The party atmosphere of Charles Mee’s Fire Island begins as you walk in, with barbeque, free beer, deck chairs and a live band. You sit on the “beach” surrounded by projections of sun, sea and sand, as well as your fellow man. This makes for a totally different sort of theatre-going experience: a multi-media bash that contrasts the carefree, high-spiritedness of summer on Fire Island to the unending search for true love; a search that transcends age, gender, race, and sexual proclivity. This added dimension is a credit to Mee and his director, Kevin Cunningham. This is a party with gravitas.
Scenes happen onscreen, as well as on the “beach” and truly there is a cast of thousands. The actors sometimes double their onscreen personas and talk over one another, which is particularly effective during arguments about love, where no one seems to be listening, because the most important thing, from all perspectives, is that someone isn’t getting what they need (except the reasonably happy naked couple in the shower) Sometimes the actors are helped by holographic images, particularly of women in 1950’s garb, hurling dishes. The band rocks, with a Tuvan throat singer lending an erotic sinisterness to the proceedings. There is a punkish man in black prowling the crowd, the Tiberius amongst the bacchanal, referencing the Greeks, warning all that the search for pleasure as well as love has gone on since the beginning of time, and will continue to do so, with mixed results.
The ideal couple is shown first; they are perfectly in tune with one another, in the throes of love, levitating, looking at the stars. They are emotionally what all the others are striving for but never quite get to. An older woman walks around with a large knife: she is having an affair with an older man, and bounces between him and her husband, getting satisfaction from neither. Her lover is equally unhappy, tempted by other women but wanting what he cannot have with his married lover all the same. There is the older roué who tells a young conquest to be, “I have known many women” as if this will be incentive for her to leap into the sack with him. There is a young woman who keeps running into her ex-lover and continually asks her why she left. The unsatisfactory answer seems to be a deflating, “I love you but can’t be with you.” There is the beautiful gay man who refers to his less beautiful lover as a “cicada,” though they do walk off arm in arm together, and holographically switch partners later on. There is a sinister clown running around, aiming to deflower the most virginal in the group, and he succeeds in getting her dress off. There is an older, wearied woman who meets an older, rumpled man on the beach, and they share some wine and poignantly discuss older love, loneliness, and the one perfect, elusive person. She says to him, “ Sometimes there’s only one pebble on the beach. Sometimes not even one.”
There is always an enormous party to look forward to, and Fire Island does not disappoint: a dancing drag party, complete with all queens in the pool at the end. As my friend also pointed out, there is always next year to look forward to, because Fire Island, like the search for love, is a continuum. But the best thing about Mee’s production is all of the fighting, desire, disappointment, struggle, disconnectedness and exhilaration of its active participants. Mee gets the party; but better still, he gets what lies beneath.
