Hi Caftaners! Can I just begin by saying, JFC, things just get worse and worse, don’t they? Kudos to all who did the No Kings protests on October 18. Her I am at the one in my hometown in Massachusetts, where I was that weekend taking care of my mother after she’d had surgery:
I’m really hopeful that Zohran Mamdani soon becomes our next mayor here in NYC—that truly would be a progressive ray of light—yes, kweens, Madge reference INTENDED! But other than that, whoa, times are rough, to the point that I’ve begun normalizing living with a certain daily baseline of fear, anxiety, sadness and rage. I often wonder: Were the future MAGAs of 2008-2016 this freaked out about Obama? Did they think that Obama was literally tearing down one vital American institution or democratic norm after another? Were they as outraged by the forward march of gay marriage, trans visibility, expanded healthcare and diverse people in high places as many of us currently are about what seems the utter lack of any real checks on a White House that has declared multiple forms of war on half the country, not to mention huge swaths of the world?
Believe me, I do my share of political engagement right now, but one thing I’ve learned is that you can’t think about this shit all the time or you’ll go mad. (Just ask my friends what a joy I was to be with the first six months of this year before I finally internalized the point I just made.) You have to laugh, you have to enjoy time with your friends, you have to unwind, and you know what, dammit? There ain’t nothing wrong with reminiscing, either! So there is my ROUSING defense of The Caftan Chronicles! For only $5/month (and mwah mwah mwah to all current paid subscribers!), we aging gays (and our read-along-with-us friends) can look back on moments when we were our bravest, our smartest, our hottest, OUR MOST FABULOUS! But we can also celebrate the good things we’re doing today—and we can learn from one another about what constitutes the best life we can have in these very, very uncertain times.
I’ll let all that stand as intro for our latest Caftan chat. Do you know DAVID DRAKE? Do you remember (particularly if you were in NYC in the early 1990s) when his golden-haired, twinkalicious smile rained down on the West Village via a massive billboard for perhaps one of the most influential gay solo shows of all time—The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me?
Little story I want to share: I did not know that my very own birthday—June 27, 1969—was the night of the Stonewall riots until I, only 23 and barely out of the closet, went to David’s show, which, if I remember, begins with David playing a young gayboy David exulting about his birthday: June 27! (though not 1969). That was the night David Drake kissed me! Well, not literally (sadly). But I chatted with him after the show and we exulted in the fact that we were both Stonewall babies—and ever since, we wish each other a happy Stonewall baby birthday. It’s just what we DO!
In other words, I’ve known David, 62, for years. So I remember his starry period that immediately followed TNLKKM. I remember his lovely small part in Philadelphia and I remember his deliciously bitchy lead as Michael in a landmark 1996 off-Broadway revival of The Boys in the Band.
And then I remember the many years when it seemed that David was always struggling for work. But mostly, since 2018, I’ve enjoyed watching David in his confident and successful role as the artistic director of The Provincetown Theater.
(Yes, I’m giving you back to back Ptowners, having just Q&A’d David’s fellow Ptowner Frankie Valenti, once known as porn bad-boy Johnny Hazzard. Folks, PLEASE suggest some older gents of note I can chat with who live in Palm Springs, Ft. Lauderdale, Atlanta, Detroit, London, Montreal, St. Olaf, Minn.—anywhere!)
One thing I really enjoyed talking about with David was, well, programming. How do you take a theater that’s sort of lost its identity (if it ever had one) and has become a programming hodge-podge and rebrand it in a way that’s not only coherent but commercially successful? I think you’ll find out here. And then, like me, perhaps you’ll be excited to see what David’s programming for next year.
The other thing I love about this interview is that, like the best Caftan interviews, it’s about navigating often unhappy periods of our lives where it seems like everything’s going awry. Because they WILL happen. So what matters is what we do with them, even amid low morale.
David is such a sweetheart who’s real-life persona contains more than a soupçon of his one-time drag persona, Tawny Heatherton.
(IMHO, one of the most evocatively specific drag names ever.) There’s a bit of a sunny aw, shucks, fellas! loopiness and breathlessness to David that I just adore. Experience it here for yourself!
I have some nice Caftans coming up for you! (I always try to savor a moment when my Caftan card is briefly filled, before the endless hunt inevitably continues. YOUR SUGGESTIONS PLEASE! ESP. IF YOU CAN INTRODUCE US! For example, I’ve been trying to get both Boy George and Michael Stipe forever…does anyone have an in?) Please keep supporting me on this. I want to keep this conversation going for years to come.
Now here’s LA DRAKE!
David, thanks so much for chatting today. So, you started as artistic director of the Provincetown Theater in 2018?
Yes, but I’d been coming to Ptown on a regular basis as a freelance director, producer and actor since 2008 or 2009, pretty much every summer, to do some kind of show. But otherwise up until 2018 I was based in NYC.
Walk me through a typical day. You live with your boyfriend?
Yes, Thom Marquee, a hairdresser, so he’s 100 percent gay.
And he’s also a painter. We’ve been together for six years and have lived together for five in an apartment in an old 1920 house on Bradford St. We have a cat named Jake. He wanted a dog, but now he’s a cat person. He takes care of both me and Jake in a beautiful way.
So when do you wake up?
I’m a night owl. Thom goes to work around 9:30-10am most days but I don’t get up until about noon. I go to bed about 2 a.m. So whenever we have a production, we rehearse in the evenings because we cast mostly locally with people who have day jobs. I do a speech every night before curtain to welcome the audience. I think of theater as a church and I’m the pastor. I take pictures of people after the show for our Instagram.
It’s very local. Our audiences come up to me in the grocery store. During the day I’m in the theater office with my three full-time staffers—the managing director, a communications associate and a business associate. Then I lock up the building and come home and have dinner and watch murder shows until two. And this is my schedule whether we’re doing a show or not. I direct most of the shows at the theater, which is both a financial and a quality consideration. Recently we’ve had guest directors come in for at least one of our usually five productions a year, which always includes a musical and a June festival of solo shows.
And subscribers get to go to everything. When I got here, we had seven subscriptions and now we have 437.
Wow!
We’ve really built it up. A subscription currently is $260, which is one ticket per show, which comes out to about $32 a show. It’s a really good deal! January we do nothing, but February through March we do story slams and four to six readings of new plays to help develop them. I started that because I wanted to mingle writers from NY, L.A. and Boston with the local Cape writers, to help un-isolate the Cape writers. We did that with Sarah Schulman’s play The Lady Hamlet, which we ended up world-premiering about four years ago.
We also helped develop over six years the musical we’re doing right now, The Jack of Hearts Club, which is a big hit by a local composer named John Richardson, a popular pianist at the Crown and Anchor, that’s about queer people at a Provincetown bar in 1963.
It’s playing through November 2. It’s about how to survive and have joy even when you’re oppressed. So we’re incubating shows that I think would be good for the community to eventually see, and it allows them to get behind a play that they believe in.
That’s so cool. What was Ptown even like in 1963? Did it have a gay resort vibe like it does today, or did that come later?
No. You had this mix of artists and queer people, or artists who are also queer. Like when Tennesse Williams would come up here, he attracted a lot of artists around him, which in turn attracted gay people to be adjacent to that glamour.
So bohemia was the magnet that drew the gay community. When did the gay resort vibe start taking shape?
In the seventies. In the sixties you still had a lot of druggie hippies, including like John Waters, Divine and Mink Stole.
And it’s interesting how that started a cycle that over decades became gay and richer, to the point that now in Ptown you have such wealth that it prices out artists. I guess it’s special that Ptown still has places like the Fine Arts Work Center and the Provincetown Theater.
Yes, but it’s an ongoing struggle to hold onto things like that with the real estate prices.
Yes, and also places that are safe for queer people become a magnet, which has turned Ptown into a year-round gay retirement community.
Yes. Housing is a major issue here. But there are philanthropists who come forward, like Terrence Meck, who runs [the NYC meals charity] God’s Love We Deliver. He has a place here and he created The Palette Fund and he gives us some money. His fund also bought the old community house here on Bradford St. and turned it into cheap studio spaces for local artists year-round, as well as computers and enclosed quiet spaces. Then we have Steve Azar who bought The Gifford House and does a lot of queer community stuff.
David, I remember about a decade ago before you got this great full-time gig with the theater that you were dealing with some tough times.
Oh my God! I was living on $20,000 a year. I was a pauper. But I was loving what I was doing.
What was the transition?
I’d been floating around Ptown and Baltimore and other places as a freelance theater person until I came back to NYC about 2013. I’d had a cheap apartment in Queens with my then-boyfriend, so I could get by. I’d also worked as an editor at broadway.com, so I had that money, plus some I inherited for my grandmother.
My first sober summer was in Ptown in 1986, where I was a tap dancer in a musical review at The Boat Slip. A woman singer, a diva from, uh, Bridgeport, Connecticut, starred in that review. I was like 22 years old. I fell in love with Ptown then. I was offered a job as a cocktail waiter. I was chicken on a stick! Blond curly hair, total twink. But I turned the job down because I was afraid of being around alcohol. I was a real drunk.
But let’s fast-forward to your current job.
So when I was offered a job up here the summer of 2008, right when I was getting out of a relationship, I fell in love with it all over again. I’d go down to the beach in the morning and swim and read. I remember going into the water and crying and crying. I was baptizing myself, cleansing myself of this raggedy person that I’d become in New York, letting go of all my dreams. It was a midlife transition. And I kept coming back as a freelancer, directing a whole bunch of shows at the theater. I understood what the community liked and wanted. So I got a call from a board member of the theater: “What would it take for you to come up here and save this theater?” And I said, “Well, it would take this much money.” And they said, “We’ll get back to you.” [laughs] Then they reached out again when they were letting go of someone. But I was enjoying my work in New York with some great writers and actors. This is 2017. I’d just done a show in NYC at The Crane called The Jamb, about gay meth addicts.
It was a big hit and we got great reviews. So my career was starting to move. I thought, “Okay, this is great.”
But I had a sublet that was ending, which was when the Ptown job offer came. I thought, “Oh, I don’t want to go to Ptown and save that fucking theater.” I’d wanted to do that five years ago, but I didn’t want it anymore. But I thought, well, just help them out. So I started planning out a season for them. And in the process of doing that, I realized that I wanted the job.
What sort of a season did you propose?
They’d been doing all these European plays, like Genet and Gertrude Stein and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, and not getting audiences. They were trying to adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
They really weren’t offering candy to the community.
What they weren’t offering was what I realized was a New England [experience]. So I decided to take the job and see how it went. So I directed Our Town with a huge cast, a real community event, and it cleaned house and started the theater back on track. Then I directed a new American play there the next year, The Gift, a lovely play about race. Then I did a gender-swapped Importance of Being Earnest, which was a huge hit and spoke to the community.
You started doing programming that was, frankly, more gay.
More gay and more American. I knew that the people up here wanted a good beginning, middle and end play. Ptown holds a great nostalgia for a time we never lived in. It has this kind of aesthetic where you’re visiting an ancestral place—because of the Pilgrims, because of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, because of the gays. A lot of swirling energy where you can find magic and reinvent yourself.
Basically I realized that the theater needed well-made plays, Pulitzer-winning plays, nostalgia, large casts to signal that plays involve everyone. So I also did You Can’t Take it With You—very popular, big cast, old-fashioned traditional set, which they hadn’t been doing. They’d been doing experimental Wooster Group stuff with microphones and films that didn’t speak to the community’s desires or needs. We also did Love! Valour! Compassion! that summer.
I remember. I saw that.
I came up with this idea of honoring great American writers, which became our big fundraiser. We honored Terrence McNally, who came up for the event. And we did The Laramie Project, directed in the round by Leigh Fondakowski, for the twentieth anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s murder.
Here’s the whole production if you want to watch it:
Then, for the holiday show, I didn’t want to do something Christmas—I wanted to do something ecumenical. So we did Always…Patsy Cline with only two characters and a $700 set. It spoke to the season of generosity and of an American icon. Same with Mae West, so we did her play, The Drag, which never made it to Broadway. I was trying to claim voices that were important to the American aesthetic.
What’s been the most commercially successful production so far?
Love! Valour! Compassion! was very successful. The Fantasticks with two boys instead of a boy and a girl and the father characters turned into mother characters.
Tom Jones, the cowriter of the show, gave us his permission for that just before he died. But Sweeney Todd, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike all sold through seats up to 90 percent, when you usually budget for a sell-through of 60 or 70 percent. I come from the world of commercial theater. “What can I do that’s going to be popular?”
It sounds like you put your finger on what the audience really wanted. Would I be correct in saying most of the audience is older gay white men?
The median age of people on the Outer Cape year-round is 65. It’s a retirement community. The Ptown high school closed a few years ago because there weren’t enough kids to support it. Maybe only 7 percent of Ptown now is families with kids. The Portuguese folks are mostly gone—they sold their homes for a lot of money. There are pockets of Jamaicans and Bulgarians who’ve become year-rounders after years of being seasonal workers.
Anyway, our shows that have been the least commercially successful have been What The Constitution Means to Me and Tiny Beautiful Things, based on Cheryl Strayed’s book about all the letters she received when she was an advice columnist.
Another thing I did was start using my connection to bring New York talent up here. I knew I could get basically anybody to come to Ptown for the summer. If you’re a gay performer, why wouldn’t you come here to do a show that you wouldn’t get cast in anywhere else?
How did you build the subscription base?
When I got here, we not only cleaned and updated our longstanding mailing list of about 6,000 but started building it. Anytime you bought a ticket to a show, you got on our mailing list. Also, I became the voice of our newsletter. “Hey folks, here’s what we’ve got going on this week!” It was me saying, “Trust me—I’m not going to let you down.”
Leveraging your—
My celebrity. “Oh, we have a celebrity running the Ptown theater now.” A lot of people in NYC like [recently retired executive director of Broadway CARES/Equight Fights AIDS] Tom Viola really approved of and supported that, and they were able to tell their folks that Ptown theater was now in good hands, and to go support it.
What are aspects of the job you’d never dealt with in a job before and hence have been the most challenging? Is it managing people?
I’ve grown in knowing how to manage people, including increasingly larger casts. I think I’m pretty good at it. I think working with a rotating board of directors has been most challenging for me. The theater was about $75,000 in debt when I came in, so that first season was all about making money to pay that off. Thankfully the board members, none of whom had been on a theater board before, trusted me. I’ve learned a lot about money and working with a managing director. To talk out of school a little bit, I had a board that didn’t know what a managing director was. So they kept hiring a business manager and micromanaging them to death, to the point that we lost five of them in four years. So I convinced the board to call them a managing director and just let them work with me. I had to teach the board that over time. And I was learning it, too, because I’d been around a lot of nonprofits in my life but I hadn’t worked in one.
I also had to learn that I didn’t have to do everything myself.
How do you feel that you’ve changed as a person since moving to Ptown fulltime and taking this job?
Oh, God. That’s a good question. [long pause] I don’t know. [laughs]
Do you feel a sense of stability?
Yes, and of my responsibility to the role I play in the community here. I’m a public person who doesn’t like to be in public very much. I like to stay home by myself. I’m very much like my father that way. He was a teacher and a hunting and fishing columnist and a county commissioner in central Pennsylvania, a Democrat in a very Republican area. He’d go to the grocery store and people would want to talk to him about digging ditches because he was commissioner, so when he got home he’d close the door and go to his den because he didn’t want to deal with people anymore. And that’s me now. I’ve become my dad. And that’s why I don’t need attention. Doing this interview is like, euch, do I have to do this interview? Do I have to be me?
Oh, really? I’m sorry!
I’m not interested in my own press anymore. I take pictures of other people when they leave the show for our Instagram, instead of having mine taken.
When you’re home, what do you do?
Cry. [laughs]
Really? It’s okay to cry.
I just sit and cry in the dark. [laughs] No, uh, really, I’m a news junkie so I watch a lot of MSNBC and then I switch over to CNN to see how far they’ve fallen out of the liberal loop. Talking to my TV all night. Or Thom and I will watch something like The Bear. We just finished Task, which I cried at. Remember Mare of Eastham?
Yes. That was so good!
Well, the same creators made this new one with Mark Ruffalo that takes place in the same gritty area outside Philadelphia where they all have that accent.
Right. Get me a glass of werter. Do you cook?
No, but Thom does. We’re doing a lot of salads right now because when Trump got into office, I struggled with ice cream addiction. Just like I did when I first got sober.
Right. So David, let’s go back in time and talk about the era of The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me. How did that come to be?
Unexpectedly. I was a workaday actor in New York. I started going to ACT UP in 1988 or 1989. I didn’t know how to do anything there. I wasn’t a politico. I wasn’t a medical person. I was baffled and overwhelmed by the amount of intelligence and passion that was in the room, so I just stood behind the T-shirt table and sold T-shirts. At the time, I was doing eight shows a week of Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, almost 1,000 performances in all, so I couldn’t go to a lot of the nighttime or out-of-town protests that ACT UP did. But when the show was over in 1990, I went on unemployment. This was the time of Queer Nation and OutWeek magazine. I was 26 or so and learning so much! I was part of the solution! I was sober five years at that point.
Wow, you got sober young.
I was 22. I’d moved to NYC at 20, after leaving college, and immediately got cast in shows. My mother was killed in an accident at 17, so I was also running away from my feelings, away from the pain into the booze. I totaled my car at 19. My nickname was David Drunk. “Oh, here’s David Drunk!” I was a blackout drinker. So I got sober when I was almost kicked out of my apartment by my ex-boyfriend, whom I was living with and who was already sober. He asked me to come to a meeting with him, so I went. I thought I was going just to hold onto my apartment, but I was like, “Oh my God, I am an alcoholic.” It was filled with gay guys laughing, so I stayed.