according to legend, preceded the Vikings and Columbus in sailing to the New World. Using Brendan metaphorically is a promising idea, but the reference to him currently seems tacked on and rushed.
I hope Fleming undertakes a few more drafts in order to to expand, edit, and shape his material — letting audiences see more clearly exactly why a gay-friendly celebration in an outer borough of an American city has become so important to a straight Irish lad from County Clare.
