Before Orlando, this show meant something different. Before that tragedy, a mere two weeks ago — just two days after Rainbow Theatre Project opened Get Used to It! — it would have been easy to think of this 20-song revue as a quaint history lesson, a peek back at the political fights and personal communities of gay men in 1993 when AIDS was raging, Ellen was not yet out, and Don’t Ask Don't Tell was freshly instituted.

Now, however, the view into the past is fractured. Tom Wilson Weinberg's Cole Porter/Stephen Schwartz-esque song cycle, written in the early 90s, is being presented to us right here, right now by three singers and a pianist. Do we take it as a review of how far we've come, or a reminder that the battles of last century are far from done? Is the church-and-state satire of 'Hymn' outdated because the terms it puts its conflict in are outdated, or is it painfully relevant because the conflict itself continues? Is the out-and-proud tenderness of 'Three-Letter Word' made bittersweet because its innocence is lost, or is it made bold because it testifies to what is universal across time?"

—Brett Steven Abelman, June 20, 2016, DC Theatre Scene

wo musical revues I wrote in the late 1980s and early 90s, Get Used to It! and Ten Percent Revue, had good runs in New York and a generous number of productions around the country. They attracted attention in the mainstream and LGBT press and won a few honors along the way.

The intention of both shows was to present a view of LGBT life and politics with humor, satire and urgency. I was influenced not by creators of musical theater but rather by gay and lesbian activists. The moment was dire. Conservative political and religious institutions fought to strip us of what few rights we had gained in the 1970s. And our friends were dying of AIDS.

Last spring one of the revues, Get Used to It!, was revived by a theater in Washington, DC. I had met with the director about a year before the show was cast, expecting him to share my view that the shows were now nostalgia pieces, quaint histories of LGBT life 25 or 30 years ago.

He thought they were still potent, funny and dramatic. He acknowledged that some of the references were dated but didn’t want me to change a word. (A few times over the years producers have inquired about revised and updated versions which I’ve politely declined.) He felt that if audiences were stirred by the history that would be enough, and if they found it topical, relevant and moving, that would be what he hoped for and expected.

Two reviews published early in the run confirmed this director’s instincts. Both wrote of the shows as if they were new. Then, in the second week of the run, the killings at Pulse nightclub occurred. Shocked, as were people all over the country, I asked him if he wanted to acknowledge the tragedy from the stage. He wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea. Later that week, I went to Washington, saw the show (okay, three times) and realized it had addressed Orlando as written 25 years earlier.

After seeing it for the first time I met the cast and realized how brave they were despite the challenge of going on stage with the tragedy fresh in their minds. These young actor/singers could have been blasé after nearly eight years of acceptance and support from Barack Obama and his administration. Orlando changed that. Their commitment to the material reminded me of the passionate, confrontational and funny way it was sung in the early 90s.

Now we find ourselves in a dire place once again, something I didn’t imagine during the run of Get Used To It! in Washington. I couldn’t picture an election result or an administration that would attempt to define itself by limiting human rights in the name of making America great again.

Like so many progressive people here and around the world, I mourned, lost sleep, felt depressed, then angry and finally energized. The process took a few months. Now I’m writing letters and calling legislators, demonstrating, picketing and going to meetings to help build coalitions and stand up to the new reality that faces us. And I’m writing songs.

ecently I had the great pleasure of experiencing my play Hunting and Gathering at Rep Stage in Columbia, Maryland, ten years after I initially wrote it. It was great fun revisiting the source material as I'm currently married and raising a child, theoretically stable (although we did just move last summer), and in very different circumstances.

Hunting and Gathering is a comedy about rootlessness, four characters who for different reasons are between housing options and figuring out their logistical and emotional/spiritual homes. When I wrote it, I myself was living in much this way. I'd been happily settled in an apartment in Soho before 9/11 and then, after the attacks, I lost my job and my apartment and was suddenly couch-surfing and subletting until I could afford what felt like a monumental outpouring of money — first month's rent, last month's rent, security deposit. (Forget real estate agents! For a self-employed New York artist and writer, such people are luxuries we can't afford.) Once I was settled again (with a roommate for whom I wrote the character Astor), I started drafting the play. And by the time it was produced, I was yet again out of a place – my belongings in storage, my work in New York City, and my long range plans in Los Angeles. I was often pathologized for moving so often, people would patronizingly ask if they should write my address in pencil because it changed so often and/or if I planned on landing at any point soon — as if my sad income and its accompanying frugality were character defects and not a byproduct of working in the theater.

But in 2016 this is not the case. Whereas in 2007 (when we went into production), this play spoke of a particular group of people — the "Creative Class" — it now speaks to everyone. Before the 2008 financial crisis, only artists lived like I did. Now, we have a generation of young (and some middle-aged) people down-sizing material holdings, moving to smaller quarters and shedding extraneous belongings, living "at home" with parents or older family members, taking in roommates, becoming a roommate, looking for solutions to problems that we once thought would stop plaguing us as soon as we (got a job, got married, sold a pilot, got settled on a tenure track) and so on. This is a play for a new generation of Americans. Which made it particularly thrilling to see onstage in Columbia this Spring.

Before the 2008 financial crisis, only artists lived like I did … More and more people today are finding that the promise of Permanence — in home, in relationship, in job security — doesn't pan out the way it did for our parent's generation.

It used to be that you found your spouse, your home, your place in the world in your late twenties and early thirties and then settled down to enjoy them and build equity for retirement. That model no longer holds. More and more people today are finding that the promise of Permanence — in home, in relationship, in job security — doesn't pan out the way it did for our parent's generation. The center cannot hold. Things are shifting. Daily. People are losing their jobs, having to sell their homes, downsize, streamline, move across the country, start over, start again, redefine, re-brand, re-imagine. Which has everyone talking about home: from mortgage rates to foreclosures to refinancing to gentrification and finding the right downtown loft, home is on the brain. How to get a home, find a home, pay for a home, and lastly — how to decorate what you've got.

The production team at Rep Stage asked me about the theme of "gratitude" in my play (the final line is: "Thank you." Which is also parenthetically true of Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha — written and produced a few years after Hunting and Gathering). When everything physical is shifting, what else do you have? Gratitude becomes key. If our homes aren't meant to be permanent; if there's no blame attached to impermanence, in a very Buddhist sense, then there is nothing wrong with us for drifting. Thank God or whomever else is responsible — and give thanks! I always think, let's be grateful for what we've got while we've got it. Because you never know what's coming …

Hunting and Gathering comes from a period in my life in which I wondered: where is stability? And how do I negotiate my own feelings about what I've left behind while proactively creating some place to land?

The director Kasi Campbell and cast, most particularly Kathryn Tkel, were amazing. And I'm grateful to them for loving my play as I did and for bringing it to life for a new audience.

Brooke Berman
Queens, New York, 2016

PS: The Queens neighborhood Ruth makes fun of is where I now call home. My husband and I bought a coop in 2015 and are happy Queens-dwellers. Who knew?