1994

Conceived and directed by Tina Landau

“In the wonderfully heady prologue to the En Garde Arts production of Stonewall: Night Variations, the play’s director and author, Tina Landau, turns Pier 25 in lower Manhattan into a boisterous freak show for the audience to wander through. It speaks volumes about the perception of gay men and lesbians in the late 1960’s. The setting is Gay World, a retrospective theme park that recalls the days when Greenwich Village was a mecca for misfits, a place for tourists to gawk at girlish boys, boyish girls and other exotic species in their natural habitat.
Such is the ingeniously metaphoric preface to a play about liberation. What follows, on a vast open-air stage that stretches into the Hudson, tells the story of how each of the characters introduced in the carnival is sprung from social captivity in June of 1969 by the fabled Stonewall uprising… Ms. Landau correctly takes a democratic view of the epochal uprising, which was started by a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, presenting it as a multiplicity of tales of the oppressed.”
– Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Photos